The Earned Life

The Earned Life Plot Summary

Introduction

Richard was a young taxi driver with dreams as vast as the open road. One summer day, he picked up a charming young woman from the airport, and during their hour-long ride through traffic, they formed an immediate connection. As they pulled up to her parents' impressive home, Richard mustered the courage to write his name on a taxi company card, suggesting she call if she needed another ride. Her warm response hinted at possibilities beyond a mere taxi service. A few days later, she called, and they arranged a date. But as Richard drove to her house that fateful evening, he stopped three blocks away, paralyzed by fear and self-doubt. He never showed up, never saw her again – and forty years later, this moment of hesitation still haunts him with profound regret. This poignant story illustrates the central challenge we all face: the gap between the life we want and the life we actually create through our choices, risks, and efforts. We stand at countless crossroads where our decisions – or indecision – shape our future fulfillment or regret. What makes some people move forward while others retreat? How do we align our daily actions with our deepest aspirations? These questions aren't merely philosophical – they're practical concerns that determine whether we'll look back on our lives with satisfaction or remorse. Through powerful frameworks like the "Every Breath Paradigm" and practical tools like the Life Plan Review, we'll explore how to make choices that serve our higher purpose, take meaningful risks, and put forth the effort required to create a life that feels genuinely earned.

Chapter 1: The Every Breath Paradigm: Becoming a New You

When Gautama Buddha said, "Every breath I take is a new me," he wasn't speaking metaphorically. He meant it literally. This profound insight suggests that life is a progression of discrete moments of constant reincarnation from a previous you to a present you. The emotions and thoughts you experience in one moment don't necessarily linger; they alter with each breath, eventually vanishing. Whatever you hope will happen in your next breath, or the next day, or the next year will be experienced by a different you – the future you. The only iteration that truly matters is the present you who has just taken a breath. This paradigm shift can be transformative when applied to our daily lives. Consider Mike, a successful executive I coached who was on track to become CEO of his media company. While brilliant in many ways, Mike struggled with being insensitive and dismissive to people he deemed less useful, and he carried an air of entitlement that annoyed colleagues. After working together to address these behaviors, Mike made significant improvements at work. However, at home, his wife Sherry still harbored resentment from years when Mike had focused on his career while she raised their children. Despite Mike's genuine changes, Sherry couldn't let go of the past. During a long drive after a family reunion, when Sherry once again expressed her wish that Mike had contributed more when their children were growing up, something clicked for Mike. Instead of becoming defensive, he calmly told her: "You're right about that guy ten years ago. He was clueless about many things. But that's not the guy in this car right now. He's a better man now. Tomorrow he's going to be someone else trying to be a little better. Another thing – that woman who suffered back then is not the same woman today. You're faulting me for the actions of someone who doesn't exist anymore. It's not right." After a long silence, Sherry apologized, acknowledging the truth in his words. Mike had finally internalized the Every Breath Paradigm – the understanding that we are not permanently defined by our past actions or failures. This insight is particularly valuable when we beat ourselves up over past mistakes. By recognizing "that was a previous me," we can forgive ourselves and move forward without the burden of shame or regret. The Every Breath Paradigm also helps us avoid living vicariously through past glories. Just as we shouldn't be defined by our failures, we shouldn't cling to past achievements as if they still define our current worth. The basketball coach Phil Jackson captured this perfectly when he said after winning consecutive NBA championships: "You're only a success in the moment of the successful act. Then you have to do it again." This perspective reveals a fundamental truth about living an earned life: we are never finished earning it. There is no hard-stop moment when we can tell ourselves, "I've earned enough. I'm done." The process of earning our life happens breath by breath, moment by moment, through the continuous alignment of our choices, risks, and efforts with our deepest purpose – regardless of outcomes.

