John Maxwell recommends you juggle your top priorities as if they were glass balls that would break if you let them drop.įocus strategically. What do you want them to say? What aspects of your life do you want to be commemorated? Family ties, career accomplishments, community service, or something different? This exercise focuses you to turn away from everyday concerns to a more long-term legacy view. Friends, colleagues and family pay tribute to you by delivering a eulogy. It may sound morbid, but think about your funeral.
So, what are your big rocks? How do you decide what takes precedence when you have a lot of competing priorities?ĭecide how you want to be remembered. This is a great story about prioritizing and focusing first on what is most important to you. The point is this: if I hadn’t put those big rocks in first, I would never have gotten them in.” And if you really work at it, you can always fit more into your life.” Can anybody tell me the lesson you can learn from this? What’s my point?”Īn eager participant spoke up: “Well, there are gaps in your schedule. He got something like a quart of water into that jar before he said, “Ladies and gentlemen, the jar is now full. “Good!” said the seminar leader, who then grabbed a pitcher of water and began to pour it into the jar. Once more he looked at the class and said, “Now, is the jar full?” While the students watched, the sand filled in the little spaces left by the rocks and gravel. Then he reached under the table to bring up a bucket of sand. Grinning, the seminar leader asked once more, “Is the jar full?”Ī little wiser by now, the students responded, “Probably not.” The gravel slid into all the little spaces left by the big rocks. From under the table he lifted out a bucket of gravel, dumped it in the jar, and shook it. Then he asked, “Is the jar full?”Įverybody could see that not one more of the rocks would fit, so they said, “Yes.”
“How many of these rocks do you think we can get in the jar?” he asked the audience.Īfter the students made their guesses, the seminar leader said, “Okay, let’s find out.” He put one rock in the jar, then another, then another–until no more rocks would fit. In the middle of a seminar on time management, recalls Covey in his book First Things First, the lecturer said, “Okay, it’s time for a quiz.” Reaching under the table, he pulled out a wide-mouthed gallon jar and set it on the table next to a platter covered with fist-sized rocks. The classic Stephen Covey story goes like this:
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