“Where do you live? In the past, the present, or the future?” I asked my friend Ron as we were leaving dinner.

Ron (not his real name) answered without hesitation, “I live in the future.”

“What about your wife?” I asked.

“She lives in the past,” he said quickly.

My questions were prompted by our dinner conversation.

He was having difficulty making decisions. Particularly decisions that had a long-term impact. I’ve known Ron for a very long time and didn’t understand why he couldn’t come to a decision.

It was odd.

Suddenly I realized I’m the same way. I can’t decide because, like Ron, I’m unclear of my future.

Boom! It hit me.

People who live in the future need a vision for where they are headed. Give me a vision, and I am a decision-making machine.

But how do I live without a vision?

I’ve always been a future-thinker. It’s served me well. I am proud of it. I like thinking about where I am headed. I don’t care where I am right now.

But this future-thinking causes me to be anxious. It is an anxiety I’ve lived with all my life. I’ve lived in the future for so long, I think some level of anxiety is normal. I just lived with it.

Until I couldn’t live with it any longer, so I drank more.

This overwhelming anxiety hit me in my mid to late thirties. On the run-up to this time in my life, I had a clear vision—wife, kids, house, cars, business, money, and success.

Then one day, it wasn’t enough.

My first step in solving this emptiness was to double down. Ignore those feelings of discontent and unfulfillment. I put my head down. I needed to get back to work doing what I was doing.

Get more, achieve more in each of those categories. It didn’t work. In fact, in addition to being anxious, I was now depressed. This led to seeking even more relief in alcohol. Not good.

Looking back, I now realize, as a future-thinker, I didn’t like the path I was on. It was a path toward a vision I didn’t care about. That current path would lead me to success but as a corporate executive. It was a path to success and riches, a well-trodden and predictable path. It just wasn’t my path. I thought it was when I was twenty-eight but knew it wasn’t at thirty-eight.

A future-thinker with no vision of the future is a future addict.

If you’ve been following me for a while, you know…

I almost lost my wife and kids during the double-down period.

I lost my corporate job. Whether I quit or was fired doesn’t matter. It was gone.

I couldn’t find another job because people interviewing me knew I was not sure I really wanted to do this again. People smelled the indecision on me.

I addressed my alcoholism by going to AA. There I received the grace of God and his miraculous healing of my addiction.

I accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior.

I became dependent on Him and followed Him.

This series of events took two years. Then a miracle happened. Through some weird set of events put in motion by my past relationships, I became a professional angel investor. A new career!

A new vision popped into my head, “Invest in twenty startup companies over the next twenty years.” I thought smugly, “When I turn sixty, I’ll look back and say, ‘That was one heck of a great career.’”

For the next twenty years, I executed on this vision.

Kathy and I raised our kids, led ministries, invested in our community, developed amazing friendships, and built wealth. It was an incredible twenty years. And then I was sixty, and it was over. Vision accomplished.

I had no vision again. I was still a future-thinker but once again with no vision.

With no vision for my life, my anxiousness returned. At first, I could handle it. It was like an old, annoying friend who returned to visit. If he stayed for a short time, I could handle it. But he stayed longer… sixty-one, sixty-two, sixty-three, and he just kept hanging around. The anxiety was becoming overwhelming again.

I cried out to God for help. I received no answer.

With no vision, I doubled down on the current professional angel investor vision. This led to bad decisions. I got sloppy and lazy. And I was sloppy and lazy because I didn’t care enough to be a great angel investor.

I learned I make bad decisions during a double-down period. Now I’d done this a second time in my life. The anxiety continued.

“I need a vision for my life,” I cried out to God and close friends who would listen. God was silent. Everybody else told me what my vision for my life should be. I listened to God. I was frozen. Over time, this caused me to move from being a future-thinker to a present-thinker.

What a difference.

Present-thinking is filled with joy and gratitude.

But in those moments when I snap back to future-thinking, the overwhelming anxiousness returns. The friend is back. This causes me to seek relief. My relief isn’t alcohol, but it is a tranquilizer from time to time. It takes the edge off the anxiousness and makes the old friend tolerable.

The long-term solution isn’t drugs or alcohol but staying in the present.

My reflex is to live in the future. But without a vision for the future, the void is filled with anxiety. It is like I am living a life without purpose. But I have learned this is a lie. I am making a difference right now to all the people around me by just doing what I am doing. Including writing this article to you.

