There's a growing block of people who think I'm a sociopath. How do I know? Because they tell me. Well, they don't tell me, they tell Marty. It typically comes in the form of saying they think something is wrong with me. When Marty asks them why they think that, they say it's because there's no way someone is as happy as Troy appears to be. Marty, with the slightest show of exasperation, will tell ...

The last few years I have spent the month of July tent-camping in Michigan. Parts of the family will join me for much of this but I usually spend a week or two alone. Every morning of this month begins with a 3-4 hour reading and writing session on the beach. As for what I’m reading, each year I choose a different topic to research and I will have a few books on that subject and will spend my mo...

Anthony walks into the kitchen to find me running the last serving from a box of Raisin Bran through a kitchen strainer.

ANTHONY (15)
Are you washing your cereal?

TROY
No, just sifting all the tiny broke pieces out. I don't like those.

ANTHONY
That's quite a process.

TROY
Not really. I've learned you just gotta be smarter than your problems. ...

Anthony began high school this year. This means a few things. First, it is the last time he and his brother will attend the same school at the same time. They had a nice long run in elementary but will only have this one year left. Unless you count the covid year, that was a very special setup for the two of them as they spent that entire year side by side, and as each other's best friend, they we...

recently i wrote about my obsession with living the perfect day (ref). a few weeks after that a friend of mine called bullshit on this pursuit. he didn't say it was greedy of me, he said it was irrational, and in truth not possible. he, and his wife, argued that you can't have multiple perfect things. it defied the point of perfection. you ju...

how many things have you done 15,000 times and aren't perfect at? for me that list is remarkably short. so short in fact there is only one thing i haven't perfected in that many attempts--living the perfect day. and doing so repeatedly.

i am 50 years old and on my 50 birthday i have gone through this exercise more than 15,000 times. now if we take away the child years, and even the adolescent years, and even the college years and just leave me the years where i have had a lot of control over my time, that means i have failed to figure it out in more than 7,500 attempts. this fact makes me absolutely mental.

so fixing this is my current obsession. well, one of my current obsessions at least. because a part of my perfect-day theory is that the more obsession-based activities your can sprinkle into the hours of the day, the better chance you have of milking every minute of that day in a meaningful and purposeful way.

bella and i were having one of our, what she calls "red-leather chair chats". these happen when she and i are both around and have twenty open minutes. she will ask if we can meet in my office. this is a request i have rarely, if ever, said no to. once settled into our respective chairs we catch up with each other's life. these largely replace what used to be our dad hours which haven't happened for bella too routinely since, honestly, she began middle school. i blame this largely on me no longer being able too pull her out at lunch time for our father-daughter lunches like i used to in elementary. problem in both middle and high school is their lunches are not long enough for me to sneak them away and get them back in time for their next class, which is a bit bizarre to me.

on this day, after getting me up to speed on her life she asked what was going on in my world. i shared that we had just started a new marketing outreach campaign and i had to call about twenty people a day to see if they were interested in our service.

BELLA
why do you sound so unexcited about it? that is unlike you.

TROY
i don't know. it just hasn't been turning out the way i thought it would and i'm a little discouraged by it.

BELLA
how long have you been doing it?

TROY
two days.

BELLA
two days! that's it?

TROY
uhh. yeah.

BELLA
and who are you calling?

TROY
law school registrars.

BELLA
dad. you can't give up after two days. i mean you're still getting your script worked out. it took me weeks before i had my approach down at club fitness. AND the people you are talking to are professionals. they can't even be mean to you. has anyone hung up on you.

TROY
no.

BELLA
six or seven of the people i call every day just hang up on me. don't even say a word. just hang up.

TROY
i guess i didn't think of it that way.

BELLA
you can't quit after two days. it's not the dearmitt-way.

the next day i made ten calls. seven people answered. and all of them were pleasant and helpful. when i was done for the day i may have even thought to myself--well, that was kinda fun, but i would never tell bella that.

at the end of every week, i write two journal entries--one for my business and one for my personal affairs. i do this with several things in mind. i like to reflect on the happenings of the prior seven days. this is both to celebrate any progress and achievements as well as help set the tone and priorities for the week ahead. last week's personal entry, shared below, felt a little more potent than most.

there's more than a little truth in that closing sentiment.

marty told me of a new workout trend where you hire people to excercise for you.

