Quotes from Bob P. Buford

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.

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.

As you take stock, ask yourself these similar questions: What is my passion? How am I wired? Where do I belong? What do I believe? What will I do about what I believe? Or, as Peter Drucker advised people who were looking for their life's task: What are my values, my aspirations, my directions, and what do I have to do, to learn, to change, in order to make myself capable of living up to my demands on myself and my expectations of life?

the best way to earn the goodwill of your neighbor is to ask either explicitly or implicitly, "What can I do to be useful to you?

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.

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.

What's the one thing — not two things, not three, not four, but the one big thing — in the box?

God uses all kinds of people to get us the help we need if we will just be aware and sensitive.

After God made you, he stepped back and said, "This is a great one!

I'm an entrepreneur, and I want to be remembered as the seed that was planted in good soil and multiplied a hundredfold.

Halftime is not about beating yourself up for what you did not do, but for coming to terms with your failures and recognizing that you live under grace.

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.

The existential writer Albert Camus discovered this truth: "In the midst of winter I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer." We

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.

Finally, this book can — and should — be read as a story of growth from knowledge into wisdom, of intellectual and spiritual education.

God's desire is for you to serve him just by being who you are, by using what he gave you to work with.

In this blizzard of wonderment, Mike Kami asked me a simple and penetrating question: "What's in the box?" When

No one had ever put such a significant question to me so directly. After a few minutes (which seemed like hours), I said, "Well, if it has to be one or the other, I'll put Jesus Christ in the box." It

There are two sources of unhappiness in life. One is not getting what you want; the other is getting it. George Bernard Shaw W

As one successful Harvard-educated businessman remarked about the many successes he had experienced in his business, "I was always finding out that beyond the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, there's a sort of emptiness." Consider

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.

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.

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.

If learning prepares you to deal positively and productively with change, then it is more important now than ever before.