Musings, Meanderings, & Loops · Essay
October 17, 2026
When I was a kid there was a kind of book that felt like a cheat code. Choose Your Own Adventure. You read a page, and at the bottom it asked you what to do — if you open the door, turn to page 47; if you run, turn to page 82 — and the story went wherever you sent it. Most of the paths ended badly, and fast. Every kid I knew read them with a finger jammed in the previous page, ready to back out of a bad choice.
I think about those books more than a man of fifty probably should, because I have come to believe life is one — with two differences. You cannot keep your finger in the previous page. And you do not get to choose the opening chapters at all.
Let me be honest about the limits first, because the cheerful version of this idea skips them. You do not choose your parents. You do not choose where you are born, how tall you are, the body you were issued, or the particular mind that came with it. Some people start the book on page one with a lantern and a map. Some start on page ninety with a broken leg.
But within the confines of what we are given, we choose — what to accept, what to change, how to answer what happened to us. That is the whole adventure, and it is not small.
There is a line I have carried around for years, and I always thought it was Bob Dylan's: Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself. When I went to check it, I found that nobody knows who said it. It is usually pinned on George Bernard Shaw, with no evidence he ever did. The earliest version anyone has located is in a 1969 newspaper column by a journalist named Sydney J. Harris. I find that perfect. A sentence about creating yourself, still out there looking for its author, getting attached to whoever needs it.
I need it. I think we are not mainly here to discover a self that was hidden under the couch cushions. We are made in the image of a Creator, and some part of that image is the ability to make — including making the person you become.
Neither route is wrong, by the way. Some people accept what they were given and build a good life inside it. Some drive hard toward something different. The question is not which road. It is whether the road matches what is in your heart.
Because I believe most of us know what we were meant to do. Not in every detail, but in outline. We know it the way you know a song is in the wrong key. Part of life is finding it; a bigger part is simply admitting it, and not running away from it once you have.
The psychologist Leon Festinger gave this a name in 1957: cognitive dissonance, the discomfort of holding beliefs your behavior contradicts. I think of it as emotional dissonance, because that is where I feel it. If you believe in your bones you are meant to be a musician and you spend your days as an accountant, you are going to be miserable, and the misery is not a character flaw. It is a signal. The gap is talking.
Festinger noticed something darker, too: people often relieve the discomfort not by changing what they do but by changing what they believe. That is how the musician becomes an accountant who says he never really wanted music anyway. The dissonance goes quiet. So does something else.
I will confess my own version plainly. Each day I fail to do what is in my heart is a day I am off — sad, low, irritable — because I know it is gone. I am not getting that day back. And I still waste plenty of them. I put off the thing that matters. I eat what I should not, drink what I should not, and then wonder why I did not get anything done. Knowing what the right page is has never once turned it for me.
Years ago I spent two years working for a Washington legend — a brilliant lawyer, in his sixties then, which seemed very old to me. Part of my job was drafting legislation, and I would bring him drafts that were long, sweeping, and grandiose, the kind of thing a young man writes when he believes thoroughness is the same as seriousness. He would uncap a blue felt-tip pen, almost a Sharpie, and cut them down to a fraction of themselves. Then he would write in the margin, in letters you could read from across the room: Less is more.
He wrote it so often I stopped seeing it. He was right. He was always right.
He was also not a kind man. He was tough, and he could be cruel, and I left more than one meeting with him feeling skinned. I have spent years holding those two facts side by side, and I have stopped trying to make one cancel the other. The best advice I ever received came from one of the hardest people I ever worked for. The cruelty was not the price of the wisdom, and the wisdom does not excuse the cruelty. His pen cut the work; his temper cut the people. Only the pen ever made anything better.
At the time I heard less is more as a verdict on my drafts. It took me about twenty years to understand he was handing me the most practical advice I have ever received.
Less food is generally better. Less alcohol is better. Less spending. Fewer things — but good things; I would rather own one well-made object than five pieces of junk. And less doing, which is the hard one. Most of what I have accomplished came from a small fraction of my effort. Economists call it the 80/20 rule: a minority of causes produces most of the results. Almost everyone knows the rule. Almost nobody acts on it, because acting on it means deliberately not doing most of what you could do.
You do not achieve more by doing more. You achieve more by finding the twenty percent that matters and giving the rest away.
So I made the list. It is short on purpose.
Faith. Living a godly life, and one that helps other people find their way.
Family. My children above everything — the kids I helped create with God — and my parents and my sister.
Health. This is the one I understand least and need most. Less is more is very literal here: eat less, eat simpler, eat things that do not punish me. Move my body enough that it does not hurt. Walk, lift something, do a little every day — which, I will admit, I have never done consistently in my life.
Systems. Ways to track what I said I would do, so that intention survives contact with Tuesday.
Learning. Every day, something new, read or built or worked through.
And then the things I love doing: technology and the systems that run it, music, writing, and art in all its forms.
That is it. There is nothing else, really. Anything that does not serve that list — commitments, habits, people, purchases — has to go, or at least move to the margins. The list is not a set of goals so much as a filter. Less is more turns out to be mostly a practice of exclusion.
I used to think success was a number, or a title, or a house on the water. I do not think that anymore.
Success, for me now, is a day lived inside the list. Did I pray? Was I a good father today? Did I learn something? Did I play an instrument, write something, build something? Did I use my mind in a way that served what I believe? That is the whole scorecard.
And here is the distinction I wish I had understood at thirty: being the thing is not the same as being in the thing. Being is a label you hold. Being in is a state you live. I do not need to be called a musician; I need to be in the music, today, for twenty minutes. Not the idea of doing it. Actually doing it.
When I was eighteen, I did not imagine my life at fifty would look like this. Some of it I could not have imagined at all. My children are the greatest blessing of my life, and I did not think much about fatherhood back then. I think now it is the closest any of us come to the role God plays — creating, protecting, and then letting go.
Getting older has gifts nobody advertised. It gets quieter. Fewer nights out, fewer people occupying your calendar, more room to reflect and less to worry about. At fifty I know who I am, who I want to be, and who I do not want to be. I know what I want to spend my time on. I know which people to draw close and which to watch for.
I wish I had known all this at twenty-five. But I do not think you can. You need the life. You need the heartbreak and the failures. I have been broken — financially, professionally, personally — and I would not wish any of it on anyone, and I would not trade what it taught me. Some things you only learn by losing nearly everything else.
And the pages are turning the right way now. I feel better than I have in years. I am still learning, still building, still pointed at the things on the list. There is, God willing, a lot of book left. And for the first time, I know which pages I want to turn to.
My old boss was right. I can still see it in the margin, in blue felt tip: less is more.
I used to think the adventure was in the number of paths — more options, more doors, more pages to flip to. It turns out the opposite is true. The adventure is in choosing fewer paths and walking them all the way down, truly leaning in.
No finger in the previous page this time. Just the next one, on purpose.