yes. you are reading that right. you stay at home. they go to the gym in your name. then they report back to you what they did. and that is your workout for the day.

before you scoff too much, you should know that this approach is getting some traction. i get that at first blush it sounds a bit ridiculous, like SNL-skit ridiculous but as with many like things, there is some logic at work. the tactic, in this case, is you get to watch someone leading a healthier lifestyle than yourself AND see and hear what goes into it. as you watch your sponsor get more fit and attractive, you start wanting that for yourself and because of the daily reports, you have a sense for what it would take to make it happen for yourself. so on paper, it has some merit and is finding some success in practice too.

for me this falls into that oft-cited "if you worked as hard at the thing you're trying to avoid as you worked at avoiding it ..." bucket. but in ruminating on it further, it occurred to me that i have been doing this exact practice for more than ten years. the difference is i don't have a workout proxy. i have proxies for social media and the daily news cycle. i know loads of people hyper-engaged in all of those matters, and i just kick back and watch all their hand-wringing and angst and consternation from afar. and when i see what immersing yourself in those matters does to one's mental well-being and personal fulfillment, i see all i need to maintain a healthy and fulfilled mental state for myself. and this is precisely what the workout sponsor does for someone. so if it is half as effective for them as my system has been for me, then get yourself a gym proxy, like, today.

and all of these mental meanderings have given me an idea for a new company that is connected to (1) my current use of social media and news proxies and (2) my obsession with time management. if you are addicted to being connected and informed and love the way you feel after giving hours of your day to social media and the news cycle BUT want that feeling without giving up all the time to stay "plugged in", hire me, or my new company rather. what we will do is send someone to your house first thing in the morning. upon arriving, they will knock on your door, and when you open it, they will kick you square in the groin, girl and boy alike. they will then toss an invoice at your crumpled frame and as they turn to leave will call out, "see ya tomorrow." that way you can fit all that gut-punch level dread and mental turmoil into your day before your first coffee is even cold, leaving the rest of the day's hours for more fulfilling and meaningful pursuits.

50 (a 2-part essay)
PART 2: On Being 50
(Part 1: On Becoming 50)

i've long held this approach to aging where i liken it to a formal education, which if done right, aging rightfully is, no?

in your twenties, you're like a freshman in high school. scared and intimidated but when with other freshmen, cock-sure, loud, and certa...

50 (a 2-part essay)
PART 1: On Becoming 50

twenty years ago i had a breakdown of sorts. it kinda came out of nowhere. it was right around my 30th birthday. a year earlier my mom had given me the name and phone number of my biological mother saying she thought i was old enough to have it now. fact is, she thought i was old enough for a good while but kept waiting for me to ask about ...

the above screen shot shows a web page i look at nearly every day. it is part of a collection of webpages i use to motivate and remind me of things important to me. i originally made the above page to look at before leaving the office to help me shift from work mode to family mode. when i first made it, the day count in red had thousands of days. now it has hundreds of days, and barely so.
View in Gallery >>>

many people are FIT through many approaches and means. some must work harder than others to achieve those goals but still find a way. some are dealt a worse hand than others but still find a way.

and many people are SUCCESSFUL through many approaches and means. some must work harder than others to achieve those goals but still find a way. some are dealt a worse hand than others but still find a way.

it's taken me a long time to learn, realize and accept that there are many ways to run a winning game. there was a time i thought, well this worked for me so it is what will work for you. it took me an embarrassingly long time to learn that the real (and only) key is to run YOUR game and not someone else's game. as the kids say today, "you gotta do you". this is something i wished i learned thirty years sooner than i did. if i had, not only would i have been a lot more successful sooner, i would also have been a lot more happy sooner.

"but you don't count."

that's my daughter's response, at times, to advice i give her. you know, life advice, the fatherly kind. i ask her what that means, why i don't count. she says my advice doesn't count because i love life too much, i love my job too much, i love my wife and marriage too much, i love every waking morning too much. because you like everything you're doing, nothing is w...

i'm a regimented person. so much so that people mock and ridicule me for the amount of structure in my life. i have talked to many people who say that sort of daily rigor is not for them--even if we have just discussed some challenge in their life where a routine is the exact answer to a problem they might be battling. this is most certainly my family's position on this matter. dad's schedules are...

notes from a toastmaster's talk i gave titled JUST DO IT ... AGAIN.

i called my friend matthew. we needed to talk. as i began he started eating something, something that sounded like a mixture of apples, cheetos and ice. i kept pausing at the height of his chewing. picking up on this, matthew stopped his masticating long enough to say:

MATTHEW
sorry. i was just on an hour long call with these morons from work and was starving.

