Do the exercise. Not in your head. On paper, this week. Pick the age. Write the five. Write the obituary your kid reads. Then extend it, and write what you would do with the extra time.

Pick the age you die. Now pick a bigger one. What you write for the extra forty years is what you actually wanted the whole time.

Two hours into a conversation with a friend, recorder still running, I asked him how old he thought he was going to be when he died.

He said eighty.

All right. Write down the top five things you hope to accomplish by the time you are eighty. That is where most men stop, and where the whole thing gets called visioning and goes in a binder. This one keeps going, and what comes next rearranges you.

I picked it up at Strategic Coach, Dan Sullivan’s workshop. They call it the lifetime extender exercise. I run it on myself and on the men I work with.

STEP ONE: PICK YOUR AGE

Whatever number comes out of your mouth first is the honest one. Do not negotiate with it.

Mine was eighty four.

STEP TWO: WRITE THE FIVE THINGS

Five things you hope to accomplish by then. Not the ones that sound good at a conference.

Most guys write three business outcomes, one number, and one thing about their kids that they feel guilty about. Write the honest list, not the impressive one.

STEP THREE: WRITE THE OBITUARY

Actually write it. We never write it good enough the first time. So I will instigate you a little, and we will write you a good one.

Then here is the thing. You have to go out and be that guy now.

Imagine you literally get to write your own obituary. A powerful one. One of your kids is going to read it one day at your funeral. It is not you in front of the people who show up. It is them, holding the paper.

What do you want them to read?

You will not stumble on the death part. You will stumble on the family part. Most of what a man optimizes for does not survive being read out loud by somebody who loves him.

STEP FOUR: THE EXTENSION

Here is the one that rearranges you.

Let us say God comes to you and says, you did some cool things. I am going to give you one lifetime extension. Pick another age. My friend said ninety. I told him think bigger. He went out to a hundred and twenty.

So now. If you got an extra forty years, what would you do with them? Write all of that down.

THE SECOND PAGE IS WHERE THE TRUTH LEAKS OUT

Think about loading a truck. The obvious things go on first. The company. The number. The proof. You load all of it because the truck is only so long and everybody is watching.

Then somebody tells you the truck is forty feet longer than you thought.

What you walk back into the house for on that second trip, with everything obvious already loaded, is the thing you actually own.

The first page is what you owe. The second page is what you want. And nobody guards that second page. There is no plan attached to it, no budget line, no board holding you to it. Which is exactly why you tell the truth on it by accident.

Here is what came out of me on the first page. Help entrepreneurs build massive impact in their business and massive peace in their life, and help them build a relationship with Christ. It is true. I meant every word.

Here is the extension page. I want to create documentaries about the men I have gotten to do life beside, so their families can hold a record of the work and the man behind it. I sat with that and thought, that sounds enormous. Then I did the math, and it turns out I already started, through a podcast I did not build for that reason and which turns out to have been that reason the whole time. It was never the fantasy. It was the one item I could have started years ago, filed under someday so I would not have to be accountable to it.

THE SHEDDING

Whatever you wrote on that second page is what you really want. So everything you are doing that is not pointed at it, you start shedding.

That is a much harder cut than firing an underperformer, because you are shedding things that are working. Things that make money, that people admire you for, that simply are not on the page.

I have not built the film company yet. This past year has felt like ten years to me, because I have gotten slower and more present in it. That is real. So is the fact that I am behind on the one thing I named as the point of all of it. Both are true tonight, and neither one is losing.

So do the exercise. Not in your head. On paper, this week. Pick the age. Write the five. Write the obituary your kid reads. Then extend it, and write what you would do with the extra time.

What is on that second page that you could start in the next ninety days?

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Prepared by Benny Fisher | Visionary Navigator | bennyfisher.com