13 LIVE WITH PURPOSE

“Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating

yourself.”

—George Bernard Shaw

So, how do you use purpose to create an extraordinary life? Ebenezer
Scrooge shows us how.
Cold-hearted, penny-pinching, and greedy, a man who despised
Christmas and all things that give people happiness, his last name a
byword for miserliness and meanness—Ebenezer Scrooge might have
been the least likely candidate to teach us anything about how to live.
Yet, in Charles Dickens’s 1843 classic A Christmas Carol, he does.
The redemptive tale of Scrooge’s transformation from stingy,
callous, and unloved to considerate, caring, and beloved is one of the
best examples of how our destinies are determined by our decisions,
our lives shaped by our choices. Once again, fiction provides us a
formula we can all follow to build an extraordinary life with
extraordinary results. I’d like to beg your forgiveness, take a little
literary license, and quickly retell this timeless tale to show you.
One Christmas Eve, Ebenezer Scrooge is visited by the deceased
spirit of Jacob Marley, his former business partner. We do not know
if this is a dream or if it’s real. Marley wails, “I am here tonight to
warn you, that you have yet a chance and a hope of escaping my fate.
You will be haunted by three spirits”—from the past, present, and
future, as it turns out. “Remember what has passed between us!”
Now, let’s stop for a second and bear in mind who Scrooge is.
Dickens describes him as a man whose old features are frozen by the
cold within him. Tight-fisted, with head down and hand to the
grindstone, Scrooge pays as little as possible and keeps as much as he
can. He is secretive and solitary. No one ever stops him in the streets
to say hello. No one cares, for he cares for no one. He is a bitter,