Do you ever wish you could go to sleep and wake to find your problems gone? Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. Change requires an active role on your part. This section is designed to guide you through change.

You’ve already decided that you’re sick and tired of being sick and tired. Perhaps relationships repeatedly fail. You’re stuck in the same old boring job. You desperately want your life to work and are open to a new perspective on living. It’s time to start over.

I believe that every person has the capacity to change who he or she is.

When I first wrote that sentence it was a declaration of faith. It has since become a laboratory finding. Brain researchers scanned London taxi drivers and found that the years spent memorizing the city had physically enlarged the memory structures of their brains — adult brains, remodeling themselves under the demands placed on them. Personality psychologists, who once taught that character is set like plaster by thirty, have tracked people across decades and found the traits keep moving all life long — and, more remarkably, that people who deliberately practice acting like the person they intend to become actually shift their measured personality in that direction. The Greek philosopher Heraclitus said all of this twenty-five centuries ago in a single image: you cannot step into the same river twice, for other waters are always flowing on. He meant the river. He also meant you. The fixed self you think you’re stuck with is a snapshot of a current, and a current can be redirected.

I have also said, here and elsewhere in this book, that I do not accept the notions of twelve-step programs, ongoing therapy, and the kind of self-help books that keep you reliving past traumas. I have already given those programs their due correction in these pages — the evidence for what they do is stronger than I once allowed. But the narrower warning survives intact, and I repeat it: you can engage in all of these and still stay the same, by using the past as an excuse not to actualize the present. You define who you are by what you’ve done and, in the process, lose sight of your potential. The test of any program is never how faithfully you attend it. It is whether you are changing.

You need to suspend judgment and become vulnerable in order to accept that there is another way of perceiving life. If you’re not open to that possibility then you have no future.

For example, let’s say you act in dysfunctional ways because you were a battered child, or your father was an alcoholic. As a child you responded as best you could. As a young person of five or six, you may have had to adapt to an unhealthy situation in order to survive. You didn’t yet have the intellectual capacity to deal with these issues. All you understood was that you needed to be loved and accepted.

Many people are influenced by those impressionable years for the rest of their lives. Authority figures, such as superiors at work, may represent your mother or father in your mind. You carefully watch what they do, how they look at you, and what their body language says. You acquiesce to their demands by never speaking up for yourself. When they talk to you, you look down.

Although you appear normal to the world, inside you may be filled with rage. You may sublimate that anger by working compulsively or engaging in other addictive behavior. There are a thousand ways to manifest self-contempt.

Why not change these unproductive patterns of behavior? Don’t cling to them your whole life. The key is in acknowledging the present and letting go of the past. Realize that at any moment you can choose between living in the present, or in your memories.

Two allies are available to you the moment you decide, and you should know about both.

The first is old: Seneca, watching the Romans postpone their lives exactly as we postpone ours, wrote that it is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste most of it — that while we are waiting to live, life passes. His prescription was two words long: begin immediately.

The second ally is new. Behavioral scientists studying what they call the fresh start effect have found that human beings are measurably more likely to pursue their goals — and to succeed at them — when the attempt is anchored to a temporal landmark: a new year, a birthday, a Monday, the first of the month. The landmark works because it lets you file the old self under a closed chapter; the person who failed before was, in your own accounting, someone else. This is not self-deception. It is the mind’s built-in machinery for starting over — which means the impulse you feel right now, reading an essay on new beginnings, is not sentimentality. It is equipment, waiting to be used.

Let’s begin the process by taking an honest look at the following questions. As you reflect on them, see what answers feel right to you.

Who And What Prevents You From Becoming Your Authentic Self?

Answering this question helps you prepare for a new beginning. Make a list of your limits. Note the restrictions others place on you, such as those involved in being a woman or a member of a minority group, and those that you impose upon yourself, such as an assumption that you can’t learn a particular skill.

Reviewing your list helps you see what restraints you need to overcome. If you hold yourself back because you are a woman, for instance, explore that issue. As a woman you need to know what you’re up against. Not so long ago, women were barred from racing in marathons. Men wanted women to believe that their bodies couldn’t handle the physiological stress. When I first wrote this, my friend Fred Lebow, the director of the New York City Marathon, was telling me that women were catching the men in numbers and sometimes beating them outright.

Fred died in 1994, and I wish he could see the finish lines now. The full story deserves telling. In 1967 a twenty-year-old named Kathrine Switzer entered the Boston Marathon under her initials because women were forbidden to run; when an official spotted her mid-race he physically attacked her, trying to tear the number off her back. She finished anyway. Women were not officially admitted to Boston until 1972. Today, women are the majority of all road-race finishers in America — fifty-three percent — and near parity at the marathon itself. In 2024 Ruth Chepngetich of Kenya ran the Chicago Marathon in 2 hours, 9 minutes, 56 seconds — a time that would have won outright gold in the men’s Olympic marathon within my own lifetime. And at the extreme end, the story turns astonishing: the longer and harder the race, the smaller the gap between the sexes becomes, and sometimes it inverts. Courtney Dauwalter has won 240-mile mountain races outright — beating every man in the field. In 2024 Jasmin Paris became the first woman in history to finish the Barkley Marathons, a course so brutal that in nearly four decades only twenty humans had ever completed it. As for Switzer — she returned to Boston in 2017, at age seventy, wearing her old number 261, and finished again. Every limitation on your list should be examined in the light of this one: it, too, was once presented to somebody as a law of nature.

