This is an image that will run throughout this book. The nineteenth-century philosopher is saying: you do not have the control over your life that you might like to believe. You will of course have certain aims, pulling you in one direction. However, life is constantly pulling back in the other. Irrespective of how much ‘you believe in yourself’, t

Ultimately, choose your pact based on your curiosity. Remember to let go of previous choices, societal expectations, and top-down assumptions. What excites you?

the only way to live authentically is to acknowledge that you’re inevitably always making decision after decision, decisions that will shape your life in lasting ways, even though you can’t ever know in advance what the best choice might be. In fact, you’ll never know in hindsight, either – because no matter how great or appalling the consequences

Here’s the truth: you can only make decisions based on what you know at the time. We live in an outcomes-based culture, where the correctness of our choice seems based on the success of the result. That might work in some situations, but is that really how we want to live our lives? Successful outcomes might look great on paper, but we want to buil

“That’s where you’re wrong. The fear behind indecisiveness is the fear of what you can’t control, the fear of an uncertain future. But nobody can know for sure what will happen in the future. No matter how much time you spend trying to make the perfect decision, you will be wrong sometimes. Accept that. The difference between champions and everyone