Chapter 2: Barriers to Living Your Own Life

Mark Tercek was a partner at Goldman Sachs overseeing the firm's training programs and environmental markets group. When approached about the CEO position at the Nature Conservancy – the largest environmental nonprofit in the United States – he seemed perfectly suited for the role. With his financial expertise and passionate environmentalism, Mark could make a tremendous impact. Yet despite this ideal match, he hesitated. During a walk through the woods near my home, I finally asked him directly: "Why can't you pull the trigger? It's not an offer. It's just an interview." His response stunned me: "If I get the job, I'm afraid of what my Goldman partners will think." After twenty-four years at the firm, financial security, and a clear path to making a difference in a field he cared deeply about, Mark was paralyzed by concern over his colleagues' opinions. I grabbed his arm, looked him in the eye, and said, "Dammit, Mark. When are you going to start living your own life?" This question became a turning point – Mark called the search team the next day, and shortly thereafter left Goldman to become CEO of the Nature Conservancy. Mark's story illustrates how powerful the influence of our "referent groups" can be – the people whose approval and respect we crave. My friend Dr. Roosevelt Thomas, Jr., who reshaped corporate America's attitudes about workplace diversity, explained that if you know a person's referent group, you can understand why they talk, think, and behave the way they do. After twenty-four years, Mark was still emotionally linked to his colleagues at Goldman Sachs, and their approval mattered deeply to him. Beyond referent groups, we face numerous other barriers to creating our own lives. Inertia – our default response to persist in our current state rather than switch to something else – keeps us locked in place even when change would benefit us. Our parental programming shapes our beliefs, values, and self-image from childhood, sometimes limiting our perception of what's possible. Obligations to others often conflict with promises we've made to ourselves, forcing us to choose between being selfless or selfish. Many of us suffer from a failure of imagination, unable to envision a different path for ourselves. Others are winded by the accelerating pace of change, falling behind as the world moves forward. Increasingly, we're narcotized by vicarious living through social media, watching others live rather than creating our own experiences. And some of us miscalculate our personal "runway" – either overestimating it when young (delaying our "real life") or underestimating it when older (believing it's too late to start something new). These barriers aren't permanent disqualifications – they're temporary obstructions that can be pushed aside. We possess offsetting attributes like motivation, ability, understanding, and confidence that enable us to find our way. The key is recognizing these barriers for what they are: not immutable facts about ourselves, but learned patterns that can be unlearned and replaced with more empowering perspectives that allow us to truly live our own lives.

Chapter 3: The Action-Ambition-Aspiration Model

Marie started a pasta sauce business three years ago after friends kept telling her, "You should sell this." As a retired food professional with experience developing recipes for food companies, she had the skills to create something authentically new. When I asked about her motivation, she said, "I get a kick out of making a special product that customers appreciate. I'm doing this for that validation, not the money. Not yet, at least." Marie had confidence in her ability to create new products, understanding of the process, and support from mentors she'd met through a food industry accelerator program. The marketplace was receptive – people will always need ready-made sauce, and her niche at the high end was finding its audience. But two years into the business, Marie hit a moment of doubt. "I started wondering what was the purpose of all this work if I wasn't taking a salary yet. What was the endgame?" A mentor helped her clarify that start-ups aim either for steady profit growth or being bought out. She decided her goal was getting someone to buy the business, after which she could either continue with more resources or move on. "That gave me clarity and purpose. I felt aligned again," she explained. Marie's story illustrates how crucial alignment is between our actions, ambitions, and aspirations – three independent variables that govern our progress toward an earned life. Action refers to what we're doing now, in the moment. Ambition is what we want to achieve – our pursuit of defined goals with clear finish lines. Aspiration is who we want to become – our pursuit of objectives greater than any defined goal, with an infinite time horizon. The vast majority of successful business people live lives dominated by Ambition. They're highly motivated to achieve specific goals and have the discipline to subordinate their Action to their Ambition. But if they're not careful, especially in competitive environments where hitting targets is how we keep score, their discipline can easily turn into goal obsession. They become lost in their Ambition, regardless of whether they've defined their Aspiration or articulated their higher values. Coaches, on the other hand, tend to be clear on Aspiration – being present, serving others, making the world a better place – but fuzzy about the actions and goals they're pursuing to serve that aspiration. They're reluctant to do the hard, uncomfortable things required in this online era to expand their reach and help more people. The challenge is to align these three variables so that our immediate actions serve our defined ambitions, which in turn advance our deeper aspirations. When we overfocus on Action at the expense of Aspiration and Ambition, we tend to make poor decisions. This is the classic conflict – our anticipation of a short-term benefit engaged in a tug-of-war with our long-term welfare, with short-term winning. Conversely, when our fear of short-term costs impedes us from seizing opportunities for long-term gain, we miss chances for growth and fulfillment. By understanding how these three variables interact, we gain a powerful framework for making better decisions. We can ask ourselves: Does this action align with my ambition? Does my ambition serve my aspiration? This alignment is the essence of living an earned life – where our choices, risks, and efforts in each moment connect to something greater than mere personal achievement.