I am convinced through all of this, God brought me to the present.

He gave me a taste of what it is like to live in the present. I liked the experience, and now I want to be a present-thinker. Every day I want to make the present my thinking reflex. To enjoy this moment. This time right now, I am writing to you, my reader. This is a very special moment. It is intimate and enjoyable for me, and hopefully for you, too.

Maybe God blessed you from the start like he blessed my wife, Kathy. She is a present-thinker. She’s always been. She is the most fun and loving person I know on this earth. Just this morning, we had a conversation about this, and she showed me again the joy of the moment, the present.

But she also brought up a great point. “I don’t know what my life would have been like without you. I think God brought us together because I needed a future-thinker as a husband, and you needed a present-thinker as a wife.”

She’s right.

On a trip to Denver, I spoke with an entrepreneur, Mike (not his real name). Our chat that day stuck with me.

“I deal with a lot of stress in building this business. It’s lonely and doesn’t go my way most of the time,” said Mike. “Sometimes I find myself looking for relief, and I find it in alcohol. I know it isn’t healthy. I am just trying to find a way to change the way I feel. I need to take the edge off.”

Can’t Live Like 35

Instantly, I related. When I was building my business, I did the same thing. The motto today is the same as it was then, “Work hard. Play hard.” But the truth is, it is not healthy.

He continued with some really great wisdom, “I have come to believe my behavior needs to satisfy one of two goals. It must be good for my family or help grow my business. Drinking to change my mood does not satisfy either of these goals.”

Mike is 45. He has been successful at everything he has done throughout his life. He is a hard worker, disciplined, and really smart. But what he did at 35, he can no longer do at 45. At least not without big penalties. He is married now, with kids, a house, cars, kids’ college tuition, and people he needs to keep employed, including himself. Not to mention his body is 10 years older.

Mike Is Smarter

I am right there with Mike, and I know many of you reading are, too. Mike is smarter than I was at his age because he recognizes his behavior is not healthy. He recognizes his behavior is detracting from his family and his business.

I have a habit of overbooking myself. Kathy, my wife, used to tell me, “Your way of doing business is to find an opening on your calendar and fill it.” She knows me all too well. This behavior would leave me feeling overwhelmed. When I was overwhelmed, I became anxious. This anxiousness used to lead to drinking. That’s what led me to AA over 23 years ago. So instead of drinking, I looked for relief elsewhere. Junk food.

Fight the Overwhelmed Spiral

I’d sit and eat salty, fatty snacks or sweets while watching TV, which gave me instant relief from negative, overwhelming feelings. I’d feel better for a moment. Eventually, lying in bed, I would think, What have I done? I’m not going to sleep well because these foods give me reflux. And then when I do get up, I’ll feel bloated, heavy, and uncomfortable. The instant relief was not worth it.

A few days of this behavior and there would be an onset of depression. Then I didn’t feel good and didn’t feel like doing anything. I was stuck.

When I got to feeling that way, the thing I needed to do most appeared the least desirable. I had to meet people and help them. This helped me feel better, so I started eating better. This behavior went on for years.

Then one day I tried something which broke the cycle. I adopted a new way of life where I get the rest my body needs. For three days I promised myself, “No morning appointments.” I would sleep until I woke up. After three days, I felt so energized that I decided to do it for the rest of the week.

Rest Is Crucial

With rest, I think clearly. I make better decisions. I can put my life and work into proper perspective. In short, I have avoided the negative, addictive cycles which lead to depression and illness.

If you can relate to the behavior I described here, go to bed and get some rest. Not enough to catch up. But make a daily schedule that treats sleep as a priority in your life. You shouldn’t work until you drop. Your sleep is just as important as your work and your family.

We always remember ourselves being younger. Mike, who is 45, sees himself and treats himself like he is 35. But his whole life changed in those 10 years. I am 64 but see myself and act like I am 54. We need to take proper care of ourselves, wherever we are.

So my new motto is “Work hard. Play hard. Rest hard.”

Now that I have the rest, I have to work on the play. But that’s a topic for another article.On a trip to Denver, I spoke with an entrepreneur, Mike (not his real name). Our chat that day stuck with me.

11. Being an entrepreneur means being a leader. Being a leader means making decisions which carry the fate of your dreams and people’s livelihoods. This is what you signed up for, but you are not alone.

