Titles are useful. They tell people where we sit, what we do, and what we are responsible for. The trouble begins when a title starts answering a question it was never meant to answer: Who are you?
For years, I let achievement carry too much of my identity. When business was strong, I felt strong. ...
Last Wednesday, a group of people boarded the River Queen in Newport, Kentucky, for a day on the Ohio River. As the boat moved north with the Cincinnati skyline outside the windows, they spent the next several hours thinking, writing and deciding where they wanted their own lives to go over the next...
Some decisions feel hard because we do not have enough information. Others feel hard because we have not decided who we are becoming.
Without a clear direction, every opportunity can look important. Every request can feel urgent. We say yes because we are afraid of closing a door, disappointing som...
We use the word someday as if it belongs on a calendar.
Someday we will take the trip. Someday we will slow down. Someday we will repair the relationship, take better care of ourselves, start the work that matters, or tell the people we love what they mean to us.
Someday feels responsible because ...
There was a season of my life when the outside looked like momentum and the inside felt like pressure.
I was achieving. Producing. Moving fast enough that I did not have to ask whether I was moving in the right direction. For a while, busyness can protect us from that question. A full calendar give...
I’ve been thinking about how honest a calendar can be.
It does not care what we say matters. It records what receives our time. The meetings we keep. The people we make room for. The health we postpone. The work that follows us home. The conversations we keep meaning to have.
Most of us imagine th...
On Monday, I had one of those experiences I will never forget. I had the opportunity to sit on stage with Gary Keller at Mega Camp’s CEO Summit and talk about The 10-Year Letter in front of thousands of people. Gary also wrote the foreword to the book, which made the moment even more meaningful. Wha...
Your future self already knows what matters. The question is whether you will listen.
There is a story Matthew McConaughey once shared that has stayed with me for years. Someone asked who his hero was, and his answer never changed. It was himself, ten years in the future. He never expected to ful...
You’ve been circling this for a while.
There’s a moment that happens when someone starts this process. It’s quiet. No one else sees it. They sit down, open a blank page, and realize something: they’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what they should do, but not much time getting clear on what th...
For years I’ve asked people a simple question.
Where will you be in ten years?
Not your next quarterly goal, and not the short-term plan you hope works out over the next few months. I’m talking about the life you are intentionally building. The one you want to wake up to. The one that reflects who...
There is a quiet danger that almost everyone lives with, and most people never recognize it. It is the danger of a short horizon.
Short-term thinking fills your calendar. It keeps you busy responding to the next email, the next meeting, the next obligation sitting in front of you. From the outside ...
I’ve been thinking about this quietly over the last few weeks. It keeps coming back to me during ordinary moments, when nothing in particular is happening and there’s space to notice how life is actually being lived.
What if the version of you ten years from now followed you around for a month.
Th...
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