If time travel is ever invented, I plan on sitting down with my younger self and sharing a few thoughts.
That seems rather unlikely. Still, these notes might help me make the most of whatever days I have remaining and, perhaps, help someone else along the way.
As you will quickly discover, I am not an author. This is simply an attempt to write something useful. Maybe someone will read it. Maybe they won’t. But it seems worth a shot.
One challenge for me is that my best ideas never seem to arrive when I am sitting at a keyboard. They show up while mowing the lawn, driving down the highway or standing in the shower. None of those are particularly good places to write.
I love Moleskine notebooks. I have a stack of them in my desk. Almost all are empty. The few I have used reveal a familiar pattern. The first several pages are neat and organized. I carefully stay on the lines, form my letters properly and try to create the sort of notebook that might someday impress someone.
Then reality arrives. The handwriting gets sloppy. The pages become disorganized. Before long, I quit writing altogether. This time I decided to do something different. I turned the notebook sideways and ignored the lines.
The handwriting is still terrible. The pages are still messy. Nothing is properly aligned.
But I am writing.
And that may be the first note to my younger self: Ignore the lines.
Not all of them, of course. Some lines exist for very good reasons. Yellow lines on highways deserve respect. So do property lines, airport security lines and certain lines your wife has made abundantly clear should not be crossed. But many of the lines we spend our lives trying to stay inside are imaginary, or arbitrary, or created by people who had no idea where we were trying to go.
A few years ago, someone interviewed me for a leadership book. After reading it, I found myself thinking, “If he can do it, I can do it.” Maybe that is true. Maybe it isn’t. But this is my attempt.
I want these notes to explore things I learned late, misunderstood or only came to understand through experience. Some will be about leadership. Some about people, risk, friendship, failure, judgment and the strange ways life refuses to follow the plan.
There will be little rhyme or reason to the order. That is intentional.
If time travel is ever invented, perhaps I can hand these notes to a younger version of myself and save him a few mistakes. Although, knowing him, he probably won’t listen.
So perhaps these notes are really for me—the older version who is still learning, still making mistakes and still trying to figure things out.
For now, I am going to keep the notebook open, turn it sideways and ignore the lines.
