Preface

Before Tom Cruise, Matt Damon, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and even Clint Eastwood, there was John Wayne. The iconic action hero of my youth, “The Duke”, as he was sometimes called, was famous for fighting, shooting, and tough-talking his way through every movie to protect the abused and vanquish the bad guys, wherever they were. To me, his characters seemed a source of stability on which I could build my sense of right and wrong. I loved going to movies to see the most recent John Wayne film, and believed that anything John Wayne did was, by definition, good. He was a role model to me.

And then an unsettling thing happened. There, in one of my favorite movies, The Duke was driving while clearly intoxicated. This was before MADD and SADD and national sensitivity to the dangers of drunk driving, but my awareness of the issue had been raised when someone very dear to me had almost been killed by a drunk driver. When that accident happened, I remember wondering why someone would risk lives—their own and others’—by driving a car when they could barely stand. It left a strong impression because I had almost lost someone close to me. It seemed irresponsible.

And, yet, here was my hero doing it in a movie. Two strong beliefs were in conflict: the infallibility of John Wayne vs. the insanity of driving drunk. This really troubled me and I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Either I had over-reacted about drunk driving, and it wasn’t really so bad (after all, there was no national uproar about it and everyone seemed to watch that part of the movie without comment) or John Wayne was not infallible. I felt strongly about both and was having a hard time letting go of either.

But this conflict opened my mind to a much broader issue: if this conflict was possible, it seemed likely that there were other things in my life that were not as sure as they seemed. I needed to consider and reconsider all things I believed to be true, continually comparing them and checking for inconsistencies and conflicts. And so began a life of perpetual questioning and reflection in search of consistent truths.

Luckily, I quickly found that others shared my struggle, and that many had written down their conflicts and conclusions—some were even in books my teachers were trying to make me read! The scientific method, the search for cause and meaning in history, the reflections of philosophers, the perceptions of poets—the resources available to me were as vast as any library. Nor were they confined to libraries: it seemed that everyone I met knew something from which I could learn—even if they didn’t realize it. This is not to say that everything I read or heard was true—it all required thinking and sorting.

And now it is forty years later. Over this time I have found many things that seem to stand up to the rigors of reflection and that I believe to be true. Originally written for my children, this book is a distillation of what I believe I have sorted out. Like my kids, I believe that over time you will learn these things yourself, but you will have to distill them from writings that may be inconsistent or misleading. This book is meant to give you a head start (perhaps a forty-year head start), both in thinking about and recognizing the specific ideas shared here as they manifest themselves in your life, but also in the way of thinking that will lead you to a life of intentionality and reflection—and discovery of many more such ideas. Sir Isaac Newton, who invented calculus and other mathematics as well as formulating many of the laws of physics, once confided to a friend, “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants,” thereby giving due credit to his predecessors in math and science. I offer this book so that you might stand on the shoulders of the giants I have discovered.

You will often hear the coach of a winning team talk about executing the “fundamentals” well—doing basic, known-to-be-important, things right every time. Most of the concepts in this book are “fundamentals,” which I believe have broader impact and application than often understood. They are things I (and others) have benefitted by applying in a wide range of situations, whenever I have had the presence of mind to remember and apply them.

The ideas found here have been accumulated over many years, recorded on scraps of papers, on a mini recorder, and in voicemails, emails, and texts to myself (not while I was driving!) Aside from the advice in this book, I commend to you the practice of recording your ideas when they occur to you. This is common among all creative people, be they writers, scientists, musicians, or entrepreneurs.

In any book, the writer’s world view is the foundation upon which all of the content rests. The perspective of this book is of one who has accepted the importance of faith and the role of God in life (though most of it is relevant and useful to someone who has not).

I share that perspective knowing that you will run into many learned people who believe that there is no place for faith—that faith and reason are not compatible. While not trying to debate the matter here, the most important thing I can convey is that it is simply not true that being a thinking person is incompatible with being a person of faith. Great thinkers past and present have wrestled with the compatibility of faith and reason and found essential roles for both in their lives. A list of some of my favorites is in the appendix (along with a list of other books I’ve found useful), and includes Tolstoy, Martin Luther King, Mother Teresa, and Francis Collins, the scientist who led the successful mapping of genes within human DNA. I hope you find them useful.

I confess that part of my motivation is the hope that you would see/perceive things in your life that I saw in mine later than I wish I had. While you will no doubt have your own blind spots that you will discover later in life and need to work through, it is my hope that the ideas shared here will help you act more wisely than I did and avoid at least some pitfalls.

I once read an article about a singer/songwriter saying life is about “waiting for the bolts of lightning” and the rest of the time we are “just laying bricks.” Each of the chapters represents a bolt of lightning that I have felt, and hope will be as valuable to you as it has been to me.

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