Most of us don't get a televised press conference to sum up our lives. But Brett Favre's farewell makes the point I tried to make in Rule #48 of the 50 Rules Kids Won't Learn in School.

RULE (48): Tell yourself the story of your life. Have a point.

Start by telling it up until now. What have you done so far? Now go back and add in the bad stuff you left out; the rudeness, the lying, the petty betrayals, the bitchiness and thoughtlessness, all the stuff that – balanced with your good traits -- tells you how you are really coming along.

And now, imagine you are on your deathbed at a ripe old age (and, yes, the odds are that you will actually be over-40 someday). Look back on your life: What did you do? What will you leave behind? What kind of a person were you? Do you want to be remembered as a person of character and honesty? Of compassion and trustworthiness? Do you want your life to have made a difference in the lives of others? And how are the decisions you are making now contributing to or undermining those goals?

The important thing here is to see your life as a narrative, a story that has a point to it, rather than a series of random pointless incidents. The decisions you make now won’t just affect what happens next week, but may shape the rest of your life. What feels good this Friday night, might wreck your plans for the next two decades.

Ask yourself: what do want to be the meaning of your life?

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“Ultimately,” wrote concentration camp survivor and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, “man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible."

Steve Jobs, the CEO and co-founder of Apple and the Pixar animation studios puts it somewhat differently: “Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life.”

Speaking at Stanford University ’s 2005 commencement, the high-tech guru told the graduates that a year earlier, he had been diagnosed with a potentially fatal cancer.

“I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning,” he recalled, “and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months.”

News like this tends to focus the mind wonderously, and Jobs was no exception. All day, he lived with the diagnosis and the prospect that he would be dead within months.

Later that day, doctors performed a biopsy “where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor.” The news was good; instead of dying of an incurable disease, it turned out that Jobs had a very rare form of the disease that was curable by surgery. “I had the surgery and I'm fine now,” Jobs said. “This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope it’s the closest I get for a few more decades.”

But having lived through the prospect of dying, Jobs told the Stanford grads, “I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.”

His message: “Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life….”

Unfortunately, he followed that up with a series of New Age cliches, but the point was important anyway: You need to think about your life, because it is up to you what it will be about.