David G. Becker is the president and founder of Blue Plate Media Services, a global media strategy, planning, and buying agency. He has written numerous articles on advertising, marketing, and media strategy and is a frequent speaker on consumer marketing. As an industry advocate for small and mid-sized companies navigating the shifting media landscape, he has guided over one hundred companies in launching new consumer products across North America. A recipient of New York's "Young Entrepreneur of the Year," David has successfully launched multiple businesses over the past thirty years and has invented, imported, and marketed consumer products for major retailers including Target, Federated Stores, and QVC. David lives in Summit, New Jersey, with his wife, two children, and two dogs. He lives his life one marble at a time.

CHAPTER 1

Growing Up

Growing up, I was always busy. When I was a little kid, we'd play Kick the Can, Freeze Tag, and Curb Ball with a vengeance, in the street with the local neighborhood kids until the sun went down and darkness fell over our concocted playground. When I grew a little older, I learned that I could make money with odd jobs, including a paper route, sweeping the floor in a local salon, working retail, flipping burgers, performing magic, and helping my mother with her various businesses. As I grew even older, into young adulthood, there was always a business I wanted to start or a product I wanted to invent. I was intense. I had big lofty dreams. There were lots of projects and businesses. That's the subject for another book.

Time marched on. I started a family.

My daughter, when she was little, would always ask me to read her a story in bed. I would climb into her little white brass-piped Charles Rogers bed and read to her, because that's what dads are supposed to do. And because I wanted to have a different relationship with my daughter from the one I had had with my father. I wanted to know her. And I wanted her to know me. To really know me. That was the conscious me. The unconscious me was buried in my work and whatever project I was working on at the time. I began to notice a trend. A trend I wasn't happy about. My daughter, Anika, would walk into my small guest-room office and ask me to read to her. Or talk to her. Or listen to her. Or play with her. But I was so wrapped up in my project, in my thoughts, in myself, in my life, that I didn't make the time. "In a minute, honey. I'm busy changing the world."

This is about the time when my older sister, Caryn, shared with me that email about 1,000 Marbles. The main character in that story determines that he has only a set number of Saturdays left in his life — 1,000 to be exact — and to mark each Saturday, he goes out and buys a jar of 1,000 marbles. He takes one marble out of the jar each Saturday to show the passage of time. After all 1,000 marbles are gone, he begins to recognize each following Saturday as a special gift, a little extra time, and something to be cherished.

It was like catching a punch square on the chin. At that moment, my life changed.

CHAPTER 2

Awakening

My father, Elliott Robert Becker, born in 1926 in Brooklyn, New York, and a product of the Great Depression, was a good-looking man, as a young adult and as a senior. People said he looked like Ernest Hemingway. And he did. The resemblance was remarkable. He loved to dance. And play chess. And chart the stock market. After high school, he joined the Navy, where he served his country in World War II. I learned that he wanted to be a salesman. Hard for me to believe. He always seemed like the accountant that he became. I don't know if he was happy. I don't remember hearing him laugh.

My father died when he was seventy-three years old, on a cruise ship off the coast of Nice, dancing and eating and playing chess. He was the sweetest, smartest, most humble person I have ever known. I strive to be like him (but I often come up short). His mother, Frieda, was tough. An old-school disciplinarian. She would teach and rule by the belt, as my Grandfather Abraham (they called him A1) would sit silent. Grandpa A1 owned candy stores in Brooklyn. They moved often. He was a round man with a twinkle in his eye and a crooked smile. He didn't say much. My father loved him and often said he was the sweetest, most humble person he had ever known. But my father never really got to know him. Grandpa A1 died when he was seventy-three.

My father died when he was seventy-three years old. My grandpa A1 also died when he was seventy-three years old.

Now, here I was, forty years old. I thought of my father. And his father. And my mother. And my daughter. And my son. And my wife. And my sisters. And all of the moments in my life that I will never get back.

I took pen to paper and wrote a simple math problem. Seventy-three years minus forty years equals thirty-three years. Thirty-three years at fifty-two weeks equals 1,716 marbles. That's 1,716 weeks before my seventy-third birthday. I wanted to find a way to visually represent these 1,716 weeks until my seventy-third year, when I would be the same age as both my grandfather and my father when they passed. My thinking was profound. I jumped in my car, ran to a local arts and crafts store, and set out to find 1,716 marbles in different colors and sizes and textures. I also bought a big glass vase.

I raced home and scooped up my five-year-old daughter. We dumped all of the marbles on the carpeted floor and started to count them into piles of ten. We gathered ten piles of ten and pushed the small piles into larger piles of one hundred. We carefully, and I mean really carefully, counted, and then recounted, 1,716 marbles. The marbles of my life. I didn't want to get the count wrong (this is my life we are talking about). We then slowly rolled the marbles into the tilted glass vase, and then dropped them, one by one, marble by marble, pile by pile, clank by clank, into the vase until the 1,716th marble was resting comfortably atop a pile of wildly assorted colored marbles. My project was complete. I carried the marble-filled vase into the bowels of my bedroom closet, shimmied it across the carpet until it rested comfortably, peacefully, in its private, personal space. The marbles of my life, waiting to be spent.

This is where my spiritual journey took a 180-degree turn from the marble story my sister shared with me a few years earlier. In the story she shared, you were supposed to take out a marble every week with the purpose of watching the level of marbles slowly diminish, as in the days of our lives, so that you would see that any time over the allotted amount would be a gift. Instead, rather than focusing on the remaining, unspent marbles sitting idle in my jar of life, my mind focused, fixated, on the single selected marble, the marble of the moment, so that I could honor each moment as a gift, not just the ones above and beyond what I had calculated.

How I would choose to spend my first marble, and every marble in my jar of life, would ultimately define me, set my Life Appreciation System into motion, and shade and color the days of my life and the wide-ranging experiences that would make up my life.

My exercise was simple. Every Saturday morning for the next thirteen years and counting, I would religiously — or should I say spiritually, or maybe we'll just go with consciously — walk into my bedroom closet and blindly reach into my glass vase and pull out a single marble. I would look at it, roll it across my fingers, feel...