10. We needed self-starters, the kind of people who see what needs to be done and do it.

9. People are like golf swings. They are never exactly right, and they can always get better.

8. Once you lose someone’s trust, the only way to get it back is to trust in the person whose trust you are trying to earn.

7. Lead by example. You show me how much you care about me when I see the pain you will endure to keep me around.

6. You get better at what you measure.

5. When people get hired or promoted into the wrong position, it becomes the responsibility of the leader to vote them off the island. It’s a tough decision, but it has to be made by someone. That someone is you.

4. Great visionary leaders know exactly how far ahead of the group they can get without losing them. This is the art of leadership.

3. Founders slowly release control, function by function, and the last area of control they hold on to is always revenue.

2. I believe, as leaders, we have that one thing that can bring us down. To ensure the one thing does not win the day, God puts a person in our lives whom we respect and listen to.

1. Legacy isn’t something I leave behind as a life’s work. My legacy is the people I’m influencing through the life I’m living.

10. All that you experience as the entrepreneur is experienced by your family. They are torn as you are torn.

9. You move from being a dad with authority over your children’s lives to being a father with only influence.

8. Marriage is the hardest of all relationships. Dedicate your life to fixing your spouse, demanding change, or treat your spouse as the person you hoped they would become. You choose.

7. In the child-rearing years, the family grows arithmetically. Once the children leave, the family grows exponentially.

6. High expectations combined with little to no compliments wear people out.

5. Love takes time. Love is an investment.

4. If we wait to give our kids money when we die, they’ll probably be in their sixties, and they will be too old to really enjoy it together.

3. I was so driven, I was compromising time with my own family as well as my employees’ time with their families. Right priorities start at the top.

2. Whatever grandfather I choose to be, that’s the grandfather my grandchildren will have.

1. We are not trying to balance work on one side of the scale and life on the other. It is all one life, and you and your family are together.

10. Angel investing at its best is a really risky business. But risky does not lose money. Bad risks do.

9. Experience for an angel investor begins after you write the check.

8. Vetting an entrepreneur? The best I can do is meet their spouse and the people who used to work for them. In other words, inspect the fruit.

7. The initial investment is all about vision and promises. The second investment is all about performance and results.

6. Angel investing is a contact sport.

5. When the entrepreneur isn’t sure who might buy it and why, and the angels jump in to help, you know those angels won’t invest. At least not now.

4. The bigger the money, the harsher the accountability.

3. When I am talking to an entrepreneur, my lungs fill with air. The entrepreneur moves my thinking from what is to what can be.

2. In our hearts, we angels know we are unqualified to pick winners and losers. But that’s not how we act.

1. I learned I was managing the tension between the entrepreneur’s dream and my money, and getting this balance right meant success or failure for both of us.

I heard a friend describe his grandchildren as average. It upset me, and I told him in no uncertain terms.

His grandchildren have well-educated and productive parents. First and foremost, these kids have parents who are married, love each other, respect each other, and love their children. The children are being raised in a safe home with a wonderful education. They travel regularly in the US and abroad. They participate in organized sports. They have unique personalities and interests. Their pursuit of these interests leads to startling creative acts.

Yet with all this, my friend, their grandfather, called them average.

He labeled his grandchildren average. This made me ask: How does he label himself? Does he consider himself average too?

Why do we label people? Why do we label ourselves? How does our self-labeling affect how we label others?

Here are my thoughts from my journal this morning.

Be careful—be aware of how you label yourself. I am quick to label others. But in many cases, I don’t realize that I labeled myself first.

Labeling others gives me a sense of control. I know what to expect. Their behaviors become predictable, and that is comforting. I live in a no-surprises relationship with them. I put them in a box and store them on the “safe relationships” shelf.

When I label myself, I make myself safe. I set boundaries on what I might achieve. My expectations of me: to love, to be loved, to learn, to achieve, to lead, to advance, to succeed.

But God created me. Is God’s design for me, his creation, lying fallow behind the door of my self-label?

I do to me what I do to others. I make myself safe from myself.

This labeling is horrible to do to others and disastrous to do to myself. Self-labeling is catastrophic to my personal growth. It is catastrophic to other people’s growth while in a relationship with me.

Labeling is a relational form of control.

It makes the world seemingly safe to navigate. The goal is no surprises, good or bad. My relationships live in an emotionally bland limbo. An environment with little joy, hope, or passionate love. A safe relationship. Seemingly safe for me but destructive to others.