TROY
well ...

MY DREAM DAY
05.30     wake (naturally)
06.00     write (for web or talk)
07.00     get aleo off to school
07.30     set goals for the day
08.00     get anfer to school
09.00     work - deep-dive development
01.00     exercise
02.00     meditate
02.30     design window
03.00     administrative - work
04.00     administrative - personal
05.00     read - professional
06.00     family dinner
06.30     dad hours (two 45 minute blocks)
08.00     clean kitchen (for marta)
09.00     leisure
10.30     bed

were i allowed to live the above day unperturbed for lots of days, i could cover a remarkable amount of ground on an enviable variety of fronts.

most humans i know learned how to be successful in youth. successful in sports. successful in school. successful socially. for me, i didn't learn the rules of success until i was in my thirties. this isn't to say i didn't experience success before i was thirty because i did. i found the woman i was meant to marry (and got married). i saw routine promotions in my work (several of which were surpris...

i've shared our shopping list and menu before. i've not been updating the site's menu pages because since having kids we weren't entertaining as much. but do not take that to mean we abandoned our food planning systems. i think this is probably our oldest joint-list, our most functional list, and the most impactful list to our home (although that seems like a lofty claim so please take it as me saying it's VERY helpful to us). every other year or so marty and i have a full-blown conversation about how people manage this process in their home (shopping and cooking) without a list/plan. we try to remember what we used to do before we started using our process but it's hard to remember because we've been doing it so long. of all the list i have shared and will share, i gotta think this one is definitely one of the most vital and sanity-saving of them all.

below you will find both a pdf and word version of our shopping list template. the word version would allow you to modify the list to your own needs should you be curious to give it a go and not want to start from scratch. marty definitely adjusts ours to match the flow of our grocery store. below those two files is a sample of what one of marty's ready to go lists looks like in action.

download 20kb

download 184kb

if you think people bristle at lists, just ask them about self-help books. i will confess to not understanding the stigma and baggage wrapped around them. especially when therapy in comparison, in some circles, seems like a status symbol. but from the first time i ran across one, i instantly became intrigued by their composition and objective. for me they served a mentorship role i was in dire need of. that said, most self-help literature is admittedly like eating chicken wings—lots of work for minuscule chunks of meat. but, oh my, can that meat be a tasty and memorable morsel. and that is what keeps us reaching for that next one in the basket.

one lesson i've learned in life is the importance of timing. my first and most powerful dose of this came when i first met my wife. i knew in a single breath that she was the one for me but after five painful and awkward dates, anyone could see it was just not clicking so we threw in the towel. i called her a year later for a follow-up date, mostly because i couldn't stop thinking about her. this do-over date began as each of the prior ones did, painful and awkward but then, forty minutes in, for reasons i've never understood, the world fell away and at that precise moment the rest was irreversibly set in stone.

self-help books possess this timing quality. there are many times i've started a book and it just didn't speak to me. i pull it off the shelf years later and it owns every ounce of my attention. while this applies to all sorts of books, it is doubly applicable to self-help books. further, i have recommended some of these books to people and to my knowledge, aside from the third one listed, they have never helped anyone to the degree they have helped me so in that vein i do not recommend reading them on a whim or simply based on them being listed here. it would be akin to taking Nyquil medicine when you are not sick. Nyquil is a violently foul thing to swallow when you need it and know it will help you. it is an unfathomable thought when you are doing ok and don't need it. so please peruse this list with that understanding in mind.

SELF-HELP BOOKS THAT HAVE HAD THE LARGEST IMPACT ON MY LIFE

(in order of their import/impact)

