Time & Perspective Quote by Arnold H. Glasow

Glasow’s line reads like a tidy three-part management framework disguised as life advice: curate the past, savor the present, strategize the future. Coming from a businessman, that division matters. It treats happiness less as a mood than as a portfolio problem - an allocation of attention across time. The verb choices do the work: you don’t simply have memories; you decide what to remember. The past becomes a resource you can inventory, not a trap you must endure.

The subtext is quietly anti-nostalgic and anti-doomscroll. “What to remember” implies selective recall: keep the lessons, drop the loops of resentment and regret. “What to enjoy” gives the present a job beyond endurance; it’s not merely where you’re stuck while waiting for the future. And “what to plan for” pulls against the seductive chaos of spontaneity, insisting that hope without structure is just another form of avoidance.

Contextually, this fits the mid-century self-help and business-motivational tradition: calm your inner life by imposing a rational order on it. There’s an American pragmatism here, a faith that emotional well-being can be engineered through better mental habits, like a more efficient workflow. The irony is that the sentence sells control as serenity. Happiness arrives not from having perfect circumstances, but from becoming the editor of your own timeline - cutting, highlighting, and scheduling your way into a life that feels coherent.