To Mattera, the lesson was clear: A person had to go when his heart told him to go. Even if he didn’t know how the journey would end.

He’d long cursed their mañana culture, swore that these people were going nowhere because they didn’t go at full speed, but as he watched the old man flip off the ruined tire and replace it with the spare, he could see what he’d admired about Dominicans all along—that they didn’t worry for the future because they knew there was always a way to

Many presumed Bowden to be in it for the money, but he seldom sold what he found. He told people he was chasing a feeling—the moment when, after years of struggle, and after a thousand people say you’re crazy, you see something sparkle in the water and grab on to it. Treasure. A person is never the same after that.

“Tracy is a stubborn old man,” he said, “but he’s not dumb. You’ve gotta let him come to the sugar wreck himself. You’ve gotta let it be his idea, too.”

Men came alive when they were made equal. A hundred of them together could take on the world.

Treasure shows who you really are. It strips away every façade you’ve constructed, every story you believe about yourself, and reveals the real you. If you are a miserable, lying, greedy, worthless fuck, treasure will tell you that. If you are a good and decent person, treasure will tell you that, too. And you needn’t find a single coin to know.

it didn’t matter if guys like Marx got too old to actually find the stuff; they weren’t really in it for the treasure. In the end, they seemed in it to set sail, to search for things others didn’t dare look for, to be “Sir Robert” instead of Bob.

Do it now. Tomorrow is promised to no one.

—If an undertaking was easy, someone else already would have done it. —If you follow in another’s footsteps, you miss the problems really worth solving. —Excellence is born of preparation, dedication, focus, and tenacity; compromise on any of these and you become average. —Every so often, life presents a great moment of decision, an intersection at