Carl Richards is a Certified Financial Planner™ and creator of the Sketch Guy column, appearing weekly in The New York Times since 2010. The following article is reproduced with permission from his weekly newsletter and his website can be found here.
Greetings, Carl here.
One day, I imagined that I had a vault where I kept the most valuable lessons I’ve ever learned.
I opened the vault and was surprised to find that each of those lessons had been hard at the time. Often, deeply painful.
There was unforgiving weather on trips to the mountains. Really hard work. Major financial mistakes. Cherished ideas I was sure would work but flopped instead.
My most valuable lessons are painful, so I keep them in a vault. And because I keep them in a vault, I don’t revisit them often.
Isn’t that interesting? The lessons I value the most are the ones I seem to be intent on protecting myself from.
That seems backward. It seems to me that instead of trying to protect myself, I should build a life that exposes me to those sorts of experiences as often as possible (with some much-needed rest and recovery in between).
Instead of avoiding valuable lessons, I’m trying to learn to be comfortable being uncomfortable. I’m setting my life up in a way that allows me to do things that may not work. I’m conducting experiments that are safe to fail instead of fail-safe.
I’m trying to cherish hard-earned lessons.
Doesn’t that sound better than keeping them locked away?
-Carl
P.S. As always, if you want to use this week’s sketch, you can buy it here.
