Where did I come from, why am I here, where am I going: the whiteboard version

The Church's missionary manual, Preach My Gospel, gives the plan of salvation its own lesson, the second of the standard set, and frames it around three questions: "Where did we come from? Why are we here? Where are we going?" The lesson has eight headings in order: premortal life, the creation, agency and the fall of Adam and Eve, life on earth, the Atonement of Jesus Christ, the spirit world, resurrection and exaltation, and judgment and kingdoms of glory. The manual prints a diagram captioned "The Atonement of Jesus Christ makes salvation possible." The Church's missionary preparation teacher manual tells instructors to have students "first study the diagram and then draw their own version without looking at Preach My Gospel", and later to practise drawing it while "using a scripture to support each element". Their drawings "may take any form, as long as they include the major parts". That is why the sketch you get on a napkin varies in the details and never in the sequence.

The plan begins before the drawing does. The Church teaches that every person lived before birth as a spirit child of God, with what the Gospel Topics page calls heavenly parents, and that God presented a plan to those children. Wikipedia's summary of the doctrine lists its terms: birth on earth with a physical body, testing through trials, a "veil" over memory of that earlier life so that people would walk by faith, and freedom of choice held to be "an inviolable right". Members believe Jesus Christ was chosen in that council as the Savior. Lucifer, in the account, proposed removing choice and was refused; the Church teaches that a third of the spirits followed him and were cast out without bodies. Two ideas from this part of the story do most of the work later. One is that choice, or agency in members' vocabulary, comes before everything else. The other is that mortality was accepted, not imposed. A member who believes she chose to come here reads adversity differently from one who thinks it just happened.

Earth is the box in the middle of the diagram, and the Church describes it as the place to get a body, to be tested, and to make covenants through ordinances such as baptism and confirmation. "Temptation, opposition, and adversity" are part of the design, the Gospel Topics page says, and the trials are held to help a person grow rather than to punish. At death, members believe, the spirit goes to a spirit world and waits for resurrection. That world has two conditions in Church teaching: paradise, for "the spirits of the just", and spirit prison, for those who rejected the gospel or were never taught it. The distinctive point, and the reason the Church builds temples, is that teaching continues there. Those in spirit prison "will continue to receive instruction in the Gospel and be allowed to repent", and ordinances performed for the dead in temples are held to count for them if they accept. Members believe everyone is resurrected, body and spirit reunited, and then judged by Jesus Christ on desires and obedience.

The right-hand side of the drawing comes from a single afternoon. On February 16, 1832, in an upstairs room of the John Johnson farmhouse in Hiram, Ohio, Joseph Smith and Sidney Rigdon recorded what members call "the Vision", now section 76 of the Doctrine and Covenants, while working through John 5:29. It describes heaven divided into three kingdoms, and the Church links them to Paul's comparison in 1 Corinthians 15:40-41 of "the glory of the sun, moon, and stars". The table summarises who the Church teaches goes where.

Note what is missing from the table: a permanent hell for ordinary sinners. The Church teaches that the telestial kingdom is still a kingdom of glory, entered after a stay in spirit prison that ends with the Millennium. Almost everyone, in this scheme, ends somewhere good. That is the belief to keep in mind when a Latter-day Saint colleague seems unshaken by a bad quarter.

Almost everyone, in this scheme, ends somewhere good.

None of the executives on this site has said on the record, in a source this site could fetch, that the plan of salvation made him take a particular risk. The record shows a pattern of long horizons, and members will tell you where the horizon comes from. Jon Huntsman Sr., who founded Huntsman Chemical in 1982, told the Deseret News in January 2004 that he had staved off bankruptcy four times. The worst stretch ran from 2000 to 2003: a projected profit of $250 million (May 2000) vanished within nine months after natural gas prices quadrupled, adding $50 million a month to power costs; cash fell from around $250 million to under $75 million, 60 to 90 days from missing payroll. The fix removed $1.1 billion of debt and cost the family 49.9 percent of the company. Huntsman's stated reason for saving it was the charitable commitments the family had already made. He served as an Area Seventy of the Church from 1996 to 2011 and had given more than $1.5 billion by his death in February 2018.

David Neeleman went personally bankrupt at 23 when a partner airline failed, lasted six months at Southwest after it bought Morris Air for $130 million, and was fired by JetBlue's board in 2007 after an ice storm. "I was totally devastated. I killed myself for that company," he told the Deseret News in March 2021, before starting his fifth airline, Breeze. His rule: "It isn't what happens to you, it's how you deal with it." Clayton Christensen framed his own scorecard in the terms of the judgment section of the diagram: according to a 2010 Deseret News profile, he expected God to measure him by the individuals he had helped, not by titles. Read together, the three describe risk as survivable and failure as an episode, which is what the drawing teaches about mortality itself. Whether the belief causes the behaviour, or the same temperament produces both, the record does not say.