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.

Our default response in life is not to experience meaning or happiness. Our default response is to experience inertia.

An earned reward not connected to a higher purpose is a hollow achievement—like a basketball player who’s interested only in maintaining his high scoring average rather than making the myriad sacrifices (e.g. taking a charge, diving for loose balls, guarding the opponent’s best player) that win close games and championships.

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

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.”

This is the Great Western Disease of “I’ll be happy when…” It is the pervasive mindset whereby we convince ourselves that we’ll be happy when we get that promotion, or drive a Tesla, or finish a slice of pizza, or attain any other badge of our short- or long-term desires.

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.

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.

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