Look at your list and ask yourself, where do my limitations come from? Then set your mind on overcoming them. Two dramatic examples come to mind here. The first is provided by a sixty-seven-year-old woman, named Queenie Thompson, who showed up one day at my running and walking club in Central Park. She had one primary challenge working against her: she was a 67 year old female in a group comprised of over one thousand young men and women in their 20s and 30s. During the running clinic, I said to the group that I didn’t care how slow anyone was. Today we start a process, I said. Don’t expect immediate results; plan long-term goals. I promised them that if they would stick with this and believe in themselves as much as I believed in them, they would reach their goals and become models for others.

We started racing and Queenie was last in a group of a couple of hundred. I thought that everyone was finished when someone told me that one person was still way down the road. I went to meet her. Queenie was just barely moving. She was overweight and had some physical problems. I asked her how she was feeling and she told me that she didn’t think racing was going to be for her. Her friends thought her coming to the club was a stupid idea and she should listen to them. She ought to act her age and spend Sunday mornings sitting on the boardwalk with the other old people, discussing her aches and pains.

I asked her then where she wanted to be. She told me she wanted to be here. “I only care where your mind wants to be,” I said. “I’m not concerned about your body, because it will improve over time. But you need a strong mind to make the transition possible. Each week, as you get stronger, people are going to become more adamant about your stopping. The better you feel about yourself, the worse they’ll feel about themselves. They’ll project that onto you. You’re holding up a mirror to these people and making them see that they don’t have their lives together. You’re going to get a lot of negative feedback. If you can handle that, everything else will fall into place.”

Queenie kept on coming back. For the longest time she was the slowest person there, but she never lost sight of her goal. We kept encouraging her. Sometimes a voice would come into her head telling her to give up and act her age. She learned to pay it no mind. Instead she replaced her limiting thoughts with positive ones. She would say to herself, I’m getting younger. I’m having fun. I’m feeling great.

Her persistence paid off. Queenie Thompson no longer comes in last, but first. She mounted the podium to take the gold medal for the twenty-third time in three years. At seventy, Queenie was a world champion. She won two gold medals at the international games. That means she was one of the best athletes, not just in America, but in the whole world.

Queenie Thompson became a completely different person from the woman at that first club meeting. She has a vivacious personality with a positive disposition. Her body is lean and muscular. Her health is dramatically improved as well.

The second illustration is about a friend who overcame limiting beliefs about her work. Brenda used to be close to 275 pounds. She was very angry and bitter, even though she was financially successful as an art director for one of America’s largest advertising agencies.

People expected a lot from her, and she never let them down. As a result, Brenda had no life outside of work. I’d call her at eight in the morning and she was at her job. At eleven at night she was still there. It wasn’t her work she was doing, but work for other people. She often felt uncomfortable but thought she was powerless to change her situation. You can’t tell a client you don’t want to promote their product because the product’s unhealthy. As a result, she became angry.

Finally, she decided that she had had enough. She started preparing for a new direction. That took six months. Then she quit her job and went back to school to become a chiropractor.

Now she’s a different human being. She lost the excess weight and is light and happy. The child in her is out and playing. She’s creating her own art and openly taking care of her own needs. She became the healer she always wanted to be, and as a result feels empowered. She understands that this is her life to live, and no one else’s.

These are just two examples among many I could give of why I believe there is a champion inside every human being.

Start by setting new limits. See yourself where you want to be. Visualize yourself as successful, a winner, crossing the finish line, practicing a new career, or completing whatever it is you want to do. Forget the rules you’ve been taught. They’re for the conditioned self, not the new you.

Do You Consider Your Problems More Important than Your Ideals?

When you focus on your problems, you never get around to living your ideals. People tell me, “Gary, I’ll develop spiritual and emotional growth later. In the future, I’ll learn to be loving and nurturing and to develop bonds. I’ll get around to doing service for society after I resolve my problems. Then I’ll have time to help other human beings.”

The trouble is, that time never comes. When you focus on problems, the moment you get rid of one, you replace it with another. You’ve got to let the problem mentality go.

When your mind is centered on difficulties you tend to compromise your ideals. Notice which problems and concerns you think about. When you need something so badly that you think you can’t live without it, ask yourself, what am I giving up? I spoke to a man this morning who told me he resorted to stealing to maintain a lifestyle he and his family are used to living. Of course, something is terribly wrong when you lie, cheat, and steal to get money.

I advised him to let his house go. After all, it’s just so much square footage. “Your ideals are more important than 1,600 or 2,000 square feet,” I said. “You’ve got a whole world to explore. There are millions of people to relate to and myriad experiences to have. Who says that you’ve got to spend every ounce of your energy protecting that square footage? Think of how much of your life is wasted guarding that investment. Where is the higher ideal?”

He confided in me that he worried about his family not perceiving him as a provider. To this, I suggested that he and his family become co-providers. In other words, they needed to change their priorities and work together. They needed to work on their lives, not just be concerned with income. In the process, they would experience new people, cultures, and places instead of being prisoners of their own lifestyle. Giving things up can be freeing.

You can’t just say, I’ll change once I’m free of debt. That never works. The time to focus on your ideals is now.

Living By Illusions Is Living a Life of Lies

Before you can change you need to investigate the illusions under which you’re living.