This labeling leads to relationships without passion or expectation. Relationships with no surprises. Lifeless relationships. What am I doing?

This marks the end of my journal entry. Then…

This led me back to my creator, God. Does God label me?

God’s Word identifies humanity with these labels across both the Old and New Testaments:

• Created in His Image: Humanity is fashioned in the image and likeness of God, sharing attributes designed to reflect Him.

• Children of God: Believers are recognized and adopted as God's sons and daughters.

• Stewards and Workers: Humans are entrusted with responsibility for the earth, given work and a mission to subdue and care for creation.

• Priests, Prophets, and Kings: Roles describing humanity’s spiritual standing and authority within God’s kingdom framework.

• Husbands, Wives, Fathers, Mothers, and Friends: Relational roles defining human interaction within families, marriages, and communities.

• Servants and Slaves (Bond-servants): Describing our posture of obedience, service, and devotion to God rather than to sin.

• Disciples, Teachers, Encouragers, and Witnesses: Followers called to learn, share, teach, and testify to the faith.

• Sinners and Redeemed: Acknowledging humanity’s fallen disobedience while highlighting those who are made right and saved through faith in Christ.

These are God’s labels for you and me. They appear to me to be labels without limit. After all, we are created in God’s image. Why would there be limits? Unless…

How do you label yourself? And does this label drive how you label others, including your own children and grandchildren? Are you trying to make your relationships safe for you?

I need to ask God for wisdom.

10. I didn’t need God in my life. I was in charge, and I lived the consequences for the next 20 years.

9. I knew better than God.

8. It was my wife or me, the kids or me, God or me. Sadly, each time I chose me.

7. It took me 40 years to get to the end of myself and ask Jesus to be Lord of my life.

6. The belief is so simple I almost missed it: Trust God, not yourself. Why would I even want to go back to trusting me?

5. When God doesn’t have anything to say, get comfortable not having an answer. The break isn’t something you did. It is something He did.

4. God is not a screamer or a chest-poker. He is there all the time, waiting for me to be ready to listen.

3. God never called me to anything in my life that I failed at. I always succeed when I do God’s will for my life and rely on God to achieve it. Always.

2. He never leaves, but sometimes I leave him.

1. We have a relationship, but we are not equals. I am not god. He is God, and this simplified my life.

11. The first step to building a sustainable company is to build a sustainable life.

10. The best day of a startup is the first day. After that, it is all ridiculously hard work, and every day tests the entrepreneur’s character and resolve.

9. Stop planning and talking and start doing.

8. Starting a business is the beginning of opportunity, because market opportunities only come to people who are already in business.

7. Want my attention? State the problem first. I don’t care what you do until I understand why you do it.

6. Customers don’t buy slideware. They don’t buy an idea. They buy software.

5. Getting paid proves you found a need and are on your way to building a sustainable business. Anything short of payment is just interesting.

4. As the founder, you must do your own fundraising, because it clarifies your vision, sharpens your strategy, and builds your key investor relationships.

3. Once you take an angel’s money, you are married. You aren’t going anywhere, and neither is the angel.

2. Success will come. It just never comes in your time frame.

1. If I have learned anything in startup investing, it is this: People are everything. The people create value. The people hit goals.

10. It takes two years for the entrepreneur to be humbled: to move from “I know best” to “the market knows best,” from telling to listening.

9. We can’t know it all, and we are wearing ourselves out trying to get there.

8. Assume people want to help instead of being disappointed that they don’t. Help them help you by telling them, “I need help.”

7. Pride goes before the fall. In a fast-growth company, the management team gets ahead of itself and believes whatever it can envision can become a reality.

6. The limit of our success is defined by our ability to trust.

5. Write one more check or move on? What makes the decision so incredibly difficult is the money you have already invested, combined with your ego.

4. The early-stage investor isn’t in the market. The entrepreneur is. The entrepreneur knows, really knows.

3. Our importance is given to us by others.

2. I believed I was letting go. I thought I did, but I didn’t. I’m sure the people around me saw it. I didn’t.

1. My superpower is either controlled by God or me. When God has it, I am an encourager. When I control it, I am a discourager.

When I was young, I had energy and drive. Now I have experience and wisdom. So what advice would I give my twenty-something self?

1. Don’t drink and don’t smoke. Drunk people are embarrassing and pathetic. They are boring, not interesting.

2. Work out regularly and eat right. Stay fit so I don’t have to take care of you.

3. As you go through life, act your age, but don’t think your age. There is nothing worse than an old guy who acts like he’s forty.

