Lessin's Lessons

The Power of Mentoring: Immortality is achievable only through one’s teachings. And ideally they are a geometric phenomena where your insights are imparted from one generation to the next. I’ll be damned if I'm going to live a geometric life without the benefit of a geometric death.

Terminal illness is a great way to sort out your friends. But don’t set the bar too high. People have their own lives.

The end of your life will be spent largely horizontal. It's important that the prior years be spent vertical.

Walking, for me, is not about exercise. It's about wandering. It's about observing and reflecting. It's about having a call option on communication with the rest of the world. But the call option is mine not yours. The French, not surprisingly, uniquely have a verb for this-le flaneur.

It’s somewhere between ironic and depressing to watch tour groups of senior citizens descend on remote geographies. It’s great that they now have the time to travel. It’s sad that they have most likely waited to do so until the end of their lives. What should have been inhaled with gusto when they were young is instead observed at a distance in the

Travel when you are young: Youthful unemployment is one of our most depressing economic phenomena. It seems patently unfair that, after years of academic exertion, graduates are deprived of rewarding employment But this economic reality, which shows no sign of abating in the Western World, has one profound advantage. It allows youth to reverse the

Despite the fact that I’m donating all the proceeds from this book to charity, I doubt I’ll sell many copies. My writing, amortized over 50 years, will not, in the end, turn out to be a very generous endeavor. That’s ok – these observations, as I said, were compiled for my children.

So here’s my modest proposal. Give the electorate, not just a call option (to re-elect their political leader) but a “put option”, to force a leader to run for re-election. Make these leaders live up to the mess they are creating for us all.

86. Record your journey. I think my most sustained mistake is that, when young, I never documented my journey while it was occurring. I now remember my life in the context of facts and not, as I wish I did, its subtleties and ironies.