Health

Have you been living with our society’s common illusion about health? Our paradigm in this country lets people think they are healthy as long as they aren’t dying in a hospital. People are never told that disease is a process that takes years to manifest and that they contribute to this process. As a result, the average person doesn’t think that he or she has anything to do with creating diseases such as cancer or arthritis. Being passively healthy is a false illusion, and it’s one we’re not encouraged to challenge.

On this point the evidence long ago stopped arguing with me. When military pathologists autopsied young American soldiers killed in Korea — average age twenty-two — they found that more than three-quarters already had visible atherosclerosis in their coronary arteries. The heart attack at fifty-five is not an event; it is a graduation ceremony for a process that began decades earlier, silently, while its owner felt perfectly fine. The same long fuse runs under most chronic disease. That is the whole case for treating every ordinary day as a health decision, and it has only grown stronger with time.

Could you imagine waking up each day and saying, “I only process wellness”? You would allow only healthful foods into your body and positive thoughts into your mind. You would associate only with cheerful people. Well, that’s how I live my life. I view every day as a new beginning. I start each morning with a guided visualization in which I tell myself, “This day, the only things coming into my mind are positive, life-affirming thoughts. I assert that nothing but good comes to me and nothing but good comes from me.”

Each day I allow nothing into my body that can cause me harm. I had lunch today with some people. As we were eating, one man said to me that nobody can be perfect. Everyone cheats sometimes. I said to him, “It’s not a matter of perfection. I never cheat and I don’t consider myself special. I think of myself as what should be normal.” I continued, “Why would I eat something that is going to hurt me? You may think that you are getting away with something but I know better.” I believe that if we make ourselves aware of the effects of our actions, we will never dishonor the body or the mind.

You have choices. True self-empowerment means you’re using those choices to engage in thoughts and actions that sustain health. Make time each day for intellectual, emotional, and spiritual growth. Honor your heart and spirit. Every day reaffirm a new beginning. Start and end each day looking at your ideal. Don’t read headlines or listen to the news. That’s negative. It reminds you how bad things are. When I first offered that advice it sounded eccentric; now that the news arrives by the hour through a device in your pocket, engineered to keep you scrolling through catastrophe, the case for rationing it has become mainstream mental-health guidance. When you focus on the possibilities, you can let in the new.

Happiness

Many people live under the illusion that they are happy when in reality they are only complacent. For example, two people who are together a long time may learn to adapt to each other even though the feelings of bliss and excitement are long gone.

Be with people who excite you. I’ve had many of the same friends for twenty and thirty years, and I’m still excited about being with them. There is joy in our time together.

Love

Love is the most abused word in the vocabulary. People say they are making love when they’re not. They’re having sex. They say they’re falling out of love. In reality, their codependent relationship is ending.

People confuse love with need. They think they’re nobody unless somebody loves them because they need someone other than themselves to make them feel worthwhile. People do all kinds of things that compromise their basic values to gain someone else’s attention and respect.

In its essence, love is something that comes from inside the self. You need to love yourself first. The more you love yourself, the more love you can give — and receive. You radiate a light that draws people.

Love should be manifested every day, in every way, and it can be. When you’re starting over, begin with the idea that you can love yourself unconditionally. Every time you start to get down on yourself, stop and remind yourself that you choose to love yourself.

Job Security

There was, once, an illusion that as long as you put in your time and worked without complaining, you would have job security for life. When I first wrote this, society had just learned a hard lesson about that illusion. The decades since have finished the course. The median American worker now stays about four years in a job; layoffs arrive by email; whole professions are being reorganized in real time by artificial intelligence; and a growing share of the workforce has no employer at all, only a series of gigs. The employment contract I grew up under is not merely weakened — it is extinct. Which means the advice that follows is no longer contrarian. It is simply accurate.

The only way to become secure is to become self-sufficient. Those who wait for someone to take care of them end up disappointed, hostile, and self-abusive. They sit in front of a screen growing fat, or chain-smoking. Frequently they abuse their families. They deprive others of their love because their company betrayed them.

These people are terrified of change. They want things to be the way they were told they always would be. They’re living by the control and power others have imposed on them. So when they no longer have a job, they have nothing to rely on because they’ve never trusted themselves.

You betray yourself by stopping your own growth. As long as you’re growing you always land on your feet. You adapt.

Friends

How many of your friends are real friends? Are they there to share something? Or are they there because they want something? Or only when they want something? Did you ever think you had real friends only to discover you did not?

Home

People think that they are being cheated out of the American dream if they don’t own a home; many perceive owning a home as the most important thing in life. One of the biggest sources of anxiety in America is the fear people have of losing their homes — and for a generation now priced out of buying one at all, the anxiety has simply changed tense: the fear of never having the home in the first place.

In reality, home is your heart. It’s where you feel you belong. If we belong to ourselves then wherever we are, we’re at home.

Have you ever been with people or in romances where you didn’t care if you had a home? You just loved being with the person. Your whole day was centered around looking forward to what you could share together. Then after awhile, maybe you started focusing on the security of a home. The home became more important than the person. No home should ever be more important than love or sharing with another human being.

Make Dreams Come True

You must trust and believe in yourself. You must get excited by your own dreams and capabilities. Every day I look at the projects that I want to do. Then I write them down. They don’t have to be done that day, but I want to keep my mind centered on my plans. I get excited by my ideas. I work on one idea at a time. I’m always examining my potential so I can make something happen.

Write down your ideas in order to keep your excitement level up. Put your ideas in front of you every day and just keep working on them. There is no one better than you to be your cheerleader and coach.

