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.

If there is no market for what you’re offering (and you don’t happen to be the rare visionary who creates a new industry out of thin air), all your skill, confidence, and support will not overcome that hurdle. As Yogi Berra said, “If the fans don’t want to come out to the ballpark, no one can stop them.”

We all need help. Accepting that fact is an act of wisdom, not a sign of weakness.

A successful photographer can make a midlife conversion to cinematographer or director, but she probably can’t remake herself into a brain surgeon. Cinematography and directing are adjacent in ability and understanding to photography (working with cameras, people, and ideas); neurosurgery is not. That’s what makes adjacency an interesting

We’ve got time to take a so-called gap year. Nothing wrong with that—except when indecision or inertia extends our gap year into a “gap decade” or, worse, a “gap life.”

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.

It’s not that the honors and attention and respect, each well earned in its time, were never real. But they have faded.

We are living an earned life when the choices, risks, and effort we make in each moment align with an overarching purpose in our lives, regardless of the eventual outcome.

Letter One: First, write a letter to a previous you expressing gratitude for that previous self’s specific act of creativity or hard work or discipline—preferably something earned rather than given—that has made you better today in some way. It can be recent or long ago. The only criterion is that you single out this action as a difference maker in