FOREWORD

The greatest tragedy is a life never truly lived

There is a peculiar tragedy in the human condition. We are born into this world with an extraordinary gift: the ability to think, imagine, create, love, learn, and change almost everything about our circumstances. Yet a remarkable number of people spend their entire lives doing little more than what is expected of them.

They wake up, go to work, pay their bills, complain about the government, watch television, and repeat the performance tomorrow.

And somewhere between their first paycheck and their final retirement party, they forget that they were supposed to be living.

Not merely existing.

Living.

The difference, I assure you, is considerable.

A cow standing in a field is existing. It eats, sleeps, reproduces, and occasionally looks up when something interesting happens. It has no particular ambitions beyond finding greener grass.

A human being, however, possesses the extraordinary ability to imagine greener grass, figure out how to grow it, buy the neighboring field, and perhaps build a restaurant overlooking the whole operation.

And yet, given this remarkable potential, a great many humans seem perfectly content to stand in the same field as the cow.

Now, I have nothing against cows. They serve a useful purpose, and unlike many politicians, they generally produce something of value.

But I expect a little more from humanity.

The great deception of an ordinary life

From childhood, most of us are handed a rather predictable set of instructions.

Go to school. Get good grades. Find a respectable job. Get married. Buy a house. Have children. Save for retirement. Try not to embarrass yourself along the way.

None of this is necessarily bad advice.

The problem is that somewhere along the journey, we begin confusing following instructions with discovering our purpose.

We measure success by what we possess rather than what we experience. We judge our accomplishments by comparing ourselves with our neighbors. We sacrifice our curiosity in exchange for predictability.

We become extraordinarily proficient at doing things we don’t particularly enjoy so that we can afford things we don’t particularly need.

And then we wonder why happiness remains so elusive.

I have known people with considerable wealth who were miserable and people with very little money who seemed to possess an inexhaustible supply of joy.

I’ve known brilliant individuals who accomplished almost nothing because they were afraid to fail, and ordinary people who achieved extraordinary things simply because nobody managed to convince them they couldn’t.

I’ve seen individuals spend forty years climbing the corporate ladder, only to discover that the ladder was leaning against the wrong building.

And I’ve observed one particularly inconvenient truth:

The world does not owe you a meaningful life. You have to create one.

Passion is not a luxury

Somewhere along the way, the word passion became associated with romantic adventures, expensive sports cars, and inspirational posters hanging in corporate conference rooms.

That is unfortunate.

Passion is much more important than that.

Passion is what makes a person curious enough to learn something difficult.

It is what convinces an entrepreneur to try again after losing everything.

It is what inspires an artist to create something nobody has ever seen.

It is what drives a scientist to question something everyone else accepts as fact.

Passion is not always comfortable. Sometimes it is downright inconvenient.

It might require you to abandon a familiar road, admit that you were wrong, or begin something entirely new at an age when society expects you to have everything figured out.

But without passion, life becomes a rather tedious exercise in maintaining the status quo.

And the status quo, in my experience, is vastly overrated.

The trouble with waiting

One of the most dangerous words in the English language is someday.

Someday I’ll travel.

Someday I’ll start that business.

Someday I’ll learn another language.

Someday I’ll repair that relationship.

Someday I’ll become the person I always imagined I could be.

The difficulty, of course, is that someday is not a day on the calendar.

There are Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and even those dreadful mornings when the alarm clock seems to ring five minutes after you’ve fallen asleep.

But there is no someday.

And while we are busy waiting for circumstances to become perfect, time continues its relentless march forward.

Time is an extraordinary commodity because it is the one resource that cannot be manufactured, borrowed, or purchased in additional quantities.

You can lose money and earn it again.

You can lose a business and build another.

You can even lose your reputation and, with considerable effort, restore it.

But an hour wasted is an hour permanently removed from your existence.

No refunds. No exchanges. No customer service department.

A challenge rather than a promise

This book is not intended to convince you that happiness can be purchased in sixty days or that reading a few inspirational paragraphs will transform you into a billionaire with perfect health and an attractive spouse.

If that were possible, I would have written a much shorter book and charged considerably more for it.

Instead, this book presents a collection of ideas, observations, challenges, and practical lessons that may help you examine your life from a different perspective.

Some ideas will resonate with you.

Others may irritate you.

A few might contradict beliefs you’ve held for decades.

Good.

A mind that never encounters an uncomfortable thought is not growing. It is merely decorating itself with familiar opinions.

You do not have to agree with everything I write.

In fact, I would be disappointed if you did.

I want you to think.

Question my conclusions. Examine your assumptions. Challenge conventional wisdom. Experiment with different approaches to living.

Most importantly, recognize that the circumstances of your birth, the mistakes of your past, and the opinions of others do not have to determine the direction of your future.

You have more choices than you realize.

And whether you are twenty years old, forty, sixty, or somewhere beyond, the future remains a remarkable place because it has not yet been written.

The pen, inconveniently enough, is in your hand.

Now, what are you going to do with it?

— YNOT