The Earned Life: Lose Regret, Choose Fulfillment

“We tremble before making our choice in life,” wrote Isak Dinesen, “and having made it again tremble in fear of having chosen wrong.”

Begin with a basic question. “What do I want to do for the rest of my life?” “What can I do that’s meaningful?” “What would make me happy?” These are not basic. They are deep, multifaceted questions that should be asked throughout your life (but don’t expect an easy or quick answer). Basic questions address one factor only—because for nearly all of

If an earned life is one of productive overkill—of going all in on what matters—accompanied by sacrifice and trade-offs, that was the moment I got serious about earning my life. I had no other choice.

Creating an earned life is first and foremost a matter of scale—of going really big on the important things that keep you on message, small on the things that do not influence the outcome. This is the secret of living an earned life: It is lived at the extremes. You are maximizing what you need to do, minimizing what you deem unnecessary.

Creating an earned life begins with a choice—sifting through all the ideas you harbor for your future (assuming you have ideas) and choosing to commit to one idea above all the others.

To live any life, you have to make choices. To achieve an earned life, you have to make choices with an expanded sense of scale, discipline, and sacrifice.

This isn’t sloth or indecisiveness. It’s a conscious practice of dodging any nonessential choice in order to save my brain cells for the consequential decisions that occasionally arise in a day, such as agreeing to the eighteen-month commitment of taking on a new coaching client.

Being a creative director at an advertising agency may not seem at first like the perfect training for becoming a screenwriter, but it makes perfect sense when you appreciate the two roles’ adjacency: They both require a gift for storytelling.

To discover your adjacency to the life you are creating, you have to find one asset in yourself that is essential for success in your new life.