The 10 Natural Laws of Successful Time and Life Management (Hyrum Smith) this book started it all for me. it was recommended by a friend i approached who seemed to be the most engaged and energized human i ever met. i've recommended it to dozens of people over the years. it has impacted exactly ZERO of them the way it did me. as for how it touched me, i vividly remember reading it on the subway going into work and without realizing it, i had had tears running down my face. this book is namely why i make the red-text note above that your intersection with anything, be it people, a film, a sentence you hear, a job you get has more to do with the timing of it in your life than the actual payload it carries. i found this book when i needed to and it began a life reclamation project that continues today. Let me share an experience that suggests the potential power that the natural laws discussed in these pages can have in your life. An executive with the Merrill Lynch Corporation attended our seminar several years ago at their corporate training facility in Princeton, New Jersey, as part of the advanced training Merrill Lynch provides its brokers after their first year with the firm. A year after this gentleman had gone through the seminar he wrote me a four-page handwritten letter that, even as I think about it today, makes me emotional. In his letter he said something to this effect: "Hyrum, I went to your seminar a year ago in Princeton. It never occurred to me that what I do on a daily basis ought to be based on my governing values. I found that to be a very exciting idea. I came away from that seminar and identified my governing values, the things that really matter most to me. In the process of that introspection, I discovered that one of my governing values was a good life for my son. When I admitted that to myself, I also had to admit that I wasn't doing anything for my son. This past year, I decided I would dedicate my life to making a good life for my son. He then described several fun things that he had done with and for his son. On the third page of this handwritten letter he said, "Hyrum, last week my son, eight years old, was killed in an automobile accident. I have experienced some real pain at the loss of my son. But I have to tell you that I have experienced no guilt. For the first time since your seminar, I realized what you were talking about when you discussed the idea and concept of inner peace." He then closed the letter by saying, "Hyrum, thank you."

Aging Well (George Valliant) the primary lesson i took from this book deals with the devastating and irrecoverable toll poor and immature decisions can take on a life. its impact on me was near immediate. days after digesting the core message i received a combative email from a difficult colleague. moments after reading it i pushed back from my desk to begin a heated march to his office. the notions from this book played across my mind's ticker-tape machine. i stopped myself and decided to wait out this initial reaction and consider what a "mature" response to this push in the shoulder might be. by the next morning my cooler mind had found an elegant and reasoned course that spared me (and my foe) from an unprofessional and time-consuming (and pointless) dust-up. the ease of this alternate path made an immediate convert of me and i work hard to view all of my more important and consequential decisions through this measured prism. What follows is not an excerpt from the book but from an Atlantic article about the book (and ultimatley what led me to the book) The story gets to the heart of Vaillant's angle on the Grant Study. His central question is not how much or how little trouble these men met, but rather precisely how—and to what effect—they responded to that trouble. His main interpretive lens has been the psychoanalytic metaphor of "adaptations," or unconscious responses to pain, conflict, or uncertainty. Formalized by Anna Freud on the basis of her father's work, adaptations (also called "defense mechanisms") are unconscious thoughts and behaviors that you could say either shape or distort—depending on whether you approve or disapprove—a person's reality. Vaillant explains defenses as the mental equivalent of a basic biological process. When we cut ourselves, for example, our blood clots—a swift and involuntary response that maintains homeostasis. Similarly, when we encounter a challenge large or small—a mother's death or a broken shoelace—our defenses float us through the emotional swamp. And just as clotting can save us from bleeding to death—or plug a coronary artery and lead to a heart attack—defenses can spell our redemption or ruin. Vaillant's taxonomy ranks defenses from worst to best, in four categories. At the bottom of the pile are the unhealthiest, or "psychotic," adaptations—like paranoia, hallucination, or megalomania—which, while they can serve to make reality tolerable for the person employing them, seem crazy to anyone else. One level up are the "immature" adaptations, which include acting out, passive aggression, hypochondria, projection, and fantasy. These aren't as isolating as psychotic adaptations, but they impede intimacy. "Neurotic" defenses are common in "normal" people. These include intellectualization (mutating the primal stuff of life into objects of formal thought); dissociation (intense, often brief, removal from one's feelings); and repression, which, Vaillant says, can involve "seemingly inexplicable naïveté, memory lapse, or failure to acknowledge input from a selected sense organ." The healthiest, or "mature," adaptations include altruism, humor, anticipation (looking ahead and planning for future discomfort), suppression (a conscious decision to postpone attention to an impulse or conflict, to be addressed in good time), and sublimation (finding outlets for feelings, like putting aggression into sport, or lust into courtship).

