Bob Buford Quotes
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Instead of facing a crisis as I approached middle age, I discovered that a new and better life lay before me. I called the process of discovery 'halftime,' and the outcome led to my second half.
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God’s desire is for you to serve him just by being who you are, by using what he gave you to work with.
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My passion is to multiply all that God has given me and, in the process, give it back. And I would like to incite you to do the same. I do not want you to be the seed that fell along the path or was scattered in rocky places or was choked by weeds.
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God has a wonderful plan for the second half of your life: to allow you to serve him by doing what you like to do and what you are good at.
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Regardless of where you are, I invite you, in the following pages, to discredit the view that the second half of your life will never measure up to the first. Instead of giving up and settling for life on its own terms, you are ready for new horizons, new challenges. You are ready to move from success to significance.
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The key to a successful second half is not a change of jobs; it is a change of heart, a change in the way you view the world and order your life.
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The second half of the baseball diamond is about good works. It is not at all separate from the first half, which is about belief, but grows out of that belief and gives it integrity.
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Peter Drucker told me that retirees have not proved to be the fertile source of volunteer effort we once thought they would be. They cut their engines off and lose their edge. Peter believed that if you do not have a second or parallel career in service by age forty-five, and if you are not vigorously involved in it by age fifty-five, it will never happen.
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Our first half is about how to make a living, and our second half has the promise of being about how to make a life.
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Prayer is, for me, like that - a state of being together with God. It's not usually triggered by liturgy or special needs. It's more like what the Bible instructs us to do: Pray without ceasing.
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I consider studying the Bible to be a valid form of lifelong learning. If “garbage in, garbage out” is true, then the reverse must be true also.
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It is the story of obscure beginnings, the story of a boy who, barely eleven, after his father’s early death, had to take on the burden of being the “man of the family”; a story of great hardships, of vision and determination, of sorrow and success.
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A distinctive of my second half is that I set aside time for introspection almost every weekend. My few hours of uninterrupted reading and thinking are the wellspring from which I draw living water to nurture the activities of the rest of my week.
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What is your passion? What have you achieved? What have you done uncommonly well? How are you wired? Where do you belong? What are the “shoulds” that have trailed you during the first half? These and other questions like them will direct you toward the self your heart longs for; they will help you discover the task for which you were especially made.
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Likewise, for the second half of life to be better than the first, you must make the choice to step outside of the safety of living on autopilot. You must wrestle with who you are, why you believe what you profess to believe about your life, and what you do to provide meaning and structure to your daily activities and relationships.
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Whatever success you are having will never completely fulfill you. A life of significance — of really mattering — is yours for the taking, and the process I describe in this book will work for you.
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I’m an entrepreneur, and I want to be remembered as the seed that was planted in good soil and multiplied a hundredfold.
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The second half is riskier because it has to do with living beyond the immediate. It is about releasing the seed of creativity and energy that has been implanted within us, watering and cultivating it so that we may be abundantly fruitful. It involves investing our gifts in service to others — and receiving the personal joy that comes as a result of that spending. This is the kind of risk for which entrepreneurs earn excellent returns much of the time.
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After God made you, he stepped back and said, “This is a great one!”
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I began asking myself questions like these: Am I listening for the still, small voice? Is my work still the center of my life and identity? Do I have an eternal perspective as a prism through which I view my life? What is my truest purpose? My life work? My destiny? What does it really mean to “have it all”?
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Odds are, you’ll live a whole adult lifetime that wasn’t available to your parents and grandparents. Their life expectancy at birth was fifty years. We have two lifetimes now. Life I is what occurs before halftime, and Life II comes afterward.
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Regret is a tough emotion to live down: it haunts you in ways that will sap your strength and inspiration to go on to better things.
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The existential writer Albert Camus discovered this truth: “In the midst of winter I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.”
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If learning prepares you to deal positively and productively with change, then it is more important now than ever before.