What else can you do to make your dreams come true?

Don’t Welcome Your Old Self Back

The moment your old self starts to reappear — you start whining, complaining, moaning, feeling guilty, and feeling bad — stop and say, “Old self, you are not allowed in. Good-bye. Hello again, new self.” You’ve got to keep bringing yourself back to where you want to be.

Don’t Empower Boredom, Emptiness, and Fear

The moment you entertain fear, you don’t try anything new. If you feel empty, it is because you are not allowing in all the wonderful things that can fill your life. Think of the beauty of the wilderness, of how wonderful human nature is when it’s honest and open.

Don’t allow a moment of your life to be empty. Put joy into each second. You can do this because you have choices. You can choose to spend a moment thinking, I’m not with someone, I’m alone. I’m lonely. Or you can think, I’m going to use this alone time to meditate, to reflect, to work on myself. Then you never have emptiness in your life.

No one who is excited by his or her own capacity is ever bored. How in the world can anyone be bored with the wonderful world we have and all the beautiful people we have in it? There are great places everywhere and amazing things being done by people every day. There’s no way you can be bored once you engage in life. You can’t engage in one billionth of what is out there to do. Anyone who is bored is saying, in effect, I’m closing myself off to life. Open yourself up.

Rediscover Your Childlike Enthusiasm

If you’re going to engage in new beginnings, this is the most important thing. This is where you get down to what really counts. I believe that in every human being there is a child, and that that child is the most beautiful part of the person’s nature. Staying in touch with that part of your nature allows you to be vulnerable and grow.

I want you to know that in making this claim I stand in the best company philosophy has to offer. Nietzsche, in the most famous passage of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, taught that the human spirit must pass through three transformations. First it becomes a camel, dutifully carrying everything its culture loads upon it. Then it becomes a lion, fighting to win its freedom from every “thou shalt.” But the lion, for all its strength, can only say no — it can destroy old values, not create new ones. For creation, Nietzsche says, a final transformation is required, and it is the one nobody expects: the lion must become a child. “The child is innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a self-propelled wheel, a first movement, a sacred Yes.” Twenty centuries before him, another teacher said that unless you become like little children you cannot enter the kingdom; the Tao Te Ching asks whether you can become again as a newborn. And modern biology added the punchline: scientists who study human evolution describe our species as the one that carries its juvenile traits — the play, the curiosity, the plasticity — furthest into adulthood. The technical term is neoteny. Staying childlike is not a regression from the human design. It is the human design.

Unfortunately, most people learn to tame that part of themselves. First your parents tell you to grow up and act your age. Then your teachers make you sit still and be quiet and obedient. You start to feel guilty and learn to follow their rules and expectations.

To start over in a healthy way, get in touch with the child you’ve buried inside. Allow the rebirth of that child. Every day find one new quality of childhood and manifest that trait all day. Let it come out at work, during play, and in your relationships. Keep using it. Bring it to the fore.

Look at the following qualities that children often display. Consider how you can use these qualities to enhance your life.

Innocence

As children, we were innocent about everything. As we advance through life, though, we lose touch with our innocence. We abuse the truth again and again, and in time become jaded. We believe the only way of communicating is through deception and half-truths. We let our real needs and feelings be neglected because we don’t admit to them.

At this point we need more than ever to recreate the part of childhood that embodies innocence. We need to recall how we once acknowledged the wonder of learning, and how every single discovery was an exhilarating experience that redefined us and our environment. We need to appreciate people for who they are and not judge them by what society and our preconceived notions tell us to think.

By allowing the innocence of our childlike aspect to manifest itself, we are renewing our lives. We can have a fresh perspective once we clean the slate and allow each day to be brand new. Innocence is the quality at the heart of forgiveness and human growth.

Curiosity

Babies have amazing curiosity. Watch a baby monkey, a kitten, a puppy, a lion cub, or a human baby. They all have one thing in common. They find that everything is worth exploring. Every nook and cranny, and everything that moves, engages them in exploration. Life is a puzzle that they are actively trying to solve. They want to explore for the sake of exploring; they’re not looking for some reward. They will taste things without knowing whether or not they will like them. They have the curiosity to try.

Zen Buddhism holds this quality so precious that it built a practice around protecting it. They call it shoshin — beginner’s mind — and the teacher Shunryu Suzuki compressed the entire teaching into one sentence: in the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities; in the expert’s mind there are few. Science, meanwhile, has found that curiosity is not merely charming but physiological: when curiosity is aroused, the brain’s reward circuitry lights up and the memory centers open, so that people in a curious state learn and retain more — even things they weren’t curious about. And in a study that tracked more than a thousand older adults over five years, the curious ones, the ones still asking questions about the world, were significantly more likely to be alive at the end of it. Curiosity is not a personality quirk. It is a life-extension technology that ships free with every human being and is almost universally left in the box.

Curiosity allows people to grow. Without curiosity they repeat fixed patterns of behavior and every day becomes the same. I have always wondered how people could not be curious about things like ballet or folk dances, how a fiddle is made, or how a small engine gets a big plane off the ground. I’m curious about how a heart pumps, how an acorn becomes a tree, and what happens to the spirit after the body dies. All these wonderings stem from a childlike curiosity.

By bringing curiosity back into your life, you renew your passion for living. To do this, you must first eliminate the need for certainty, predictable outcomes, and control over your environment. The need for control smothers curiosity, destroys spontaneity, and extinguishes vitality.

