A client – a psychiatrist - brought us this story.  A banker meets a fisherman in a small Mexican town.  The fisherman shows him the fish he just caught with very little effort.  The banker says he could spend more time fishing and sell some of the fish.  In time, he could expand his business, buy a fleet of boats, build a huge company, and reap a windfall through an IPO.  Then he could retire move back to the small town and sleep late and still have time to fish a little.

Nobody knows who wrote it.  The fact checkers working with our publisher could not find its source.  We published it in our newsletter (The Rogé Report) and we got a lot of positive feedback, especially from older people.  They wished they read it when they were younger.  As they look back on the time they spent running their businesses, they regret not spending as much time with their families and on the more meaningful aspects of their lives.

Stop and smell the roses.  Slow down a little and think about what you really want.  Don’t focus on money; focus on what is really important to you.

In the mid-1990s, I was at a NAPFA Advanced Planners Conference in Cancun.  A rabbi was invited to speak and he bowled over the audience with his presentation.  He asked each person to write down the letter “B” on the left side of a piece of paper, representing when they were born, and the letter “D” on the right side, representing when they would die, and to draw a line connecting the two.  Then we were asked to write an “X” to indicate where we were currently on the line.

I was 50 at the time, and put an X in the middle.  Another advisor, who happens to be the same age as me, put his X about a quarter of the way from the “B.”  He must be a lot more optimistic about medical breakthroughs.

This exercise forced us to focus on the time between the “X” and the “D” – the finite time we have on Earth.  The rabbi spoke to the importance of spending time on what really matters.  He spent a lot of time consoling the sick and dying, and he said nobody on their death bed ever told him they wished they spent more time in the office.

Our book is a collection of the best essays and articles we have written over the last 15 years.  Most were published in The Rogé Report, and we decided to put them together in a book.