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Excerpts

INTRODUCTION

Before Sunrise

I was born in Portland, Oregon -- exotic Portland, as I like to say, since it always seems to get a laugh. I guess people generally think of Portland as bland.

Portland is lovely.

Except for the snakes. When I was very young, one found its way into our backyard, and as I knelt to examine it, my mother ran outside from the kitchen and killed it with a shovel.

My mother was very beautiful -- poised and stylish too. I don't want you to get a Wild-Wild-West kind of impression of her. It's just that desperate women do desperate things.

That I can assure you.

My father was an architect. Fifteen years after the snake incident, he taught me how to parallel-park in that way people do when they are engineers in their souls and understand physics in their brains, and are teaching people who are writers in their souls and understand poetry in their brains. We laugh about it now.

I spent every summer of my youth on Cape Cod, aboard a little boat, hauling in blues and bass by the cooler-full. For the record, and with God as my witness, I felt for the fish.

I went to college, became a journalist in Miami, watched the city burn twice, moved North, landed a job at the Associated Press, got married, went to business school, became a management consultant, and worked very hard to look like I knew something meaningful about industrial manufacturing.

I was later the editor of the Harvard Business Review, until I was fired. At the age of forty-one, I got divorced. It was the right thing to do. Three years later, I got married again. It was the rightest thing I've ever done.

I have four children. Actually, they're not really children anymore. But they're my children.

Not a one of them looks like me. Two are fair Nordic types; they look like Swedish farmhands. But even the two dark ones look like strangers by my side. It's OK -- truly. It's a good reminder that they should have their own lives.

If I had a magic wand, though, I'd use it to teach my kids everything I know with a little tap on the forehead. Because like most parents, I wish they could skip all the hard parts.

They won't. And I guess that's OK too. As the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky once observed, "Suffering is the sole origin of consciousness." Learning how to live from experience is part of the human condition.

Still, there is just one thing I wish I could teach my kids without all the blood, sweat, and tears usually involved.

How to make good decisions.

Simply put, that is what this book is about -- a new approach to making choices that will allow you to create a life of your own making, no matter where you were born, how you've spent your days, and what mistakes you've made along the way.

It's about a steady discipline that can help us replace chaos with consistency, confusion with clarity, and perhaps best of all, guilt with not-guilt, or to use another word for that condition, joy.

It's about an idea that changed my life and has transformed the lives of men and women around the world.

Now -- please! I'm not suggesting that I've got it all tied up in a bow. There are still plenty of times when I can't get out of my own way with my bright ideas and best-laid plans. And I know, too, that sometimes life is formed by chance or by events outside our control. Accidents and miracles happen. Of course they do.

But much more often, our lives are formed by decisions within our control, though it may not feel that way. In today's accelerated world, with its streaming information, confounding options, uncertain global economy, and ever-morphing culture, many of the decisions we face can seem unspeakably complicated, or as if there are just too many of them, in too little time. So we decide by not deciding or by letting our gut instinct guide us. We ask our friends for advice, consulting them like Ouija boards, or we look for signs, the way ancient people sought counsel in oracle bones. And we hope for the best.

Today, my life is renewed; my decisions deliberate, purposeful, and confident. But thirteen years ago, I was there, in that hoping place. Even with my credentials and accomplishments, my loving family, and dear friends, even with the affection and respect I was blessed to receive, I made many of my decisions as if I was watching them from a moving car. Sometimes things worked out. More often, they didn't. And my life showed it. It was fine one day or week or month, then crazy. It was tedious, then frustrating, then all wrong, then all right. It was happy and full, then lonely. It was moving forward, it was falling back.

I wasn't living my life. My life was living me.

Then came February 1996. I was in Hawaii, though not for a vacation. With a full-time job at the Harvard Business Review, four children under the age of six, and a rocky marriage, I didn't take a lot of vacations in those days. I was in Hawaii to deliver a speech to a convention of insurance executives who had offered to pay me a mortgage coupon's worth of dollars to enlighten them about the history of management.

My boss was thrilled about my trip. I was, as she put it, "getting the brand out there." But I knew that I couldn't leave my husband alone in charge of four kids. So I decided I could make it work for everyone if I brought my five- and six-year-olds along. Not to worry, I assured the trip's organizer. The clients might be "extremely demanding" -- her words exactly -- but my kids were extremely mature. They were practically little adults! "The clients won't even notice they're there," I promised.

Back home, I gathered Roscoe and Sophia into my arms. "We're going on a wonderful adventure," I told them. "Mommy has to work a little with some clients. But you it wwon't even notice they're there!"