Wouldn’t you like to go out and explore people, events, places, experiences? Don’t tame your curiosity. That makes you cynical and judgmental. Curiosity allows you to explore and grow.

Energy

If there’s one thing that characterizes children, it’s energy! If we want to get in better touch with the child within us, perhaps we can attune ourselves to the energy that is everywhere, and tap into it.

There are many forms of energy at work in your body. Electrical energy allows the central nervous system to transmit nerve impulses so that you can move. Chemical energy permits hormones and enzyme systems to synthesize. Thermal energy keeps the internal body core temperature steady at around ninety-eight degrees no matter how cold or hot your surroundings. (Even that constant, I must report, has since been revised — researchers combing a century and a half of records found the average American’s temperature has quietly drifted down from the famous 98.6 toward 97.9. Everything flows, including the constants.) Osmotic energy allows lymph and blood to flow through your system. Mechanical energy lets muscle movements occur.

All of these energies are part of a larger system, the life energy, which directs all other energies. Although energy is needed for motion, thought is needed even before that. Therefore, energy is consciousness. I don’t tell the trillions of cells in my body what to do. I don’t even know all the things they do. Yet they do what they’re supposed to do twenty-four hours a day. How is that possible unless there is a grand system focusing all these energies?

Conscious energy always exists. It cannot be created or destroyed. Only its form can be altered. Your life, therefore, is merely a continuum of some energy that is immortal. Your body is a vehicle that, for a period of years, has the opportunity to use the energy you’ve been given. You may not be the wisest or most saintly person who has ever lived, but you can do something with your life energy if you understand that the first rule of life is to honor it.

I make no apology for the metaphysics, and I note that I hold this view in old and serious company. The Stoics taught that a living breath, the pneuma, pervades and organizes the whole of nature. Spinoza, the most rigorous mind of the seventeenth century, argued that everything that exists is one substance seen from different angles, and that every being’s essence is conatus — the striving to persist and unfold. Emerson called it the Over-Soul, the sea into which every private mind opens. Whether you take these as literal truth or as humanity’s most durable metaphor, the practical instruction they converge on is the one I’ve given you: you did not manufacture the energy you’re made of; you are its steward for a handful of decades; honor it.

By honoring the energy that life represents, you are becoming aware of your connection to nature. You’re a part of it, because all energies are connected. George Leonard said that there is a silent thread that weaves its way through all people and connects us.

At some point, you must reconcile the difference between learned consciousness and universal consciousness. What you are conditioned to believe comprises your learned consciousness. That could be wrong. You could learn to be a racist. You could learn that your culture is better or worse than another. You could learn the art of self-denial and avoidance. You could learn insensitivity or subjugation. Then you are living your life as if your beliefs comprise the only reality there is.

It is the vanity and insecurity people feel in their everyday lives that force them to believe that they must continually prove themselves in order to protect what little they have. People constantly struggle to prove that they are worthy of love, respect, or social position. When a person becomes accepted on some level, efficient at doing something, or recognized for something, generally all their time and energy go into maintaining that image.

Universal consciousness, on the other hand, is the ultimate reality. When you connect with it, you intuitively know right from wrong. It permits you to love unconditionally, to respect all life, to honor others no matter what differences exist between you.

You can develop a deeper spiritual awareness by listening to your inner voice. It will connect you to a higher consciousness, which makes you aware that regardless of social position or financial wealth, you are still equal in all respects to any king or sage that has ever lived. The dynamics of a spiritual life balance all other things.

Fortunately, many people have connected to their inner voice and have allowed it to guide them. That’s why we have humaneness. That’s why we care about suffering, and why we have not lost our empathy and our motivation to be the best we can be.

Capacity to Learn

Children learn as naturally as sponges soak up water. Even when we are adults, there is no limit to what we can learn. That sentence, once a slogan, is now a settled scientific fact — the adult brain remodels itself under demand, all life long, and the fastest-growing group of first-time learners in everything from languages to musical instruments is now the retired. But we should always remember that learning is not merely the ability to retain and retrieve facts. The most important lessons involve our capacity to surrender the need to be right and allow a natural process of cause and effect to occur. I’ve seen people who were taught the right way to racewalk and found it cumbersome and mechanically inappropriate for their bodies. When these people were allowed to modify the form so it was less technically correct but better adapted to their own bodies, they did much better. In our society we should begin to realize that our capacity to learn is directly related to our capacity to adjust and adapt to our own unique psychological, emotional, creative, and physiological requirements. No two people are the same. Yet people try to create standards as if all people were alike.

The capacity to learn also means that we can unlearn. The hardest thing to give up is knowledge, especially if that knowledge has served us well in some respects. But what serves us well in certain respects is not always the right thing to hold onto. Much of the knowledge that we have prided ourselves on maintaining is neither useful nor universally true.

A reality should be universal. Kindness, sensitivity, passion, and honesty are universal realities. Yet we alter universal realities to meet our own individual needs. That’s not always wise, because we start bringing in our conditioning, which tells us to learn only what will benefit us.

As a result, people don’t generally do things unless it gives them an immediate reward, either in terms of recognition, monetary value, or social position. So learning for the joy of learning and for the broadening of our consciousness, and giving up old ideas and replacing them with new ones, are not considered desirable activities.

