My dear future child,
I am writing this before I know who you will become.
I do not yet know the sound of your voice, the things that will make you laugh, or the dreams you will one day carry quietly inside you. I do not know what you will be good at, what will frighten you, whom you will love, or where life will eventually take you.
Perhaps that is one of the strangest and most beautiful things about becoming a father. You can love someone before you have truly met them.
One day, many years from now, you may find these words. By then, you may already be old enough to see me not simply as your father, but as another human being who was trying to understand life while living it.
You will probably have discovered some of my flaws by then. I will have worried when I should have trusted you, spoken when I should have listened, and tried to protect you from experiences that perhaps you needed to have for yourself.
Parents often wish they could give their children the lessons without giving them the pain that produced those lessons. Life rarely works that way.
So this is not a rulebook.
I do not want you to live the life I would have chosen for you. I want you to have the wisdom and courage to choose a life that is genuinely your own.
Think of these words simply as a few things I learned along the road. Carry whatever proves useful. Leave behind whatever does not.
Perhaps, many years from now, you will add lessons of your own.
The first thing I hope you learn is that some of the best investments you will ever make cannot be measured by the balance of an account.
Invest in your body while it is healthy, not only when it begins to hurt. Move often, sleep enough, eat sensibly, and remember that health can feel ordinary until the day it no longer is.
Take care of your mind with the same seriousness.
There is no courage in suffering unnecessarily simply because you are afraid to ask for help. If life becomes too heavy, speak to someone. Strength is not the absence of vulnerability; sometimes strength is recognizing that you do not need to carry everything alone.
Invest in your education too, but never confuse education with qualifications.
Degrees may open doors, but curiosity will carry you much farther. Read things that challenge you. Learn subjects that have nothing to do with your profession. Remain interested in the world long after examinations have ended.
Find mentors when you are young.
A good mentor can sometimes see the person you might become before you can see that person yourself. Listen carefully to those who have travelled farther than you, but never surrender your judgment to them.
Then, when you become experienced enough, turn around.
Someone will eventually be standing where you once stood, uncertain and trying to find a path forward. Be generous with what life has taught you.
Knowledge becomes more valuable when it is passed on.
There is another investment I hope you learn to make, and that is the investment of attention.
Attention may become one of the scarcest things in your life.
The world will constantly ask for it. Screens will ask for it. Work will ask for it. Advertisements, messages, ambitions, worries, and other people’s opinions will all compete for a small piece of your consciousness.
Be careful about what you give your attention to, because what receives your attention eventually receives your life.
You may discover that human beings possess an unfortunate talent for becoming accustomed to wonderful things.
The new home becomes simply home. The promotion becomes another job. The object you once dreamed about becomes something sitting forgotten in a drawer. Even extraordinary circumstances eventually become ordinary when we live inside them for long enough.
This is why more is such a dangerous word.
There is always more.
More money. More recognition. More possessions. More achievement. More countries to visit. More restaurants to try. More things to place on a shelf so that other people might conclude that life has been kind to you.
Ambition itself is not the problem.
I hope you are ambitious. I hope you attempt things that frighten you a little. I hope you discover how much you can build, learn, explore, and contribute during the relatively short time you are here.
But ambition must learn to live beside gratitude.
Without gratitude, ambition becomes hunger without digestion. No achievement remains satisfying for very long because the mind immediately begins searching for the next one.
You arrive at the place you once dreamed about and discover another mountain behind it.
If happiness is always waiting at the summit of the next mountain, you may spend your entire life climbing without ever noticing the view.
So learn to notice.
Notice the people sitting around the table.
Notice your mother’s laughter. Notice the sound of rain when you have nowhere you need to go. Notice conversations with old friends that continue long after dinner should have ended.
Notice ordinary afternoons.
We often imagine that the great moments of life will announce themselves. Sometimes they do. Weddings, births, graduations and departures clearly tell us that something important is happening.
But much of life disappears without ceremony.
One day you may look back and realize that an ordinary Sunday afternoon was one of the happiest periods of your life. Nothing spectacular happened, which is precisely why you failed to recognize it at the time.
Learn therefore to be present before memory teaches you the value of what you had.
Do not consume every pleasure until pleasure itself becomes dull.
You do not need the finest meal every evening. You do not need to buy something whenever desire appears. You do not need to transform every inconvenience into comfort.
Sometimes anticipation is part of enjoyment.
Something saved for can mean more than something immediately acquired. A journey becomes special partly because you do not make it every week. A celebration becomes memorable partly because ordinary days surround it.
Enough is one of the most difficult words to understand.
The world has built enormous industries around convincing you that you have not reached it.
There will always be a better phone, a larger house, a newer car, a more exclusive restaurant, and some object whose advertisements quietly suggest that ownership will transform you into a more complete human being.