Getting Things Done (David Allen) this is the one and only book i've ever read that i think could help all people (that live in a first-world society at least). every other book on this list deals in the perceptual and abstract. this is the only brass tacks book on the list. i've read others which have helped here and there, but this one offers the tools to do a complete makeover of your organizational life. allen's methods are shockingly mature and tested. it seems most of these books are penned on the quick trying to beat others to market. unlike those, allen's methods were in play for a good long while before the notion of documenting his approach gained traction. and it is his comprehensive and proven model that lets you hit the ground sprinting with confidence. The purpose of this whole method of workflow management is not to let your brain become lax, but rather to enable it to move toward more elegant and productive activity. In order to earn that freedom, however, your brain must engage on some consistent basis with all your commitments and activities. You must be assured that you're doing what you need to be doing, and that it's OK to be not doing what you're not doing. Reviewing your system on a regular basis and keeping it current and functional are prerequisites for that kind of control. If you have a list of calls you must make, for example, the minute that list is not totally current with all the calls you need to make, your brain will not trust the system, and it won't get relief from its lower-level mental tasks. It will have to take back the job of remembering, processing, and reminding, which , as you should know by now, it doesn't do very effectively.

Flow (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi) for someone into time and life management, this work is breathtaking. you can tell how much a book spoke to me by examining it physcally and observing the number of dog-eared pages and how marred the margins are with my excited scrawls. this book is devastated. in short, the author, with an unfortunately unpronounable name, teaches you how to bend time like neo does in the matrix. flow is something that has happened to all of us, but it is an elusive experience. here the phenomenon that happens to our time and experience is documented and described in a way where you can not only better understand what is happening BUT have the potential of cornering it in the paddock and riding, even taming, it like the wild and ever-moving creature it is. Although, as we have seen, people generally long to leave their places of work and get home, ready to put their hard-earned free time to good use, all too often they have no idea what to do there. Ironically, jobs are actually easier to enjoy than free time, because like flow activities they have built-in goals, feedback, rules, and challenges, all of which courage one to become involved in one's work, to concentrate and lose oneself in it. Free time, on the other hand, is unstructured, and requires much greater effort to be shaped into something that can be enjoyed. Hobbies that demand skill, habits that set goals and limits, personal interests, and especially inner discipline help to make leisure what it is supposed to be—a chance for re-creation. But on the whole people miss the opportunity to enjoy leisure even more thoroughly than they do with working time. Over sixty years ago, the great American sociologist Robert Park already noted: "It is in the improvident use of our leisure, I suspect, that the greatest wastes of American life occur." The tremendous leisure industry that has arisen in the last few generations has been designed to help fill free time with enjoyable experiences. Nevertheless, instead of using our physical and mental resources to experience flow, most of us spend many hours each week watching celebrated athletes playing in enormous stadiums. Instead of making music, we listen to platinum records cut by millionaire musicians. Instead of making art, we go to admire paintings that brought in the highest bids at the latest auction. We do not run risks acting on our beliefs, but occupy hours each day watching actors who pretend to have adventures, engaged in mock-meaningful action. This vicarious participation is able to mask, at least temporarily, the underlying emptiness of wasted time. But it is a very pale substitute for attention invested in real challenges. The flow experience that results from the use of skills leads to growth; passive entertainment leads nowhere. Collectively we are wasting each year the equivalent of millions of years of human consciousness. The energy that could be used to focus on complex goals, to provide for enjoyable growth, is squandered on patterns of stimulation that only mimic reality. Mass leisure, mass culture, and even high culture when only attended to passively and for extrinsic reasons—such as the wish to flaunt one's status—are parasites of the mind. They absorb psychic energy without providing substantive strength in return. They leave us more exhausted, more disheartened than we were before. Unless a person takes charge of them, both work and free time are likely to be disappointing. Most jobs and many leisure activities—especially those involving the passive consumption of mass media—are not designed to make us happy and strong. Their purpose is to make money for someone else. If we allow them to, they can suck out the marrow of our lives, leaving only feeble husks. But like everything else, work and leisure can be appropriated for our needs. People who learn to enjoy their work, who do not waster their free time, end up feeling that their lives as a whole have become much more worthwhile. "The future," wrote C. K. Brightbill, "will belong not only to the educated man, but to the man who is educated to use his leisure wisely."

