Og Mandino - The Choice: A Surprising New Message of Hope

Choice! The key is choice. You have options. You need not spend your life wallowing in failure, ignorance, grief, poverty, shame, and self-pity. But, hold on! If this is true then why have so many among us apparently elected to live in that manner?

The answer is obvious. Those who live in unhappy failure have never exercised their options for a better way of life because they have never been aware that they had any choices!

From The Choice

Bantam Books by Og Mandino

A BETTER WAY TO LIVE

THE CHOICE

THE CHRIST COMMISSION

THE GIFT OF ACABAR (with Buddy Kaye)

THE GREATEST MIRACLE IN THE WORLD

THE GREATEST SALESMAN IN THE WORLD

THE GREATEST SALESMAN IN THE WORLD, PART II: The End of the Story

THE GREATEST SECRET IN THE WORLD

THE GREATEST SUCCESS IN THE WORLD

MISSION: SUCCESS!

OG MANDINOS UNIVERSITY OF SUCCESS

THE RETURN OF THE RAGPICKER

THE CHOICE
A Bantam Book
Bantam hardcover edition / April 1984
A Selection of the Literary Guild of America
Bantam paperback edition / April 1986

All rights reserved.
Copyright 1984 by Og Mandino.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
For information address: Bantam Books.

eISBN: 978-0-307-78086-7

Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words Bantam Books and the portrayal of a rooster, is Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. Marca Registrada. Bantam Books, 1540 Broadway, New York, New York 10036.

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Dedicated to a beautiful lady who
taught me the true meaning of love, many
years ago my sister, Jackie.

I am bigger than anything that can happen to me. All these things, sorrow, misfortune, and suffering, are outside my door. I am in the house and I have the key.

CHARLES FLETCHER LUMMIS

Man is made or unmade by himself. By the right choice he ascends. As a being of power, intelligence, and love, and the lord of his own thoughts, he holds the key to every situation.

JAMES ALLEN

THE ONLY CALENDAR I NEED IS JUST OUTSIDE MY WINDOW. Maple leaves, in the trees on my hill, have now turned pallid and brittle, their lush reds and golds drained by the brutish frosts of the past week.

Do your work well and then be ready to depart when God shall call, wrote a great nineteenth-century wise man, Tyron Edwards. Both his words and the analogy of the leaf completing its life cycle weigh heavily on my mind as I sit alone, here in my studio, and pray for the strength to cope with my terrible secret.

Within ninety days I expect to be dead.

I am writing this narrative as swiftly as I can because, in truth, I have no idea how much time, how much living, remains for me. Will I make it to Thanksgiving? Maybe. To Christmas? Very doubtful. But for a certainty the inevitable snow that will soon cover every fallen leaf will also blanket my grave before the new year has counted many days.

Am I being ravaged by some malignant disease? No. Only four months ago, after my annual checkup, Dr. Scagno assured me that all systems were go and that I inhabited one of the healthiest forty-two-year-old bodies he had examined in a long time.

Am I planning to take my own life? God forbid. If ever a man had everything to live for, that person is me.

So why this terrible sense of impending doom, this certainty of a deadline (such an apt word) on my life that has triggered this hasty recital on the typewriter. After all, who among us has any guarantee that he or she will even see tomorrows sunrise? Perhaps by the time you finish reading these words you will understand.

Hopefully, by the time I complete these brief memoirs, if I finish, I, too, will have a much better perspective of all that has happened to me since that memorable morning, more than six years ago, when I suddenly changed the direction of my life. The decision was mine and mine alone, you must understand, and even with my days now limited, I would do it all again if life had such a thing as reruns.

Every day all of us make hundreds of choices, most of them so menial and habitual that they are almost as automatic as breathing. What we have for breakfast, the clothes we wear, the route we take to work, the bills we pay or lay aside, the television programs we watch, the functions of our job, the manner in which we greet friend or foe, none of these is memorable beyond the hour.

But there are other choices we must make from time to time, decisions that we can later look back on from any age plateau and recall with bitter sadness or triumphant joy depending on how they affected the years that followed. Rarely are these momentous turning points in life ever planned or expected. How can they be when the vast majority of humans wander along the pathway of years without any destination or goal or even a road map?

Since so many dont know where they are, or where theyre going, they are always struggling merely to survive, always on the razors edge of disaster, forever on the defensive. When one must live that way, ones options are limited.

Not me! Not Mark Christopher, Treasury Insurance Companys youngest resident vice-president, responsible for eighty-four branch offices throughout New England and the sales production of more than seven hundred salesmen, saleswomen, and sales managers. Not Mark Christopher who was also an adjunct assistant professor at Northeastern University, teaching classes one night a week, whenever I was not traveling, on Salesmanship.

Truly, my future was unlimited. If my region continued to lead the company in sales volume, as it had for four straight years, a promotion to the home office in Chicago was inevitable. I can still remember the glowing letter of praise I received from J. Milton Hadley, founder and still president of Treasury Insurance, after he had read the flattering profile piece on me that had appeared in The Boston Globe. In that lengthy and illustrated article the writer had tagged me with a nickname that Ive lived with ever sinceMr. Success.

Whenever I delivered a speech at any of our sales conventions, I was always quoting passages from books by the greatest self-help writers and exponents of success. And for Christmas, as well as birthdays, every person in every branch office under my supervision could count on receiving an inspirational or success book from me that I was certain would help his or her careerbooks by people such as Napoleon Hill, Franklin Bettger, Dorothea Brande, Maxwell Maltz, W. Clement Stone, and Norman Vincent Peale. Mr. Success was an appropriate handle, I thought, for someone who knew exactly what his goals were and where to find the answers on how to achieve them.

And then, on a morning I shall never forget, I began a new life. It had been like hundreds of other predawn Sundays stretching back through the years. At the first noisy eruption from my alarm clock I awoke and quickly flipped the off button before it disturbed Louise. I slipped quietly from bed and walked to the window. A rain storm promised on last nights television news had not materialized. The stars were still out, and a thin quarter moon was only now wearily retreating down behind the trees. This was going to be a perfect summer day, New England at its best.