Perhaps the hardest part is that eventually your life and mine will get reduced to a single sentence. Not in the weeks or months after our passing. But give it a year or so, and all of us will be described by a single sentence: “My Mom? She was such a kind person. We miss her. Hey, what’s for dinner?” Or “My dad worked a lot, he sure loved is Corvette. What time’s the game on?”

Sobering, Isn’t it.

This book alone is over fifty thousand words long, and it’s not my only book. I will have lived at least five decades by the time I die (hopefully many more), had thousands of conversations, met thousands of people, and spoken to thousands of leaders. But in the end, everyone who knew me well, including my family, will condense my contributions to something like, “Oh Carey, he was ____________. Can you pass the salsa?”

It’s what might fill in the blank that gets me.