Tolerance of Imperfection

Children don’t examine their imperfections. They don’t say, “I can’t do this because… I can’t do that because…” They don’t particularly care about perfection as a virtue. Adults, on the other hand, like the idea of a flawless work of art, a flawless concerto, or a flawless poem. What is ignored is the process that leads to perfection. What we often don’t understand is how many drafts go into writing the poem, how many lessons precede the masterpiece, and how many rehearsals go into the great performance.

The Japanese built an entire aesthetic on the opposite of flawlessness, and it is worth knowing about. When a treasured bowl breaks, the kintsugi craftsman does not disguise the repair — he mends the cracks with lacquer and powdered gold, so that the breakage becomes the most beautiful part of the object’s history. The philosophy underneath, wabi-sabi, holds that nothing is permanent, nothing is finished, and nothing is perfect — and that this is precisely where beauty lives. Meanwhile, in the years since I first wrote this section, perfectionism has stopped being a personality quirk and become a public-health trend: researchers tracking college students across three decades have documented it rising steadily, generation over generation, alongside the anxiety and depression it feeds. The culture is manufacturing flawlessness-seekers on an industrial scale. The old Japanese potters knew better: the gold goes in the cracks.

I believe that your goal should not be perfection, which is impossible to achieve. Your goal should be, rather, the process that allows you to continue to grow your entire life, and to continue striving to enhance, renew, broaden, and deepen your awareness of what you’re doing, but never to the point at which you feel you are flawless in what you do. That state — flawlessness — should always be just beyond your grasp.

Once we understand that nothing that we do in life will ever be perfect, striving for perfection is no longer our focus. We must continue to stretch beyond our comfort zone, and force our mind, body, and ideas into an area where there are no certainties. It’s in the area of uncertainties, where we go further than we ever thought we were capable of going, that new inspiration occurs. Though we don’t know how we create it, we do. Answers occur even to questions that we never thought to ask. The process allows that to occur.

Be like a child. Don’t look at your flaws. Look at what works.

Fearlessness

Do you ever notice little children acting like little heroes? They’re not afraid.

We look up to people who have overcome insurmountable challenges. They become our heroes. And we recognize the struggle of the heroic effort even if the goal is not always achieved. We become inspired by strength and focus in the face of an uncertain outcome. The effort itself is heroic.

Movies are great at capturing the essence of real-life heroism and depicting it for us. In the movie Chariots of Fire, the main character, a runner, falls on a track and seems to be out of the race. The film goes into slow motion as he gets back up, so that you can see the agony on his face when he is unsure that he can go forward. Then you see his determination as he pushes himself to catch up to the pack. He must let go of all of his fear, and trust that there is, within him, a strength that he has never tapped. It is that heroic strength that allows him to finally pass the others. In another movie, Iron Will, a boy in a dogsled race takes on a 500-mile trek from Canada to St. Paul, Minnesota. The boy has to endure everything that can go wrong, yet he never loses his spirit. He never says he’s going to stop, even when his body can barely move. At the very end he wins the race with just a second to go, and clearly becomes a hero. People who make such sacrifices and are willing to go through such pain inspire others.

Life has since outdone the screenwriters. When Jasmin Paris became the first woman ever to finish the Barkley Marathons, she crossed the line with ninety-nine seconds left before the sixty-hour cutoff — collapsing at the gate, having run through two nights on a course that had defeated every woman and nearly every man who ever attempted it. No studio would dare write an ending that close. The heroism I’m describing is not a movie convention. The movies are copying something real, and the something real is available to you.

Heroes engage in life. Each day, in their own quiet way, without grandstanding, they go out to push just a little further beyond their comfort zone. That is what strengthens them. The scholar Joseph Campbell spent his life reading the world’s mythologies and found that beneath their surfaces they all tell one story — the hero’s journey. A call comes to leave the familiar; the call is almost always refused at first, out of fear; then a threshold is crossed, ordeals are endured, and the hero returns transformed, carrying something of value for others. Campbell’s insight was that this is not a story about special people. It is the map of every human life that consents to change — and the only true tragedy in his scheme is the refusal of the call, the person who stays home in the familiar until the familiar becomes a tomb. I believe that every person is a hero. You don’t have to be a racer or engage in an activity that would be the subject of a movie. But you are a hero when you take a journey to challenge that which seems insurmountable. Start your hero’s journey. Find one cause and commit yourself to an ideal.

Honesty

Children have no problem saying what they feel. Most adults have lost that ability. Think of what it would be like if you said what you felt. Start doing it. I do. It scares people because they are used to other people telling them what they would like to hear, not what you need to tell them. They want you to edit what you say so they can accept it.

When I do a radio show and tell things as they are, I’m not concerned about whether or not you can handle honesty. I must honor the sanctity of my inner being. You may say, “Gary, I don’t like what you’re saying. It hurts. I don’t want to hear it.” Or you may say, “Gary, thank you.” The point is, I’m not going to tailor what I say in order to produce only the positive response.

Of course, you have to practice social decorum and be sensitive toward others’ feelings. But that doesn’t mean you should lie. I’d much rather be with someone who is honest with me than with someone who says what he thinks I want to hear but doesn’t mean it.

Wonder

Look at life and be filled with all that is there. Don’t restrict yourself to a narrow range of living, with the same repetitive actions and motions each day.

