a two-minute warning.................

      It is interesting to watch football teams on a Sunday afternoon.  They spend the first fifty-eight minutes routinely following the game plan they thought would result in victory.  Then something rather remarkable happens.  An official walks onto the center of the field and announces what has become known as the "Two-Minute Warning."

      What happens in the next one hundred and twenty seconds is frequently awesome.  We often witness more intensity, more cleverness, more expended energy, and more action compacted into those two final minutes than occurs in the previous fifty-eight.

      Why?

      A sudden awareness of the sense of imminent defeat, and a birth of a new and sharpened sense of urgency.  The participants know that the clock will show no favoritism.  The clock will merely do what clocks are supposed to do:  they will tick away the seconds until the game is finally over. 

      The team that finds itself on the threshold of defeat night have shown an extraordinary level of ingenuity and intensity at any time throughout the game.  They had the potential and the opportunity to outscore their opponents early in the game.  But sometimes, despite their intentions, the players make only an average effort until it is too late.  Sometimes the blowing of the whistle announcing the two-minute warning is merely a formality signifying the probability of impending and irreversible defeat.

      And so it is with the individual human life.

-Jim Rohn, The Five Major Pieces To The Life Puzzle