Sixty years of living, learning, failing, and occasionally getting something right
I have spent more than sixty years on this planet, which is long enough to learn a few things, forget a considerable number of others, and discover that the people most certain they have everything figured out are frequently the ones who understand the least.
When I was younger, I believed that growing older meant becoming wiser.
It turns out that age alone does not produce wisdom.
It merely provides opportunities to acquire it.
Some people learn from their mistakes. Others repeat the same mistakes for forty years and call it experience.
And some of us, if we’re fortunate, eventually develop enough curiosity to examine not only what happened to us, but why it happened and what we might do differently.
That curiosity is largely responsible for this book.
I wasn’t born with an instruction manual
Like everyone else, I arrived in this world without a manual explaining how life was supposed to work.
There was no convenient chapter on selecting good friends, managing money, building relationships, recognizing opportunities, overcoming fear, or determining what might actually make me happy.
We were expected to figure these things out.
Our parents taught us what they knew. Our teachers provided information. Society supplied expectations. Friends contributed their opinions, often with remarkable confidence and questionable accuracy.
And somewhere in that collection of influences, we were expected to develop an understanding of ourselves.
It is an imperfect system.
We spend years in school learning mathematics, geography, history, and science. All worthwhile subjects, certainly.
But how much time do we spend teaching young people how to make decisions?
How to recognize manipulation?
How to select friends?
How to recover from failure?
How to manage their emotions, understand money, identify opportunities, or establish goals worth pursuing?
How to distinguish between what they genuinely want and what society has convinced them they should want?
Not nearly enough.
We prepare people to pass examinations and then release them into a world where the most important questions seldom come with multiple-choice answers.
Experience is an expensive teacher
I’ve spent much of my life involved in business, technology, and entrepreneurship.
These pursuits have taught me that success is rarely a straight line.
Sometimes you make excellent decisions and get terrible results.
Sometimes you make questionable decisions and succeed through a combination of luck, timing, and circumstances you didn’t fully understand.
And sometimes you work extraordinarily hard only to discover that you have been digging a very impressive hole in entirely the wrong location.
Business teaches you about people.
Failure teaches you about yourself.
And success, if you’re not careful, teaches you to become arrogant enough to make your next failure considerably more expensive.
I’ve learned that intelligence is valuable, but discipline is often more useful.
That money creates opportunities, but cannot guarantee fulfillment.
That surrounding yourself with the wrong people can destroy years of progress.
That the ability to communicate may be more valuable than possessing the correct answer.
And that fear, when allowed to become the dominant force in your life, can quietly steal possibilities you never even attempted to explore.
Above all, I’ve learned that your life can change dramatically when you begin taking responsibility for the decisions you make.
Not responsibility for everything that happens to you. Life is full of accidents, injustice, bad luck, and circumstances beyond anyone’s control.
But responsibility for what you choose to do next.
That distinction is essential.
Why I wrote this book
I did not write this book because I believe I possess all the answers.
Anyone claiming to have all the answers is either selling something, running for political office, or suffering from a rather serious misunderstanding of reality.
I wrote it because I believe that sharing experience has value.
Human civilization advances because one generation communicates what it has learned to the next.
We do not have to rediscover fire every hundred years.
We do not have to reinvent the wheel every time somebody needs to move a heavy object.
And we certainly should not have to make every foolish mistake personally when millions of people have already demonstrated precisely why it was foolish.
Yet when it comes to living our lives, we seem remarkably determined to repeat the same errors.
We pursue approval from people whose opinions shouldn’t matter.
We remain in relationships that make us miserable.
We allow fear to prevent us from exploring opportunities.
We confuse comfort with happiness.
We procrastinate, rationalize, complain, and occasionally blame the entire universe for circumstances we might have improved ourselves.
I have been guilty of some of these things.
Perhaps you have too.
The important question is not whether we have made mistakes.
It is whether we intend to continue making them.
Why sixty days?
There is nothing magical about sixty days.
You will not wake up on the sixty-first morning transformed into a completely different human being, immune to temptation, overflowing with wisdom, and capable of making perfect decisions.
If you do, please contact me. I would be interested in studying the phenomenon.
But sixty days is enough time to begin changing the direction of your life.
It is enough time to identify destructive habits.
Enough time to establish better routines.
Enough time to examine your relationships, finances, health, ambitions, and personal priorities.
Enough time to stop talking about improvement and begin practicing it.
The real objective is not sixty days of temporary enthusiasm.
It is to establish a way of thinking that continues long after you finish this book.
That is why the chapters address so many different aspects of life.
Finding your passions is only the beginning.
Passion without discipline accomplishes very little.
Ambition without integrity eventually creates problems.
Money without judgment disappears.
Confidence without humility becomes arrogance.
And a lifetime of accomplishments means surprisingly little if you never learn to enjoy any of them.
A successful life is not built from one grand achievement. It is assembled through thousands of decisions, most of which appear insignificant when we make them.
A word about disagreement
You will encounter opinions in this book that may challenge your assumptions.
I make no apology for that.
I have never believed that the purpose of writing is simply to reassure people that everything they already believe is correct.
If that were the objective, we could replace libraries with mirrors.
I want you to examine these ideas critically.
Accept what makes sense.
Reject what doesn’t.
Modify what needs improving.
And when experience demonstrates that you were mistaken, have the intellectual courage to change your mind.
That is not weakness.
That is learning.
A person who refuses to reconsider an opinion is not demonstrating strength of character. He is merely advertising the limits of his curiosity.
One final observation
I do not know how many years I have left.
Neither do you.
That is not intended to be depressing. Quite the opposite.
The uncertainty of life is precisely what makes it valuable.
If we possessed unlimited time, procrastination would be perfectly reasonable.
But we don’t.
Every year presents opportunities that may never appear again.
People enter our lives and leave them.
Technology changes. Economies evolve. Relationships develop or deteriorate. Our bodies age, sometimes with an enthusiasm we would prefer they reserve for other activities.
The world continues moving.
And we must decide whether to participate or simply observe.
My hope is that somewhere in these pages, you discover an idea that changes the way you think.
Perhaps it will inspire you to start a business.
Perhaps it will encourage you to repair a relationship, improve your health, learn something new, or abandon an ambition that never really belonged to you.
Perhaps it will simply remind you that there is still an enormous amount of life available to be experienced.
Whatever you discover, I hope you remember one thing:
Your greatest accomplishment should not be proving to the world that you were successful. It should be reaching the end of your life knowing that you actually lived it.
And preferably enjoyed a substantial portion of the adventure.
— YNOT