Week 10: Putting it all together

Time to read: 1.25 minutes

This duck says, "keep reading!"

This summer started with a simple idea: you create your days, weeks, and years. Not the news, not the people who behave badly — you.

We talked about living well is not optional homework, it's the whole assignment. We talked about being well-used and spending your life on worthy pursuits. We talked about how regret rarely comes from what we did, but from what we quietly never did. We talked about being the change you wish to see, one interaction at a time.

Here's what ties all of it together: None of this was ever about the world getting easier or kinder or more sane. It was about you deciding who you're going to be in this world, no matter what.

You choose your response, effort, kindness, integrity, and entire being, consistently, over time, in small and big ways.

Creating your life was never going to be a choice you make once. Your life is an accumulation of small choices, made every day. To be honest, even when it's hard. To be grateful when you want to be rude. To take a break when the words you are about to say are not helpful. To clean up your messes when you inevitably make them (because you are human).

Multiply those choices by a life. That's what "creating your life" looks like from the inside.

So as summer winds down, here's your homework: Keep going. Keep choosing. Keep being well-used. Keep showing up as the person you've decided to be — one day, one choice, one person at a time.

That's the whole purpose of this life.

Live well!

Week 9: The Things You'll Never Know

Time to read: 1 m

Here's something worth remembering when it feels like your small kindness can't possibly matter against the scale of everything that's wrong: you will never know the effects of what you do.

As a coach, I have conversations with people on planes. I never see them again and have no idea what happened next. I travel all over the world, and my family will tell you, with a combination of pride and irritation, that I make friends everywhere. I constantly look for how to be the wind beneath the wings of people trying to fly.

When you show patience to the cranky gate agent, it might have been the moment that changed their week or made them kinder to the next person. Even if there was no effect on them, there was an impact on you.

When you change the temperature of a room, your family, or workplace, you aren't doing it to calculate the ROI (Return on Investment). You're doing it because it's who you've decided to be. You've made a choice.

When you do it and the next person does it, and on and on, it becomes a thing. You're not just refusing to become part of the problem; you are part of the solution. One person at a time.

That's the whole practice, the same one we've been talking about all summer. Small, deliberate choices about who you're going to be, made without needing to see where they land.

Week 8: Be The Antidote To Cynicism

Time to read: 1 minute!

Uranium Glass!

Somewhere along the way, being kind got branded as soft, like you have your head in the sand or aren't being "realistic."

I think it's the opposite. Choosing kindness in a hard world isn't naive; it's a deliberate act, made with full knowledge of how people can behave. Being kind is harder than cynicism, not easier.

Cynicism is the low-effort choice. You get to point at what's wrong and stop. Kindness requires you to show up decently even when you have evidence that decency isn't guaranteed back. That takes more strength, not less. It requires thought, intention, and self-management not to shoot back with the mean but witty thing in your head.

When you're decent, you're not being a doormat or pretending bad behavior doesn't have consequences. You can hold boundaries and still choose to be the person who doesn't add cruelty to a day that already has enough of it.

The world doesn't need more people who can point out the problem. It needs more people willing to be the counterexample. And that's YOU. (and me)

Week 7: How Do You Create Change?

Time to read: 58 seconds

Goodness, owls are cute!

All summer we've been talking about feeling well-used and being responsible for creating your life. I want to shift to how this applies to living in a chaotic world where it seems like people have lost their decency.

You can't choose the news cycle. You don't choose the driver who cut you off, how a stranger talks online, or whether the world gets kinder this year. If you could change these things, you would have a long time ago.

Here's what you are responsible for: how you treat the person in front of you.

That sounds small next to the size of national politics. It's the most important lever you have to enact real change, and it matters. Every interaction you have is a chance to either add to the noise or subtract from it.

Being the change doesn't mean fixing the world. It means refusing to let the world's worst behavior become an excuse for your own. Someone is going to be rude to a service worker today. It doesn't have to be you. Someone is going to assume the worst about a stranger today. It doesn't have to be you.

You're not responsible for how the world behaves. You are entirely responsible for how you do.

I find this concept liberating.

Week 6: How You Spend Your Day Is How You Spend Your Life

Time to read: 1 min, 10 seconds

We've been talking about creating your life so you feel well-used. I saw a great quote from Annie Dillard that said, "How you spend your day is how you spend your life."

Your day comprises a series of small choices: what to eat, how to talk to others, what to do with your time, and how you show up.

There's a common finding in psychology: people rarely regret the things they did, even the things that failed. What haunts people is what they didn't try.

You don't regret the bad relationship you left or the business you tried and failed. But the person you never told how you felt, the chance you didn't take, the conversation you kept postponing? Those are the ones that stick.

There's a reason for this. When you act, and it goes wrong, you get an ending. You get information. You grieve and learn. But when you don't act, there's no ending, just an open wondering about what might have been.

Inaction feels safe in the moment because nothing bad happens. But nothing good happens either. Doors don't stay open forever. Many doors close quietly, without you noticing, and by the time you look back, the choice is gone.

This is the wild part of "wild and precious." Not recklessness — just refusing to let fear of a bad outcome be the reason you stopped.

So here's a question worth sitting with: What's the thing you've been not-doing? Not because you decided against it, but because you never decided?

That's usually the one worth looking at first.

Week 5: How To Live With Integrity In a Chaotic World

Time to read: 45 seconds

Here's the part nobody puts on a poster: living well doesn't mean your circumstances match your values. Often they don't.

You value connection, but you're isolated. You value health, but your body won't cooperate. You value stability, but everything feels uncertain. This is where a lot of people quietly give up and decide that living well is only available to people with easier lives, or money, or beauty.

I think this is exactly where "well-used" gets tested.

Integrity in complexity, as I put it a few weeks back, doesn't mean the complexity goes away. It means you keep choosing your values inside it, however imperfectly, instead of waiting for circumstances to improve before you start living the way you actually want.

Some of the most well-used lives I've seen belong to people whose circumstances were challenging. They just refused to let that be the end of the story. They made one small choice after another until they looked back and realized they created their life.

This tenacity is available to everyone.

Week 4: Do You Have To Choose?

Time to read: 41 seconds

Ah, wonderful costume jewelry.

Yes, you always choose. If living well is something you get to create, then not choosing is also a choice, just often not a good one.

Most of us don't refuse to live intentionally. You just let the calendar decide. The inbox decides. The next obligation decides. Weeks pass. You were busy the whole time. And, do you feel well-used, or were you drifting?

Drift feels safe because it seems like you don't have to choose. When in fact, you are choosing to drift. The cost will come later, in regret, missed opportunity, chances not taken.

This week, pick one place where you've been drifting. Keep it simple. Choose one. A relationship on autopilot. A habit you fell into. A "someday" that's been someday for years.

You don't need a five-year plan. You need one choice, one action, done intentionally, today.

Next week: What to do when your values and your circumstances don't line up.

Know someone who would like a dose of optimism, positivity, and action this summer? They can sign up here.