Enjoy beautiful things if you can afford them.
I certainly do.
But never ask possessions to perform the work of identity.
They are not strong enough.
A watch can tell you the time, but it cannot tell you whether you have spent that time well. A large home can shelter many people, but it cannot guarantee that the people inside it love one another.
Build your life around people instead.
Call your family while you still can.
Stay in touch with the friends who knew you before your achievements gave strangers reasons to pay attention to you. Sit beside people during difficult seasons even when you have no useful advice to offer.
Sometimes presence is the advice.
Celebrate other people’s success without turning their lives into measurements of your own.
Envy quietly transforms another person’s happiness into evidence of your failure. Resist it.
Someone else’s light does not make yours dimmer.
Eventually you will understand something that is difficult to appreciate when you are young: possessions rarely carry us through the hardest parts of life.
People do.
Another lesson took me time to understand: never become too proud to say, “I don’t know.”
You may spend years becoming knowledgeable in your field. People may begin asking for your opinion. Eventually you may sit in important rooms surrounded by people who assume that everyone present knows what they are talking about.
Be careful.
Status can make ignorance harder to admit.
The more respected you become, the greater the temptation to defend your image instead of examining your understanding.
Whenever you think you understand something, try explaining it simply.
If you cannot explain an idea without hiding behind jargon, there is a chance that you have memorized its language without understanding its meaning.
Teach what you know.
Let other people question you. Pay attention to the places where your explanation becomes uncomfortable. Those are often the borders of your knowledge.
Return there.
Study again.
True expertise should make you clearer, not more mysterious.
You should also become comfortable changing your mind.
You will be wrong many times in your life. I certainly have been.
There is no shame in that.
Reality is larger than your opinions, and wisdom requires us to allow new evidence to rearrange old beliefs.
Do not remain loyal to a mistake merely because an earlier version of you made it confidently.
The goal is not to win every argument.
The goal is to leave the conversation understanding the world slightly better than when you entered it.
You will also hear many people speak about wealth.
Listen carefully, but decide for yourself what the word means.
Money matters more than idealistic people sometimes admit. A lack of money can narrow choices, create anxiety, and turn small problems into enormous ones.
Learn how money works.
Learn to earn it honestly, save it consistently, invest it patiently, and spend it deliberately. Understand debt before accepting it. Understand compounding before wasting time.
But do not worship the instrument.
Money is useful because of what it can make possible.
The greatest luxury it may eventually buy you is not a car, a house, or something with a famous name printed on it.
It is freedom.
Freedom to say no.
Freedom to leave an environment that requires you to betray your values. Freedom to help your family when they need you. Freedom to choose meaningful work over desperate work.
Freedom to rest.
Freedom to begin again.
Freedom to spend Tuesday afternoon with someone you love because you do not need every waking hour to produce income.
When thinking about money, therefore, ask yourself not only, “Will this make me richer?”
Ask, “Will this make me freer?”
Sometimes the answer will be the same.
Sometimes it will not.
Your career will occupy an enormous portion of your life, so choose your work thoughtfully.
Look for places where people are treated with dignity. Look for leaders who care not only about what you can produce for them, but about the person you might become.
Look for purpose.
But do not expect every working day to feel meaningful.
Meaningful work still contains boring meetings, difficult personalities, failed projects, administrative tasks, uncertainty, and mornings when you would rather remain in bed.
Purpose is not constant inspiration.
Purpose is knowing why something remains worth doing even when inspiration is absent.
Try to leave whatever you touch a little better than you found it.
Build things that continue to be useful when you are gone. Teach people enough that they no longer need you. Give credit freely.
Do not spend your career making yourself indispensable.
Spend it making yourself useful.
Titles will come and go.
One day, someone else will sit at your desk, inherit your responsibilities, and perhaps accomplish them better than you did.
This is not a tragedy.
The position was never you.
Your character is the part you carry home.
Do not confuse professional success with a successful life.
There are people with extraordinary careers who arrive home as strangers to their families. There are people admired by thousands who cannot sit comfortably alone with themselves.
Achievement can decorate a life.
It cannot substitute for one.
Be especially careful with comparison.
You will live in a world that gives you unprecedented access to other people’s lives, or at least the parts they choose to display.
You will see their promotions, holidays, weddings, homes, celebrations and triumphs. You will rarely see their loneliness, arguments, debts, doubts, disappointments or sleepless nights.
Never compare the unedited version of your life with the edited version of somebody else’s.
It is a competition designed to make everyone lose.
There will always be someone richer than you.
There will always be someone more accomplished, more attractive, more popular, younger, faster, or apparently happier.
If your peace requires being ahead of everyone else, peace will never arrive.
Compare yourself instead with the person you used to be.
Are you wiser than you were five years ago?
