Halftime Quotes

“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?”
― Bob P. Buford, Halftime: Moving from Success to Significance

“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.”
― Bob P. Buford, Halftime: Moving from Success to Significance

“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.”
― Bob P. Buford, Halftime: Moving from Success to Significance

“After God made you, he stepped back and said, “This is a great one!”
― Bob P. Buford, Halftime: Moving from Success to Significance

“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?”
― Bob P. Buford, Halftime: Moving from Success to Significance

“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.”
― Bob P. Buford, Halftime: Moving from Success to Significance

“God uses all kinds of people to get us the help we need if we will just be aware and sensitive.”
― Bob P. Buford, Halftime: Moving from Success to Significance

“Kami pushed us hard — and successfully. To put Christ in the box, I found, is actually a sign of contradiction, a paradox. To put Christ in the box is to break down the walls of the box and allow the power and grace of his life to invade every aspect of your own life. It follows the same wonderfully inverted logic as the ancient assertion that it is in giving that one receives, in our weakness we are made strong, and in dying we are born to richer life. I had chosen to make Christ my primary loyalty but not my exclusive loyalty. That was an important distinction, for I still had loyalties to Linda, to work, to friends, and to projects. Christ is the center of all that, but he would not stand in the way of those other things that give me balance and wholeness. For”
― Bob P. Buford, Halftime: Moving from Success to Significance

“I’m an entrepreneur, and I want to be remembered as the seed that was planted in good soil and multiplied a hundredfold.”
― Bob P. Buford, Halftime: Moving from Success to Significance

“What’s the one thing — not two things, not three, not four, but the one big thing — in the box?”
― Bob P. Buford, Halftime: Moving from Success to Significance

“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.”
― Bob P. Buford, Halftime: Moving from Success to Significance

“This stage involves making ourselves what Gordon MacDonald has called “kingdom builders.” This means finding the mission in the world that has been specifically designed by God for each of us to do. It is what the Greeks called “destiny,”
― Bob Buford, Halftime: Moving from Success to Significance

“But perhaps the most compelling reason for nurturing an active mind comes from my admittedly nontechnical interpretation of the New Testament account of Jesus casting out a demon in Luke 11:24 – 26. Jesus said that when an evil spirit returns to an individual and “finds the house swept clean,” it enters that house with even more evil spirits because there is so much room to fill. I think the key theme here is emptiness, and I don’t think it is too much of a stretch to suggest that if we let our minds become empty, they can be filled with much that detracts us from the mission of our second half. One way or another, our minds will indeed be filled with something.”
― Bob Buford, Halftime: Moving from Success to Significance

“People are at their largest, their noblest and most virtuous, when they are given over to a cause, something larger than themselves.”
― Bob Buford, Halftime: Moving from Success to Significance

“Stephen R. Covey, author of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, suggests that in developing a personal mission statement, you should focus on what you wish to be and do, based on the values and principles that undergird all your beliefs and actions. “Whatever is at the center of our life will be the source of our security, guidance, wisdom, and power,” writes Covey.”
― Bob Buford, Halftime: Moving from Success to Significance

“Despite the comfort of those words, I was forced to lean on God entirely in those dark weeks after Ross’s death. I often thought of the Scripture verse “Trust in the LORD with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding.” I learned that God truly is sufficient and that his strength is made perfect in weakness. I learned that in my life on earth, I live as one who is on an adventure that could end at any moment. I am not in control!”
― Bob Buford, Halftime: Moving from Success to Significance

“Kami pushed us hard — and successfully. To put Christ in the box, I found, is actually a sign of contradiction, a paradox. To put Christ in the box is to break down the walls of the box and allow the power and grace of his life to invade every aspect of your own life. It follows the same wonderfully inverted logic as the ancient assertion that it is in giving that one receives, in our weakness we are made strong, and in dying we are born to richer life.”
― Bob Buford, Halftime: Moving from Success to Significance

“Well, Kami took me at my word. He announced that we could not put together an honest plan for my life until I identified the mainspring. “I’ve been listening to you for a couple of hours,” he said, “and I’m going to ask you what’s in the box. For you, it is either money or Jesus Christ. If you can tell me which it is, I can tell you the strategic planning implications of that choice. If you can’t tell me, you are going to oscillate between those two values and be confused.”
― Bob Buford, Halftime: Moving from Success to Significance

“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.”
― Bob P. Buford, Halftime: Moving from Success to Significance

“God’s desire is for you to serve him just by being who you are, by using what he gave you to work with.”
― Bob P. Buford, Halftime: Moving from Success to Significance

“I consider studying the Bible to be a valid form of lifelong learning. If “garbage in, garbage out” is true, then the reverse must be true also.”
― Bob P. Buford, Halftime: Moving from Success to Significance

“If learning prepares you to deal positively and productively with change, then it is more important now than ever before.”
― Bob P. Buford, Halftime: Moving from Success to Significance

“God has a wonderful plan for the second half of your life: to allow you to serve him by doing what you like to do and what you are good at.”
― Bob P. Buford, Halftime: Moving from Success to Significance

“Halftime is the perfect opportunity to shift from trying to understand God to learning to know him. It is the time to humbly accept the fact that you may never fully understand him, but that you need to accept, by faith, that you are known and loved by him.”
― Bob P. Buford, Halftime: Moving from Success to Significance

“A distinctive of my second half is that I set aside time for introspection almost every weekend. My few hours of uninterrupted reading and thinking are the wellspring from which I draw living water to nurture the activities of the rest of my week.”
― Bob P. Buford, Halftime: Moving from Success to Significance

“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?”
― Bob P. Buford, Halftime: Moving from Success to Significance

“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.”
― Bob P. Buford, Halftime: Moving from Success to Significance

“Being from Texas, I can’t help but have learned a few things about the oil business. I’m far from being an expert, mind you, but one of the things I have learned is that you don’t just go out and pick a spot and start drilling. If you want to minimize your risks, you do some seismic testing — which is basically a sophisticated way to check out the landscape to see what it might produce. Since the size and shape of a subsurface formation is unknown, an electronic device is used to shoot sonarlike impulses down toward the formation from different points of view. The matter starts to take shape as it is seen from the various perspectives. In terms of second-half seismic testing, your “subsurface formation” is that imponderable matter regarding how you will restructure your life. Your idea is indistinct in size and shape, and you can see it only from a limited viewpoint, so you go to six or eight different people you trust and ask them how they see it. Their “sonar” will reflect a part of the picture that you could not see before, and eventually the most inchoate and vaguest matters will begin to assume a definite size and shape. Then at least you know whether to drill or not. You”
― Bob P. Buford, Halftime: Moving from Success to Significance

“Harvard ethicist Laura Nash’s instructive book Believers in Business is filled with stories of Christians living in the real world of the marketplace. In her research for the book, Nash conducted a study of sixty evangelical chief executive officers to discover how they balanced the competing tensions of their work. First, consider the seven tensions she identified as common to Christians in the marketplace: serving God vs. pursuing mammon love vs. competition people needs vs. profit obligations family vs. work keeping personal perspective in the face of success charity vs. wealth being a faithful witness in a pluralistic workplace1 Sound”
― Bob P. Buford, Halftime: Moving from Success to Significance

“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”
― Bob P. Buford, Halftime: Moving from Success to Significance