How to Succeed as CEO of Your Life
Principle #1: Manage Proactively
John Eckblad and David Kiel, wrote a book with the evocative title If Your Life Were a Business, Would You Invest in It?[i] For many years I would have had to view my own life as a bad investment. Any honest assessment would have placed it in the junk bond category. I was failing to function effectively as its CEO.
I discovered that the greatest contributor to my past failures was a lack of clarity related to salient issues of life. Change has resulted from developing clarity regarding my role as CEO of my life, the commodity I am seeking to produce, and what I must do to optimize its production. Across the years the Lord has taught me principles that have helped me achieve clarity regarding these and related issues. Though my life continues to be a work in progress, I find that as I follow those principles, I experience success.
Though I am grateful that I am on a better path today, I nonetheless regret those lost years, especially because of the resulting harm my failures caused others. I wish someone would have taught me the principles contained in this book before I had inflicted that damage. It is my heart’s desire that these principles will enable you to avoid lost years and enjoy optimal success as CEO of your life.
You Are CEO of Your Life
Success at life begins by recognizing that God has assigned to us the role of CEO. A CEO, Chief Executive Officer, is a person given authority over resources by an owner or group of owners and then held responsible to use those resources to earn a profit for them. Consequently, authority and responsibility comprise the dominant aspects of the role of CEO.
Scripture teaches that God has assigned us the role of CEO of our lives using the term “stewardship.” Stewardship is an archaic word for management. Churches tend to employ it primarily in relation to giving. However, the biblical concept of stewardship includes managing the full range of our assets in order to earn maximum profit for the Lord.
In biblical times, though a steward often was a slave, he nonetheless worked at an executive level. His master gave him authority over all his possessions and assigned him the corresponding responsibility to manage them for his optimal benefit. We see the parallel, then, between a steward in biblical times and a contemporary CEO. God has assigned us authority to make decisions regarding how we use our lives and holds us responsible to invest them to earn maximum profit for Him.
Several passages of Scripture convey this truth. For example, 1 Peter 4:10 directs, “As each one has received a gift, minister it to one another, as good stewards of the manifold grace of God.” (NKJV). The “gift,” i.e. the “manifold grace,” refers to the full range of resources God has granted us. Peter calls us to be “good” stewards. This Greek word for “good” conveys the idea of excellence. We are to steward (manage) the package of gifts with which God has entrusted us with excellence, i.e. so as to advance God’s agenda most effectively.
Our biblical role as steward differs from a contemporary CEO in that a CEO can quit, but we cannot. We cannot escape our responsibility as CEO of our lives. Every morning when we open our eyes, our authority over our package of resources and the related responsibilities confront us. We can neglect or ignore our management responsibilities, but we cannot escape them.
Nor can we delegate that responsibility to anyone else—“Let Harry take charge.” And even if we could let Harry take charge, very soon we would want to take our management responsibilities back because we may not like some of Harry’s decisions. Would you want Harry selecting your spouse or your job?
In addition, we cannot escape our management responsibilities for the oversight of our life because they are inherent in our very existence. Every human being has a package of resources under his authority and the corresponding responsibility to invest them effectively. Like it or not, being human assigns to us management responsibilities. In large measure, that is what life is about.
Ultimately, we cannot dodge our management responsibilities because we will give an account to the Lord for the job we do. The apostle Paul taught, “For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may receive what is due for what he has done in the body, whether good or evil.” (2 Corinthians 5:10) Consequently, succeeding at life requires that we embrace that responsibility and aggressively work to fulfill it effectively.
This series of articles presents 14 principles that if implemented will enable you to succeed as CEO of the one life God has given you. I trust that you will embrace and employ them.