Psychology has recently taken up wonder under its scientific name — awe — and the findings read like a prescription. The researcher Dacher Keltner and his colleagues have shown that the experience of awe produces what they call the small self: the grinding, rehearsing, self-important voice in the head goes quiet, rumination drops, and generosity measurably rises. In one lovely experiment, older adults were assigned a simple fifteen-minute weekly walk with one instruction — look at everything as if for the first time, the way a child does. Over eight weeks, the awe-walkers grew measurably more joyful and less distressed than walkers given no such instruction. Same legs, same path. The only thing that changed was the willingness to be astonished — which is to say, the exact quality this section is asking you to recover.

Look for the enchantment of discovery. Have you ever noticed how children do things for the sake of doing them? They don’t need to be rewarded; the exploration and discovery are reward enough. A child plays with something, finds it exciting, and then is able to let it go and move on.

Adults tend to engage in activities for the reward. Then, once they get it, they try to guard and control the reward. They accumulate and are afraid of letting things go, because what they accrue becomes part of their identity. They become afraid to let go of their title, success, and money. Adults forget how to explore life for the joy of it. They become prisoners trapped by what they’ve accumulated.

The person who is happy with life is the person who achieves something but then moves on. That person will also be able to share the fruits of his or her experiences with other people.

Creativity

Children love to create. They create without the need to obtain something from it. You should too.

I write books, but don’t allow myself to be called an author. When you call yourself an author you establish an identity. You’re an intellectual snob. For me, writing is a creative method of communicating, not a status-generator.

If you create for the joy of it, you become creative in everything you do. You redecorate your apartment, change your work space, or dress differently. Have fun and be creative in all things.

Adaptability

Children will adapt to any environment. You should learn from that. No matter where you find yourself, look for pleasure and joy there.

Forgiveness

Children always forgive. They can’t hold a grudge. That’s one of their most inspired qualities. Children are able to let go and get on with their lives.

In this conversation we spent time learning, with the help of philosophers and physiologists, what a child accomplishes in a single afternoon. Let that be the measure of how much conditioning we’re here to undo.

Tomorrow, make a new beginning by forgiving people in your life. Forgive them and let go of the anger.

Happiness

Watch children. They find happiness in little things. In the middle of a wretched environment they still find happiness. As adults we lose that. We may have so much and not appreciate any of it. Sometimes we can’t find happiness when we’ve been given every opportunity to be happy.

Start having happy times and feeling happy. Respect what you do have.

Love and Sharing

Every human being has the capacity to love; all of us certainly used that capacity daily as children, if given any opportunity at all to do so. I think we should start making a point every day, now, to show love.

When I first wrote this, I said the eighties had been the decade of me, me, me, and expressed hope that we were past it. I must now report that the me decade turned out to be a growth industry — it acquired front-facing cameras, follower counts, and an economy that pays people to be their own product. But the research on the alternative has also come in, and it is unambiguous: people assigned to spend money on others end up happier than people assigned to spend it on themselves; volunteers live measurably longer than non-volunteers; generosity lights up the same reward circuits as receiving. Selfishness was tested at civilizational scale, and it lost. Isn’t it time you started sharing with other people? Give something back and share with others.

Trust

A child trusts everyone. Until you hurt a child by betraying her trust, she will trust you. I believe in trust. Until you show me you can’t be trusted, I will trust you. I believe trust is essential for growth. You need to trust other cultures, races, beliefs, and religions, and learn from them.

I trust there is good in all things if I look for it. While there is positive and negative in all things, I trust that I can separate the two.

Spontaneity

Children are naturally spontaneous, but as they grow up, people eventually become conditioned to plan everything they do. They start to think, do I want to or not? about every possible activity.

Why not just do stuff? It will give you freedom. I don’t always think about what I do. I just do stuff all the time. For instance, the other night, a friend who had just come from a boring party, and was all dressed up, called me. She said, “What do you want to do?” I said, “Let’s go down to the Bowery.” We did, and as cars pulled up we washed people’s windows for about an hour. People would say, “God, that looked like Gary Null!” They’d roll down the window and I’d give them a quarter. I’m sure their analysts are thinking they’re absolutely psychotic. “Some guy in a tuxedo washed my window and gave me a quarter.” That was fun.

What you remember about a lot of the experiences you share in life are the fun and spontaneity of them. You talk about what is different, interesting, and exciting. Get out of your own way and live.

Dream the Impossible

I love it when people tell me what they are dreaming about because they’re creating new possibilities. That’s exactly what they should be dreaming about.

It doesn’t matter if you actually achieve your dreams. The important thing is the idea that you’re not afraid of them. You’re not scared of what is in your heart. How many times have you chased a rainbow even though you never found the end of it? As a child, I used to run all over the place looking for the end of a rainbow. I’d be gone for a whole afternoon. I’d get lost and not know where I was. I’d ask people, “Do you know where the end of the rainbow is?” I would just keep walking for miles and miles. I never found the end, but it was a wonderful adventure. The adventure was in seeking the dream.

Remember to dream and to follow your aspirations.

Ask for Help

When a child can’t do something, he or she will come and ask you for help. That seems simple and sensible, but have you ever noticed how rarely adults do that? They won’t admit that anything in their life is not working. Ask for help if you need help. There’s nothing wrong with that.

The reluctance, it turns out, rests on a measurable error. Researchers at Stanford ran experiments in which people had to ask strangers for favors, first predicting how many would refuse them. The askers underestimated their success by roughly half — people said yes about twice as often as expected, and follow-up studies found that the people asked actually felt good about helping. We walk around carrying an imaginary world where requests are burdens and refusals are certain, while in the real world, most people are quietly glad to be needed. The child, who has run no experiments, simply knows this. Ask.