4. Start riding motorcycles.

5. Stay interesting by getting out of the house and doing something risky.

6. Give yourself the opportunity to be bad at something new. Fail. It’s okay.

7. Force yourself to do the things you know you want to do but are afraid to try. This will make you less boring.

Watch the rest of my conversation with Christian Ries → https://youtu.be/kncKvi-yUmA

My sister was a feminist.

When Gloria Steinem was a Playboy Bunny at the NYC Playboy Club as research for an article series on women, my sister was a Senior at State Teachers College across the river in Jersey City. She was an English major, preparing to be a High School English teacher. But her real interests were in modern dance and painting classes. This was evidenced by her spending all her free time hanging out in Greenwich Village in NYC. This is where the free thinkers shared their counterculture philosophies. My sister, born in 1942, was primed for that thinking.

My father told my sister to go to secretarial school after high school. He expected her to be a secretary, meet a nice man, get married, and raise a family in Jersey City. Even as a Senior in High School, she knew she wanted so much more than that.

She wanted to be an artist, a creative.

She met people in NYC who talked to her differently because they saw her differently. These people, like her, saw the possibilities of changing the world through art and new ideas. She broke free of a society that was handcuffing her freedom of choice with its expectations.

My sister became a teacher after college. She lived at home and taught English at Roselle HS in New Jersey. Within a year, she befriended a physical education teacher. She was from Connecticut. She, too, had an alternative lifestyle idea. She, too, felt suffocated by her parents and community.

Within days of meeting, they found an apartment with a slanted floor and one window on a fire escape in West Greenwich Village. Just last week, this PE teacher, who is now 84, wrote to me and said, “I remember on Saturdays watching your sister sit in front of a blank canvas with a cigarette in one hand and a paintbrush in the other. She would be there painting all day.

They were living the life they chose, not the life their parents expected. They were living at ground zero of the feminist movement. They were there when this new movement was beginning to become a groundswell of change. Women in their twenties were looking for a leader. Gloria Steinem became that leader, their voice.

Being eleven years younger than my sister, I was influenced by her.

When I was choosing which High School to attend, she insisted I attend one in NYC. She wanted me to experience the mind-expanding rhythm and excitement of theworld’s biggest city. Cross the river. Get out of Jersey City and its parochial thinking. And my father caved, and I attended Xavier HS.

My sister left NYC for Miami just before my first day of school in NYC. This left me flying solo in an environment that was completely foreign to me as a fourteen-year-old. I joined young men from all over NYC and North Jersey who were stepping into something bigger. This was a college-preparatory school that taught us to think, to become leaders. The Jesuits were really good at this.

I visited my sister in Miami for two summers. It gave me the opportunity for good-paying work. It got me away from my parents and friends. It gave me a vision for what life might be like elsewhere. After I graduated, I attended the University of Miami. My life was changing. It was getting bigger by the day.

I commuted to the U. I couldn’t afford to live on campus. I slept on a couch for four years at my sister’s one-bedroom apartment. I figured out how to keep working a full-time hospitality job on Miami Beach while going to school from morning until night on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I had the economic need and the energy to pull this off and complete my degree.

Another story of my sister’s influence guiding me to a bigger life, a life beyond my parents’ expectations.

While working, I met a general manager who ran a multi-store retail TV rental business in West Germany. We connected. He liked me and saw promise. He asked if I would like to intern at his corporate office in Düsseldorf, Germany.

I consulted with my sister, and she said, “You have to do this.”

In one week, I secured my passport and was on a flight to Germany at twenty years old. When I landed in Düsseldorf in the summer of 19, I quickly realized no one spoke English. The frustration of not being able to understand people or express myself put me to the test.

My three years of German in high school were all I had to lean on. Within a month, and with the help of a few beers to give me confidence, I began speaking German. By the end of the summer, I was fluent. And it was there, at the corporate office, that I was exposed to accounting. When I returned for my Junior year, I switched to Accounting as my major. This experience was indispensable, life-changing, life-expanding.

This all led me to a Miami-based CPA firm, where I met Richard Brock, who was selling software to CPAs. He too saw promise in me. We became partners in his software company,y which was located in Mobile, Alabama. We were selling first-time automation to CPA firms nationwide. We moved the company to Atlanta to have access to the airport. Within four years, we sold the company. This radically changed my financial position and professional ambitions.