The Obstacle Is The Way (Ryan Holiday) this book kicked open doors in my mind i didn't even know existed. and thankfully so, because i can already see the thinking that got me through the first half of life is probably not going to serve me equally well in my second leg of life. this book, i believe, is sharing some tools i'll need for this next bit of road. it has also led me to a extensive bank of exciting authors and writing that will surely have me occupied for decades to come. What is Perception? It's how we see and understand what occurs around us—and what we decide those events will mean. Our perceptions can be a source of strength or of great weakness. If we are emotional, subjective and short-sighted, we only add to our troubles. To prevent becoming overwhelmed by the world around us, we must, as the ancients practiced, learn how to limit our passions and their control over our lives. It takes skill and discipline to bat away the pests of bad perceptions, to separate reliable signals from deceptive ones, to filter out prejudice, expectation, and fear. But it's worth it, for what's left is truth. While others are excited or afraid, we will remain calm and imperturbable. We will see things simply and straightforwardly, as they truly are—neither good nor bad. This will be an incredible advantage for us in the fight against obstacles.

---

Have a book that changed your life? you know i'd love to hear what it is and what it did for you.

i think morning time is one area where the existence and value of regimentation (e.g. checklist) shows its global relevance as mornings for most people, based on my polling, begin virtually the same day in and day out, workdays and non-workdays each having their own cadence of course. most of my days i wake in my home begin like this ...

1. wake. hopefully naturally and hopefully between 5:30 and 6:00.
2. pee.
3. weigh myself.
4. get my drinks ready for the day (those drinks being tea and vietnamese coffee).
5. write (for website or talk/lecture, until 7:00 a.m.).
6. @ 7:00 a.m. do my first set of pushups for the day (daily goal is 5 sets of 25).
7. review my goals.
8. update my LIFE spreadsheet (recording prior day's progress & happenings).
9. schedule the day's hours (if they haven't already been set).
10. start day.

there do seem to be a few natural areas in life where the routines are so pedestrian and mindless, they just organically come be be set in stone. even if the first thing you do upon waking is reach over and check your email or favorite website, it is something that will in time get written into the fabric of your days. i have met a few people who actively fight these natural patterns by, say, brushing their teeth with their non-dominant hand or always going to repeat destinations using different routes. this upstream swimming always perplexed me as it seemed counter-productive and, well, kinda pointless. then one of these practitioners explained why they did this. they said they liked heightening their awareness of even the most mundane matters so they would be more engaged, or the modern-day wording is "present", in the various points of the day, ALL of the points of the day. this turned my bafflement to intrigue. i've long believed that as long as you have a thoughtful reason for doing what you do, then you are golden (of course, as long as your inclinations aren't harmful to others in which case your have some twisted thinking and should seek help). that said, i will not be brushing my teeth with my left hand anytime soon. i've got too many interesting things on other lists to spend my time foolin' with that.

if you are thinking the above list is just what sort of happened on its own and i simply wrote it down to share here today, that is very much NOT the case. that above process is the end product of years of successes and failures and constant tuning. in six months i will look at it again. touch each piece and see if it is making my mornings and days richer or is more of a styrofoam peanut simply taking up the day's space. fact is i recently turned my whole day upside down. i used to be way nocturnal and did all of the above things after 10pm, including drinking coffee. i even exercised after 10pm. in reviewing my processes one day, it occurred to me that i was doing some of my most personal and long-lasting work (e.g. working on my health, writing/sharing my memories) at the end of the day when i was completely spent and fading fast. i was giving people who weren't me my best hours and giving myself only a fraction of what i was capable of. so i began a long-term project of going from being someone who stayed up until 2am every night and cursing my morning alarm clock to someone who gets up by 6am (without an alarm clock). i definitely bristled at the start of this change. my main concern focused on the obvious advantage of night-work that you can work until you were done and just sacrifice sleep (like that matters at all) where if you moved to the morning, you could only work until you had to go to your job, else you might lose said job. after a fair bit of rumination, i concluded the quality of the product, even if there was less of it, out-weighed the quantity. now having a few years of practice in, i think it was the right choice for me and over time, i have become more productive with the hours i had, mostly due to how finite that time is, which holds a more honest fidelity with how the natural world actually functions than does thinking that time can be stolen from the day by sacrificing sleep or exercise, which is some short-sighted math and a lesson it sadly took me more than three decades to learn.

i love lists.

lists govern many facets of my life, admittedly sometimes to my detriment. once, when i had to travel i relied on multiple lists to prepare for my trip. i used my TRIP list to pack my bag. i used my BATHROOM list to pack my toiletries. i used my SKI list to pack my ski gear. as always is the case, the trip prep went fast and easy. then, thankfully before getting out of my n...

from seneca's On the Shortness of Life - life is long if you know how to use it

highlighted passages represent my notes