Chapter 4: Finding Your One-Trick Genius

Perhaps you've noticed one glaring omission from our discussion of life's dichotomies: Is it better to be a generalist or a specialist? There's no correct answer to this question. People can achieve an earned life on either path. But at some point, you have to resolve this dichotomy, making a commitment to one or the other. The alternative – a loosey-goosey in-between life in which you're neither good at many things nor great at one thing – is not pretty. I became a specialist without meaning to at first. With a Ph.D. in behavioral science, I could have studied the broad swath of human behavior. Instead, everything I've done since graduate school has been an exercise in slicing the loaf of my professional interests into ever thinner slivers of specialization. I discovered I didn't want to work with disengaged and troubled people frustrated by their lack of success. I wanted to work with successful people – and not all successful people, just the extremely successful, as in CEOs and other top-tier leaders. Continuing to slice thinner, I told would-be clients that if they were looking for help on traditional management issues like strategy, sales, operations, logistics, compensation, and shareholders, I was not their guy. I focused on one thing: the client's interpersonal behavior. By my late forties, I had narrowed my universe of potential customers to an infinitesimal number – just CEOs and people of similar rank. The more I stuck to this narrow job description, the better I got at it, until I could legitimately say my one trick – helping successful executives achieve lasting behavioral change – was now my "genius." This process of finding your "one-trick genius" (OTG) takes time – usually at least a decade or two of adulthood. Few people know their position on the generalist versus specialist debate at the start of their career. Sandy Ogg's journey illustrates this perfectly. After rising through corporate human resources at Motorola and Unilever, Sandy was asked by Unilever's CEO to formalize a way to identify future leaders. He developed a methodology called Talent to Value that measured which employees contributed most to the company's value. His analysis of Unilever's three hundred thousand employees concluded that just fifty-six people were responsible for 90 percent of its value. Sandy's insight was so brilliant that the private equity powerhouse Blackstone hired him to conduct similar analyses at their portfolio companies. He discovered that there is low correlation between a top manager's compensation and the value they add – revealing who was overpaid and who was underpaid. The people adding the most value, Sandy learned, were invariably specialists – they were "special." Starting with the broad knowledge of an HR professional, Sandy had narrowed his focus to determining one particular data point of interest to top management: Who in an organization can never be overpaid? Finding your OTG doesn't mean you're a "one-trick pony" – a pejorative term for people who abuse a limited skill set because they have no choice. OTG is a deeply considered choice, representing what we aspire to rather than what we settle for. It's about rummaging around our toolkit, discarding the skills that lack the potential for excellence, and zeroing in on a talent we wouldn't mind perfecting over a lifetime. Sometimes our unique qualities – even those that frustrate us – can become our genius. Ridley Wills, a successful architect, had what researchers called a powerful sense of "pitch discrimination" – he constantly perceived tiny distinctions in the quality and beauty of a home. This maddening, exhausting sensitivity became his genius when channeled into the one field where his 99-percent perfectionism made him happy rather than miserable. A special talent can elevate or torment you. You can let it be your ally or your nemesis. It's your choice.

Chapter 5: The Life Plan Review: A Framework for Change

The objective of the Life Plan Review, or LPR, is to close the gap between what you plan to do in your life and what you actually get done. Unlike many goal-oriented self-improvement systems, it doesn't rely on exhortations for you to be more heroic in motivation, habit, resourcefulness, and courage. The LPR is an exercise in self-monitoring: You conduct a weekly review of your effort to earn the life you claim to desire. It measures how hard you try, presuming your lapses rather than your steadfastness, honoring the likelihood that you will fall short of perfection most weeks. The LPR is a simple four-step structure that loses much of its power without a community. In Step 1, you and each member of the weekly meeting take turns reporting your answers to six questions: "Did I do my best to set clear goals? Make progress toward achieving my goals? Find meaning? Be happy? Maintain and build positive relationships? Be fully engaged?" You answer each question with a number from 1 to 10 that measures your level of effort, not your results. This distinction is critical because it forces you to acknowledge that while you can't always control outcomes, you have no excuse for not trying. In Step 2, you track these questions daily between meetings to create the habit of self-monitoring. Step 3 involves reviewing your plan for relevance and personal need once a week. When you measure effort, you're monitoring the quality of your trying. But from time to time, you should also review the purpose of your trying. Are you making a meaningful effort to achieve a now meaningless goal? Step 4 is crucial: Don't do this alone. The LPR is a group event that places you with a community of like-minded souls. I witnessed the power of this approach during the COVID-19 pandemic. When lockdowns began in March 2020, my wife and I had just moved into a one-bedroom rental overlooking the Pacific Ocean, planning to stay briefly before relocating to Nashville. Instead, we were stuck there indefinitely. My speaking engagements vanished overnight, and I worried about the younger, less established coaches in our 100 Coaches community who might be struggling. To maintain connection, I began hosting weekly Zoom seminars. By June 2020, I invited fifty members to commit to answering the six basic LPR questions and reporting their scores on a weekend Zoom call for ten weeks. I expected a 20 percent dropout rate, but no one skipped a single session. Over those ten weeks, members' effort scores increased steadily. People who had started below 5 for effort were regularly placing themselves in the 8 to 10 range by the end. The LPR's primary benefit is how brutally it forces you to confront the question: "What did I actually do this week to make progress on my goals?" Given our tendencies for superior planning but inferior doing, this is a question we prefer to avoid. The LPR removes that option. This is why participants' scores improve so quickly – the alternative, reporting poor scores week after week, is too painful to bear. Beyond accountability, the LPR offers other benefits. It can be applied to any goal, not just grand life ambitions. It creates a psychological safe space where participants learn not to judge themselves or others harshly. It pushes you to define what matters in your life as you struggle to measure your effort. And perhaps most importantly, it builds meaningful connections that extend beyond the formal meetings, as participants reach out to help one another in their journeys toward an earned life.