With one clever plan, I had finally cracked the work-life balance code, all while putting money in the bank! Or so I had "decided." Hooray for me.

Hooray, it turned out, for the saintly flight attendant on our plane. Because she did not kill me when Sophia spent the entire twelve-hour flight demonstrating the use of those little white air-sickness bags. My poor lovely thing. She was green by the time we landed. Not to worry, though, I thought -- a few hours at the beach will do her a world of good. It will do wonders for all of us. Family time! Sand castles, body surfing, happy memories!

And sun poisoning. No, I didn't forget sunscreen. I over-remembered it, slathering ladlefuls on Roscoe's luminous Nordic skin and then covering him with a shirt, hat, and towel for good measure. Prudent mother that I was, I had turned my little boy into a convection oven.

Not surprisingly, what with the ice packs and soothing I needed to apply to stop the wailing, I ended up arriving late to the client's festivities that evening. To compensate, however, I immediately leaped into mingle-and-chat mode, introducing myself to everyone.

My approach seemed to be working well enough -- these were insurance executives after a day on the golf course -- but I did notice a group of people at the party who didn't really seem inclined to mingle and chat back with me. It wasn't the attendees themselves, but their wives. Perhaps they were wondering where my husband was. Or maybe they thought, correctly, that I looked as frantic as a woman who had two moaning kids up in her room and a speech to give the next morning.

Hours later, the party ended and I rushed back to the kids, staying up with them most of the night, as all three of us battled jet lag -- then each other. They wanted The Little Mermaid, I wanted the headline news. They wanted one more story about Nonnie and the snake. I wanted to close my eyes.

At 5 AM, to win the peace, I ordered ice cream for breakfast and, finally, sticky faces pressed close, we slept.

Not for long, though. At nine, I sent the kids off to a hotel-run hula dancing camp on the beach and dutifully donned my power suit. Then I climbed the stairs to center stage, and pointer in hand, spent the next hour marching my bleary-eyed audience through Frederick Taylor's four principles of scientific management, Max Weber's seminal insights into command-and-control hierarchies, and Peter Drucker's groundbreaking views on outsourcing. I may not have been exactly scintillating, but I was earning my keep, one PowerPoint slide at a time.

Until, that is, the very last moments of my speech when, gazing toward the back of the auditorium, I noticed that two little people were trying to get into the room, their bodies pressed against the sliding glass doors, hands cupped around their eyes to peer in all the more intently.

It was Roscoe and Sophia, dressed in hula skirts. They'd made a jail break and come to hunt me down.

Up on stage, I wrapped things up with a quick thud -- no Q & A as planned -- then bolted toward the back of the room to head them off. I'll never forget how they frantically grabbed my legs when I reached them, or how the insurance executives who caught the scene regarded me, eyebrows raised high.

Yes, yes, I realize now that I should have packed my bags at that point and headed home. But in my make-everyone-happy, I-can-freaking-do-it-all mind, I still had twenty-four hours to go. I promptly decided I would spend the rest of the day scuba diving with the kids, tire them out, put them to bed, then show up at the client's luau ready to charm until sunrise if need be.

I didn't count on the saltwater making Roscoe shriek or the luau actually lasting until nearly sunrise, by which time I was decidedly not charming. I was confused and exhausted to the point of weepiness. At one point, I even put my head down on a table and shut my eyes. When I opened them again, I saw a client-wife looking down at me with a mordant grin. "You working mothers," she said, voice dripping with vinegar, "I don't know how you do it all."

"Just smoke and mirrors," I blithered.

"Your husband must be very patient," she responded archly.

"Oh, he most certainly is," I assured her.

With that big piata of a lie hanging between us, the client-wife wandered off. Eventually, I wandered off too, to my room, bedraggled. I sent the babysitter away and collapsed into a chair on the balcony. A glorious, big golden sun -- just like in the postcards -- was lifting toward the creamy blue sky of morning above.

I didn't know it at the time, but a new day was indeed breaking.

"I have to end this craziness," I heard myself saying. I might have fallen asleep for a moment there, or I might have just zoned out. My consciousness was fading in and out like a cell phone call from a mountain pass. "I have to figure out another way," I muttered.

I don't know what happened next, or why, and I probably never will.

Perhaps I had simply reached the point where change had to happen; no alternative remained. Or maybe that trip was the last factor in the equation of experiences that added up to some nascent form of judgment, or vision, or understanding. Maybe I simply received a gift. All I know for sure is that, as the sun rose over the sea, an idea came into my mind.

It was a lifeline and my lifesaver from that moment forward.

It was the beginning of a journey of discovery and reinvention that I took myself, and that we are about to take together.

It was 10-10-10.

Suzy Welch 2009