Respect for the Self

Most people don’t realize how worthy they are. Don’t victimize yourself; there’s no point to it. Be kind to yourself. List your worthy qualities. If you’re like most people, you don’t focus often enough on your good points. You have many wonderful qualities. Actually write them down and study the list. Then honor and use your wonderful qualities each day, as a child does.

Stop. Have You Played Today?

No? Then you’re still too serious. Every day should include playtime. You work every day and need play to balance yourself.

A lot of people won’t acknowledge their emotional needs. They’ll justify not playing by thinking, “adults shouldn’t do things like that.” It doesn’t go with their image. They’re supposed to be serious in their enjoyments. They’ll think to themselves, I’m supposed to enjoy poetry readings, books, and French movies I don’t understand. I’m only supposed to laugh at politically appropriate things.

The scholars are on my side here, and one of them made the point with a book title. The historian Johan Huizinga argued that our species is misnamed: alongside Homo sapiens, man the knower, he proposed Homo ludens — man the player — and demonstrated across a whole civilization’s worth of evidence that law, art, poetry, sport, even philosophy itself, all grew out of play. Play is not a break from the serious business of culture. Play is where culture comes from. When you refuse to play, you are not being an adult. You are being a defective specimen of the most playful species that has ever lived.

I believe that every man and woman has a desire to play just as children do. Play is interesting and fun. I want to be around people who are able to acknowledge this part of themselves; I don’t want to be around serious people all the time. That’s no fun.

Think of the people in your life. Are they able to find time for play, or is the relationship overly serious and predictable? Are you able to play wherever you’re at, or do you reserve playtime just for vacations? You’ve got to be able to play without caring if anyone criticizes you for it.

Stop. Don’t Bash Yourself

Whatever you do is okay. Don’t look for perfection. Don’t look for everything to be perfect or complete. Whatever you do, it’s enough. Pat yourself on the back. Be kind to yourself. You’re alright.

I gave this book its title on conviction alone. Science has since supplied the data, and I want you to have it, because it answers the objection everyone raises. The psychologist Kristin Neff and the researchers who followed her have spent two decades studying self-compassion — treating yourself, in failure, the way you would treat a good friend — and the findings dismantle the fear that kindness breeds laziness. It is the self-critics who give up, avoid challenges, and hide their mistakes; harshness turns every failure into a threat, and threatened people play small. The self-compassionate, in study after study, take more responsibility for their failures, not less — because they can afford to look at them — and try again sooner, persist longer, and improve more. In one experiment, students led to treat themselves kindly after failing a test studied longer for the retake than students left to their self-criticism. Read that again: the kindness caused the effort. The voice in your head that claims its cruelty is keeping you disciplined is lying about its job performance. Be kind to yourself. It is not the reward for doing better. It is the method.

Stop. Problems Are Not About Blame

Problems help you learn and grow. We all have problems, but unless we look at the solutions we’re going to perpetuate our problems. I don’t blame anyone for what goes down and what comes around. I simply say, it’s a part of life.

Stop Listening to What Doesn’t Work

If you’re putting your energy in one direction and not finding fulfillment, then change perspectives. Stop asking for advice from the same old tired voices. Get a different opinion. Get your own opinion. Whose life is it? Yours or someone else’s?

Seek Until You Find

You may not know what is right for you in certain areas of your life. Continue searching for what feels right — no matter how many efforts you have to make. Don’t stop because you’ve been conditioned to stop. If it isn’t right, then it doesn’t fit. It doesn’t mean you or the other person is wrong. It doesn’t mean that the job is wrong. It means that what you are doing doesn’t meet your real needs.

For instance, working at a hundred jobs and quitting each one is better than working in one place and being unhappy. I’d much rather have someone say, “Gary, I can’t work with you in this place,” than to have the person work for me and be unhappy about it. If you are honest, there are no hard feelings. I don’t consider that irresponsible. Likewise, I don’t see anything wrong with going out with a hundred people — or a thousand people — or a million people — rather than settling for someone who isn’t suited to you. Let’s face it. With all the dysfunctional people in this world, or functional people who don’t share your energy, you have a right to continue your search.

How many people do you know who are really fulfilled with their lives? Very few. But most people compromise their potential for fulfillment because of self-imposed limitations.

I believe we don’t have to make that kind of compromise — not if we empower ourselves, each day, with the strength to renew our search.

Let me close this book where a great philosopher closed her greatest one. Hannah Arendt — the same thinker who taught us, in the essay on forgiveness, that forgiving is the one power that releases us from the past — paired it with a second power, and gave it a name: natality. Human beings, she observed, are the beginning-makers. Because each of us arrived in the world as a newcomer, something genuinely new entered with us, and that capacity never expires: as long as you live, you retain the newcomer’s power to start something that has never existed before. The miracle that saves the world, she wrote, from its normal ruin, is the fact that new people keep arriving — that beginnings keep walking in the door. Notice what she has done: forgiveness unchains you from what has been; natality is your license to begin what has not yet been. Those are the two halves of this book. You have let go of the pain. You have let go of the fear. What remains is the child’s inheritance Nietzsche described — innocence, forgetting, a new beginning, a sacred Yes. This morning you arrived again. Begin.

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Dr. Gary Null is host of the nation’s longest running public radio program on alternative and nutritional health and a multi-award-winning documentary film director, including his recent Last Call to Tomorrow. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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