I was now running the software division of a publicly traded software company. I was traveling nationally and internationally. My world was huge.

To think all this happened because of my sister’s influence and encouragement. And she was influenced and sustained by the social movement called feminism, whose message was “You are free to choose who you want to be and what you want to do.” It was clearly directed at women at the time, but look at the influence one woman who embraced this movement had on me!

So, yes, Gloria Steinem changed my life.

And now at seventy-three, I see how all this wrkhow thisthis puzzle of success fits together.

All the people I knew who were successful left their childhood homes and communities and moved to another city or country.

Why is this?

We grow up with parents who have expectations for our lives. The community we are raised in embraces and promotes these expectations. Finally, society supports these expectations through government policies, businesses, and organizations.

An example is the secretarial schools that flourished in the 1950s and early 60s. Women who joined the workforce needed to learn to type, take shorthand, and serve men in business. These expectations created systems to support them.

The only way to break free of these expectations is to leave the communities practicing them.

This is what I observed in my lifetime. This is the common thread I see among the successful people I know. Leaving the community you grew up in is not the only path to success. But I do think it is much easier to break free of parental and community expectations if you are no longer part of that community. This takes a lot of vision, commitment, and courage. Moving to a new city is far easier!

Hosea 11:1-2

“When Israel was a child, I loved him,

and I called my son out of Egypt.

But the more I called to him,

the farther he moved from me

offering sacrifices to the images of Baal

and burning incense to idols.

When I was a child, Jesus loved me. He protected me and brought me along. Then slowly I began to move away from Him.

This morning, these verses reminded me of my story. Here it is.

In my early teens, I stopped following Him. I associated Jesus with religion, rules, and rituals. This was the teaching of the Catholic Church.

They did not teach relationship. They taught me to be dutiful and repentant. I came away thinking I was a continual disappointment to Jesus. And as such, I walked away. I was a young man who was so morally corrupt that I could never please Him.

This lasted for 25 years from age 14-39.

I came to the end of myself. I could not deny Jesus’ existence, that God existed. After 25 years, I had no way back. All I knew was church, and I was not one of those people. But my guilt remained. I could not stop being this heavy-drinking, immoral man. I was succeeding in business until I wasn’t. And I believed I was failing at life as a husband and as a father.

What am I to do?

At the end of myself, I saw only two options:

1. Keep living the way I was living.

2. Do something else, but what?

The transition, however, to Option 2 happened one night when I came to grips with how disgusted I was by my drinking. I came to realize that my drinking resulted in removing my moral boundaries. I came to the conclusion:

If I thought it sober, I would do it loaded.

I wanted to get off this treadmill. I needed help.

I reached out to a neighbor for help. Jim Biesecker. He invited me to A.A. I didn’t know it then, but it was the beginning of my journey back to God/Jesus Christ.

After six months in AA and abstaining from drinking one day at a time, my brain fog was lifted. I now had a clear head. I asked myself: Who is this God who did this miracle in my life? He took the desire for alcohol away from me. He brought me to the ‘who is this God?’ question. He then brought people, His people, into my life with the answer.

It was Jesus. The same Jesus who loved me when I was a child. The God I walked away from beginning at age fourteen. The one who I now discovered still loves me.

Redemption and Renewal

He made me a new man. There was no other way that this could have happened.

Thank you, Jesus, for this rebirth, this second chance at life.

I shudder to think where my life would be today (if I were still alive) if I had not believed in Him and followed Him. If His Spirit was not in me, leading me and changing me from the inside out.

As bad as I screwed up my life, Jesus never gave up on me.

These verses came true for me. God never gave up on me.

When the business and the marriage are both in trouble at the same time, which one do you fix first?

Click to watch the rest of the conversation:

1. 1. As an entrepreneur, know what you know and know what you don’t know. And never confuse the two.

2. Review your priorities. Stand for something that will endure the test of time.

3. If you don’t seek forgiveness, the defiance will continue. Face the victim and ask for forgiveness.

4. There, but for the grace of God, go I. This is humility. This is truth.

5. The three greatest temptations of life: Pleasure. Popularity. Power. Build a great life and company by not falling victim to these.

6. You are most vulnerable to making a bad decision right after a great success. Been there. Done that.

Click to watch the rest of the conversation:

What’s the best feedback you ever got — the kind that believed in you and still told you the truth?