Chapter 6: Asking for Help and Building Credibility

Richard was a young taxi driver who made a colossal error that he's regretted all of his adult life. After arranging a first date with a wonderful young woman he'd met while driving her from the airport, he froze three blocks from her house and turned around, never to see her again. Richard's mistake wasn't the result of sudden stage fright; it was a failure to properly weight the opportunity and risk that the first date presented. He over-weighted the risk, under-weighted the opportunity, and thus missed the chance of a lifetime. This reluctance to take risks often extends to asking for help – perhaps the most valuable yet underutilized tool for living an earned life. In 1979, I was working at IBM headquarters in Armonk, New York, investigating why the company's manager coaching program wasn't working. My interviews revealed a vicious cycle: IBM defined a top performer as someone who "performs effectively with no need for coaching." Employees wouldn't ask for coaching because it would signal weakness, and managers wouldn't offer it because no one asked. The company had created a culture where asking for help was seen as a character flaw. This attitude persists in many organizations and individuals. We hesitate to ask for help because doing so might reveal our ignorance, incompetence, or neediness – none of which are flattering self-images. Yet the most successful people I know are the most avid builders of their own support groups and the most reliant on their groups for help. They're not shy about admitting it. For them, a support group is like having a higher gear to make things happen more smoothly and quickly. Hubert Joly, former CEO of Best Buy, exemplifies this approach. When I began coaching him at Carlson Hospitality, he was already a respected leader but struggled with thinking he always had to add value, needing to win too much, and passing judgment. Rather than hiding these flaws, Hubert embraced the coaching process – apologizing to colleagues for past behavior, promising to do better, asking for help, and gratefully accepting feedforward advice. When he became CEO of Best Buy, facing the challenge of saving a big-box electronics retailer competing against Amazon, Hubert took a counterintuitive approach. Instead of imposing a top-down strategy, he asked employees to help him. He exposed his vulnerabilities publicly, acknowledging his need for help at every step. He asked for their approval, not in the form of personal "Do you like me?" assurances, but in the form of their "buy-in" and commitment to his strategy. By asking for their "heart," he received their full commitment – and transformed Best Buy, quadrupling the stock price. Credibility is equally essential to making a positive impact. It's a reputational quality earned over time when people trust you and believe what you say. Earning credibility is a two-step process: first establishing your competence in something others value, then gaining recognition and approval for that competence. You need both trust and approval to credibly credit yourself with credibility. The challenge is that these two steps – competence and recognition – are independent variables. Greater competence doesn't automatically guarantee recognition. In today's Attention Economy, your good work won't necessarily "speak for itself." You must actively seek recognition, which can feel uncomfortable. This discomfort diminishes when you realize that self-marketing serves the aspirational purpose of making a positive difference. Peter Drucker offered five rules for earning credibility: 1) Every decision is made by the person who has the power to make it; 2) If we need to influence someone, that person is our customer and we are a salesperson; 3) Our customer doesn't need to buy, we need to sell; 4) Our personal definition of value matters less than our customer's; and 5) Focus on areas where we can actually make a difference. These rules remind us that acquiring recognition is a transactional exercise – we must sell our achievements to have them recognized and appreciated by others.

