Or you spend a lot of mental energy on potential what-ifs. And for this exercise you would need a lot of marbles because on average we think 70,000 thoughts per day! Perhaps you spend a lot of mental energy on a big prospect, or you spend mental energy worried that you don’t have enough time to get it all done. With each thought, you give away one of your marbles. I want you to think about your mental energy and where you are putting that. Of course, we expend energy with physical activities throughout the day, but these are easier to be aware of. Each expendable amount of mental energy becomes a marble and we only have a limited number of marbles to use on any given day. What if I had a handful of marbles and the marbles represented my energy. This also got me thinking about marbles and energy. The story ends with the man removing his last marble saying, “I figure if I make it until next Saturday, then I have been given a little extra time.” There is nothing like watching your time here on this earth run out to help get your priorities straight.

He found that by watching the marbles diminish, he focused more on the really important things in life. So, he bought 1000 marbles and every Saturday since then, he took out one marble and threw it away. He got to thinking that if he lived to be 75, he only had about a 1000 of them left to enjoy. The man was fifty-five years old and by that time he had lived through over 2800 Saturdays. He then multiplied 75 times 52 and came up with 3900 which is the number of Saturdays that the average person has in their entire lifetime. The man figured out that the average person lives about seventy-five years. This reminded me of a story I heard about a man who puts marbles in a jar. This was a great way to motivate the children to only speak German all day long – even during lunch and recess. The goal was to still have some marbles at the end of the school day. He said that every time you speak English instead of German you lose a marble. I asked the teacher what the purpose of these marbles was. A few years ago, I was in the classroom volunteering and I noticed all the kids had marbles in their pocket. My children go to a language immersion school and they both speak German fluently.

When u lose your marbles