1. God does not give a vision to be rich. He gives a vision to serve others.

2. Write your goals on paper. Do it for you. Your inner voice wants to speak to you. Ask and listen.

3. Listen. It is the essence of learning. It is the heart of understanding. It is the soul of the successful entrepreneur.

4. You are here to serve. This is leadership.

5. Be generous in your meetings. A generous spirit uncovers profound truths the hasty miss.

6. With experience, you get smarter. You’ve always had your instincts. Now you have the confidence of experience.

What’s the excuse everyone in your industry accepts without ever checking the data behind it? Watch my full conversation with Gregg on Inflection Point.

Something different happened to me while reading a non-fiction book yesterday.

I had a flood of ideas. I’ve read hundreds of non-fiction books. Most of the time it is just more information. But this time was different. Way different. But why?

My son David helped me figure this out. I was reading for a reason. Here’s the story.

We were on our way home from the mountains after an early morning motorcycle ride. We were on the tail end of a five hour, two hundred and twenty-five mile joy ride. David and I use our riding time to talk. We have a helmet-to-helmet intercom system that lets us talk to each other. It is a great time to have a long, rambling conversation while enjoying our ride and the beautiful twisties of North Georgia.

David said, “I am reading a lot of business books these days. They are filled with good ideas. Some I can apply now, and some maybe later. The problem I’m having is that there is just too much information. I can’t process it all or remember it all.”

“That’s funny. I thought it was me. As I get older, I just assumed my short-term memory was leaving me because I have the same problem. I read the book and then don’t remember half of it,” I said.

David continued, “I don’t think the problem is age-related. We don’t realize how much information we are processing every day. We are in overload. But here is what I started doing to get through more material and retain what is important to me right now.”

Then he told me his plan for more effective non-fiction reading.

1. Read the jacket cover, which provides the book summary and describes the author. Also, read the table of contents.

2. Write down the questions you want this book to answer.

3. Read the preface or first chapter. You are looking for a more extended book summary here. This may prompt you to add to your questions.

4. Read the first two paragraphs and the last paragraph of each chapter with a pen in hand. Write notes, ideas, and any answers you receive to your questions.

5. When finished with the book, write a one-page summary. This includes the answers to your questions and your summary of the book. Keep this with the book.

6. Keep the book in full view to remind you of what you read and learned. Just seeing it will be a reminder of its content.

7. Discuss the book and what you learned with a friend. When you articulate what you’ve learned, it will better stick with you going forward.

After hearing this, I said, “This is brilliant. Now I know why the book I was reading this morning gave me so many ideas. I am looking for ideas for the presentations I’ll be giving in a month in Uganda. I realize now that everything I am reading, watching, or listening to is helping me answer the question, ‘What should I present?’ I am reading for a reason. I have a question I must answer.”

“Exactly,” he said. “This is how this method of reading non-fiction works for me, too.”

Then he said, “My only concern with this is, ‘What am I missing?’ by reading this way. Since I am reading to answer specific questions I have on the subject, am I missing something else I am supposed to learn?”

“You won’t miss what you’re supposed to learn if you make your concern one of your questions. What am I supposed to learn from this author that I’m not looking for?” I said.

The principle here is simple and time-tested. When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.

(Later, while reflecting on this, I realized this is why school was so difficult for me. I was asked to read books I wasn’t interested in and read without purpose.)

Wherever I go, people are telling me about a great book they read on the subject we are discussing. If I am sufficiently interested in the topic, I write the book’s title in my notebook. Maybe I’ll order it, but I want to think about it first. Sometimes the person I’m meeting with is so excited about it, he’ll send me a copy. But most of those books sit in a stack on my reading table. This stack creates guilt.

Guilt no more

I learned something very important from this conversation with David. I don’t read the books because I’m not interested enough in the subject. I don’t have any questions I want answered. Or the questions don’t bother me enough to invest my time in getting them answered. That’s why the book is still sitting in my reading stack, unread. This student is not ready.

Are there any non-fiction books you would recommend?

If there are, this is what you are thinking about. This is your area of interest. This is what’s important to you at this time in your life.

For me, right now, I’m reading biographies. I want to read about lives well lived.

Here’s a two-minute video summary on how to read non-fiction books.

My answer is the same one I give every young father who comes to me worried about being a good dad. It sounds backwards until you see it work.

Watch the rest of this conversation.