The Fulfillment of Management
Though management of our lives constitutes an inescapable responsibility, we should not view our position as CEO negatively. Management can be fun. God created us to do this kind of work and to find pleasure and fulfillment in doing it. Humans tend to enjoy the challenge of organizing things and making them work. Doing so gets our creative juices flowing. Some people enjoy putting ingredients together to make a great entree or dessert. Others get kicks out of transforming a pile of lumber into a treehouse. Others think assembling a bunch of components into a computer is fun, especially when they turn it on and it actually works. God has designed humans to enjoy taking authority over resources and transforming them into something meaningful.
The ultimate opportunity to express this natural bent toward management resides in functioning as CEO of our lives. It can be a special source of joy to shape the raw materials God has given us into a productive and meaningful life.
Management is not only fun because we enjoy the process, but also because we find the end result rewarding. It is fun to create and also to benefit from the fruits of our creation. We are blessed when people enjoy the recipes we put together, when the kids have fun in the treehouse, or when that computer we assembled writes and prints documents and enables us to read our email.
Viewing our responsibilities as CEO of our life as a source of drudgery will engender failure. Though managing our lives can be demanding, God assigned us this work as a means of fulfilling some of our deepest human needs—the need to create and organize. That is why God assigned Adam and Eve management responsibility for the Garden of Eden. Succeeding as CEO of our lives requires that we delight in this assignment. Approaching this role with enthusiasm will significantly increase our prospects for success.
Approaching our management responsibilities reactively, doing just enough to get by, will drain all the enjoyment out of fulfilling this role and dismal results. As we proactively seek to organize every aspect of our lives and make them fully productive, both the process and the outcome will provide fun and satisfaction.
Management: the Essential Remedy for Chaos
Why must we manage our lives? Perhaps we can best grasp the compelling need for management by considering the issue from the negative perspective. Chaos is life’s default setting. In other words, to experience chaotic existence all we need to do is nothing—it just happens. Consequently, any aspect of our life that is not intentionally managed will descend into chaos.
This phenomenon manifests itself in our physical world as expressed by the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states, “Entropy in a closed system increases.” Entropy is merely a term expressing chaos, the opposite of order. A closed system is one that blocks the entry of an organizing force. Therefore, the Second Law of Thermodynamics merely states that a system left to itself tends toward chaos.
This tendency toward chaos also manifests itself in the human realm. We have all witnessed thriving companies go bankrupt because they ceased to be aggressively managed.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics makes reference to increased chaos in a closed system. What about an open system, one in which energy is introduced? If we throw a stick of dynamite into a closed system, we introduce energy, but that energy only serves to increase the chaos. Reversing the chaos and bringing order requires intelligent energy.
Warding off chaos in our lives also requires intelligent energy, i.e. management. Our minds need to provide the intelligence to organize and our wills, activating the full range of our capabilities, provide the energy. That is the essence of management: our minds developing a plan that provides structure and our wills implementing that plan.
Because the default setting in life is chaos, every aspect of life requires management. Any element of life, big or small, left unmanaged will become chaotic and produce trouble. If I have a rare Saturday afternoon with nothing to do, and I fail to intentionally manage that block of time, chaos will rear its ugly head in the form of my eating too much, buying something I don’t need, or my capitulation to some other form of chaotic living. Though we need relaxation, even that must be managed.
For humans, this tendency toward chaos goes into overdrive because Scripture informs us that the world, the flesh, and the devil serve as catalysts that ramp up the production of chaos to especially destructive levels. The world is aggressively selling us a full range of commodities, telling us that we owe it to ourselves to buy them. The flesh gets into the act by craving those products, and the devil is active in convincing us these products will produce ultimate happiness that we can never experience without them. Because these destructive enemies, the world, the flesh, and the devil, work to ramp up the chaos in our lives, succeeding as CEO of our lives requires that we proactively manage every aspect of our existence.
The articles that follow in this series will describe other factors that will help you to succeed as CEO of your life.
[i] Eckblad, John; Eckblad, John; Kiel, David; Kiel, David (2003-02-22). If Your Life Were a Business, Would You Invest in It? The 13-Step Program for Managing Your Life Like the Best CEO’s Manage Their Companies (Page v). McGraw-Hill Education. Kindle Edition.