The Four P's

I just finished a closed captioning video from 2011 by Nora Nyland, a dietetics professor at BYU. She talked about living worthy of the Savior's recommendation, as He is our advocate with the Father. She suggested four things that can help us develop the characteristics we need to by worthy of His recommendation- the Four P's.

1. A Sense of Purpose. More specifically, an eternal sense of purpose. We have to know where we want to go to get on and stay on the correct path. Because of the restoration of the gospel through Joseph Smith, we know that we are literal spirit children of our Heavenly Father, and as such we each have a divine nature and destiny. That divine destiny is to return to the presence of God and to become like him. Having an accurate sense of purpose is fundamental to making the best decisions and staying the course, no matter how difficult it becomes. Knowing we are children of Deity with divine potential ought to give us some staying power when the strait and narrow path gets steeper, rockier, and more obscure than we might like.
2. The Ability to Plan. Planning is how we affect the future rather than just be affected by it. "In nothing does man come closer to God-like activity than in planning." In Moses 6:62 the Father states: "I say unto you: This is the plan of salvation unto all men, through the blood of mine only Begotten." If your plans keep you headed in the right direction, it's unlikely that you'll make any big mistakes.
3. Maintain Perspective. With physical objects, we're pretty comfortable with the idea that something can remain constant while our view changes. We might have an easier time in life if we could apply that same understanding to the non-physical world, to what we perceive emotionally, interpersonally, and spiritually. Compared to how they really are, our problems, challenges, interactions, and even decisions sometimes appear too large or too small to us. This proportion distortion can be dangerous to our spiritual health. It can cause us to become discouraged or angry enough to want to give up our efforts at living righteously or it can cause us to be cavalier about some of our choices and fail to give them proper attention. You know that you will make mistakes in your life. Viewing your life with an eternal perspective helps with the final P-
4. Perseverance. Perseverance must be important, or we wouldn't have so many scriptures admonishing us to endure to the end. None of them say, "slide to the end" or "sail to the end," so that must mean our Father recognizes it isn't easy to do all that is required of us. But what a wonderful reward awaits if we do. [D&C 14:7] "And, if you keep my commandments and endure to the end you shall have eternal life, which gift is the greatest of all the gifts of God." A great example of a perseverant attitude is found in Paul in Phillippians 3:13, "But this one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before, I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus." Our perseverance leads us to the greatest of all the gifts of God.