Principles for Success: "The Call to Adventure" | Episode 1
- [Narrator] Principles for Success.
An ultra mini-series adventure
in 30 minutes and in eight episodes.
Episode one, The Call to Adventure.
Before we begin, let me just establish the fact
that I don't know much relative to what I need to know.
Whatever success I've had in life
has more to do with my knowing how to deal
with my not knowing than anything I know.
That I should be telling other people what to do
sounds kind of presumptuous to me.
But I'm going to do it because I believe
that the principles that have made me successful
could help other achieve their own goals.
I'm now at a stage in my own life
in which it is much more important to me
to pass along what I've learned about how
to be successful than to seek more success for myself.
What you choose to do with these principles is up to you.
You have to be an independent thinker because only you can
develop your own principles based on your own values.
This brings me to my first and most fundamental principle
which is that you need to think
for yourself about what is true.
So let's get started.
Early on, I've discovered I needed principles.
Principles are smart ways for handling things
that happen over and over again in similar situations.
There are principles for everything.
From skiing, to parenting, to cooking, and so on.
I'm going to share some of my most important
overarching life principles that influence
how we approach everything that we do.
I didn't start out with principles,
I acquired them over a lifetime of experiences.
Mostly from making mistakes and reflecting on them.
My life principles are simple but they're not complete.
I still struggle to make the best decisions
and I still make mistakes
and learn new principles all the time.
This is the reality.
At the beginning, I needed to escape
the conventions that surrounded me
which meant that I needed to think for myself.
Unless you want to have a life that is directed by others,
you need to decide for yourself what to do
and you need to have the courage to do it.
But I didn't know that at first.
I only learned that from going on my adventure.
Looking back on my own journey,
I now see that time is like a river,
that carries us forward into encounters with reality
that require us to make decisions.
We can't stop our movement down this river
and we can't avoid the encounters.
We can only approach them in the best possible way.
In your lifetime, you will face millions of decisions.
The quality of your decisions
will determine the quality of your life.
Over the course of my lifetime,
the most valuable things I've learned
were the results of mistakes I've reflected on
to help form principles so I wouldn't
make the same mistakes again.
These principles took me from being
a very ordinary middle-class kid
from Long Island to becoming very successful
as judged by conventional measures.
They also gave me the meaningful work
and meaningful relationships that I value even more
than these conventional successes.
People often ask me how I did it.
I can assure you it wasn't because
of my uniqueness as a person.
It was the result of a unique approach
to life I believe almost anybody can adopt.
It starts with embracing reality and dealing with it.
In episode two, I'll explain what that means.