Chapter 7: Empathy and Making a Positive Difference

Telly Leung starred in the Broadway hit Aladdin for two years straight. When asked how he maintained his motivation and energy through eight performances a week, he described his approach to empathy. First, he connected emotionally with the audience: "I was a little eight-year-old boy the first time I saw a play. I was mesmerized by the music, singing, dancing, and joy. I carry that memory with me to every performance. When I go out on that Broadway stage, I think of 'little Telly' and imagine the emotions of some eight-year-old boy or girl sitting in the audience that night." Second, Telly practiced what he called "authentic empathy" with his fellow performers – a professional respect that kept him focused and "in character" for every moment. "In the two hours I was onstage as Aladdin, I had to demonstrate many extremely different emotional reactions. I had to connect emotionally with the other actors. Every night I had to fall in love with Princess Jasmine – and I did! When the curtain fell, I immediately shut that feeling down until the next show. Then I went home where I could resume being in love with my husband." This "authentic empathy," as Telly defined it, is "doing your best to be the person you need to be for the people who are with you now." It's a powerful concept that aligns perfectly with the Every Breath Paradigm we discussed earlier – focusing our concern on the present moment rather than dwelling on the past or worrying about the future. Empathy comes in many forms. The empathy of understanding allows us to occupy the same headspace as another person, predicting how they'll react to a situation. The empathy of feeling involves experiencing the emotional state of another person, communicating either "I feel your pain" or "I am happy for you." The empathy of caring focuses on the person's reaction to an event rather than the event itself. And the empathy of doing goes beyond understanding, feeling, and caring to actually take action to make a difference. Each type of empathy has its place, but singular empathy – focusing our concern on a single person or situation in the present moment – may be most valuable for living an earned life. It reminds us that each opportunity to display our empathic powers is unique and exceptional. When you demonstrate singular empathy, you cannot be inauthentic. You are demonstrating empathy to the only people who can appreciate it: those who are with you now. This approach to empathy connects directly to making a positive difference in the world – which Peter Drucker identified as our mission in life: "to make a positive difference, not to prove how smart or right we are." When I've asked successful people to characterize the fulfillment they get from pursuing an earned life, the number one answer is some variation of "helping people." We most fully earn our life when we are of service to others. Leo, a friend who learned to cook while staying home with his three young daughters, exemplifies this principle in a quiet, everyday way. After returning to work and becoming COO of a private equity firm, Leo never gave up his role as the family cook. Every day, he plans meals, shops for ingredients, and prepares food for his wife and guests. Cooking is not a bucket list item for Leo – it's something he does every day with care and attention. When he wakes up in the morning, Leo is a cook. He cooks a great meal. People experience pleasure. Leo feels validated. When he wakes up the next morning, he's still a cook. He does it again. Leo the cook is not merely a metaphor for the earned life – he is the essence of it in all its mundane magnificence. There is no victory lap for being a cook, just the privilege and fulfillment of being that person and trying to do it to the best of his ability every day. The reward of living an earned life is being engaged in the process of constantly earning such a life.

Summary

Throughout these pages, we've explored how to bridge the gap between the life we want and the life we create through our choices, risks, and efforts. The path to fulfillment without regret isn't about achieving perfection or collecting accolades – it's about aligning our daily actions with our deepest aspirations, regardless of outcomes. When we embrace the Every Breath Paradigm, understanding that we are constantly reborn with each moment, we free ourselves from both the weight of past failures and the false security of past successes. We learn to be present, to play the shot in front of us rather than dwelling on the shot we just missed. The earned life emerges from five recurring themes that function as guardian angels of fulfillment. First is purpose – anything we do becomes more elevated when connected to a clearly expressed higher aim. Second is presence – the impossible but essential practice of being fully engaged with the people and tasks before us right now. Third is community – accomplishing something with the help of others resonates more deeply than solo achievement. Fourth is impermanence – accepting that nothing lasts forever inspires us to find meaning in each fleeting moment. And fifth is results – not obsessing over outcomes but committing to trying our best, knowing that our effort is what we truly control. As we integrate these themes into our lives through practices like the Life Plan Review, asking for help, building credibility, and exercising singular empathy, we create a virtuous cycle of earning that transforms not just our own lives but the lives we touch. In the end, an earned life doesn't include a trophy ceremony or an extended victory lap. The reward is the process itself – being engaged in constantly earning such a life, one breath at a time.

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Marshall Goldsmith

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