Kinder?
More courageous?
More patient?
More capable of admitting when you are wrong?
Those questions may tell you much more about the direction of your life.
Try to own a little less than you can afford.
You may discover that every possession asks for something in return. It needs space, attention, maintenance, protection, or simply another small piece of your mind.
Simplicity is not deprivation.
Sometimes it is freedom from having to think about things that were never important.
Give more too.
Not because generosity guarantees some reward from the universe, but because it keeps your world larger than yourself.
Help people who cannot repay you.
Do useful things that nobody will know you did.
There is a particular kind of freedom that comes from no longer needing every good action to become part of your reputation.
And please remember that you do not need to become extraordinary for me to be proud of you.
I will naturally dream about your future. Parents cannot help imagining possibilities for their children.
Perhaps you will build companies, write books, discover something, lead people, travel widely, or become exceptional in a field I know nothing about.
Perhaps you will not.
Perhaps you will prefer a quiet life.
There is dignity in that too.
The world may encourage you to turn your existence into a performance, as though a life only matters when enough people witness it.
Do not believe that.
A quiet life can be a magnificent life.
If you become a CEO, I will love you.
If you become a teacher, I will love you.
If you become an artist, engineer, doctor, carpenter, researcher, parent, entrepreneur, or something that does not yet have a name, I will love you.
And if you change direction halfway through, I will still love you.
Your life was never meant to justify mine.
You do not owe me achievements in exchange for being loved.
What matters far more is who you become when nobody is watching.
Be dependable.
Keep promises carefully, especially the small ones.
Treat the cleaner with the same respect you show the chief executive. People reveal themselves most clearly through how they behave toward those from whom they need nothing.
Apologize when you are wrong.
Forgive when forgiveness is possible, but learn that forgiveness does not always require allowing someone back into your life.
Have boundaries.
Kindness without boundaries eventually becomes permission for other people to misuse your kindness.
Know when to leave.
There will be relationships, jobs, ambitions and even versions of yourself that once served you but no longer do.
Leaving is not always failure.
Sometimes staying requires a greater betrayal.
Have the courage to begin again.
You may have to do this more than once.
Most lives are not straight lines. They are revisions.
Do not be embarrassed by that.
Perhaps the deepest lesson I can offer you is also the simplest.
Love people while they are here.
Do not postpone every conversation.
Do not assume there will always be another Christmas, another dinner, another journey, another chance to ask the question you kept meaning to ask.
Time rarely announces what it is taking from us.
One day you may become a parent yourself.
If that happens, perhaps you will understand why I wrote this.
You will look at someone impossibly small and realize that you would like to protect them from every disappointment the world contains.
Then you may slowly understand that this is neither possible nor desirable.
A parent’s job is not to clear every stone from the road.
It is to help a child become strong enough to walk across difficult ground without losing tenderness.
I cannot live your life for you.
I should not.
There will be mistakes you must make personally before their lessons become yours. There will be heartbreaks that my advice cannot prevent, questions I cannot answer, and crossroads at which you will have to decide without knowing where either road leads.
I hope I give you roots strong enough to know where you came from.
I hope I give you wings strong enough that you do not need to stay there.
And I hope that when my beliefs no longer fit the world you inhabit, you will have enough courage to improve upon them.
Every generation should travel a little farther than the generation before it.
So question these words.
Add to them.
Correct them.
Then go and live.
Build a life rich in people rather than possessions, curiosity rather than certainty, purpose rather than status, and freedom rather than appearances.
Earn enough to have choices.
Learn enough to understand how much remains unknown.
Work hard, but remember why you are working.
Travel if the world calls you.
Come home when someone you love needs you.
Take care of your body before illness teaches you its value.
Take care of your mind before exhaustion teaches you its limits.
Buy beautiful things if they genuinely make life better, but never allow what you own to become the measure of who you are.
And when life is good, notice.
That last lesson may be among the most important.
When life is good, we often assume it will remain that way. We hurry through peaceful seasons in pursuit of something more exciting, only to look back later and understand how precious those uneventful years really were.
So look around occasionally.
There may be a day when nothing remarkable happens. You wake beside someone you love. Everyone you care about is healthy. You eat dinner together. The phone does not ring with bad news.
Do not call that an ordinary day.
Call it a fortunate one.
A good life is not waiting somewhere in the future after you have earned enough, achieved enough, learned enough, or finally become the person you think you are supposed to be.
The future keeps moving.
Life is what is happening while you prepare for it.
And wherever you eventually go, whatever you accomplish, however many times you fail and begin again, I hope there is one thing you never have to wonder about.
Long before I knew what you would become, I loved you.
Not because of what you might achieve.
Not because of the name you might make for yourself.
Simply because you were you.
And that was always enough.
Best Regards, Your Dad