Suzy Welch - 10.10.2010

SCRIBNER
A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020

Copyright 2009 by Suzy Welch

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address Scribner Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

SCRIBNER and design are registered trademarks of The Gale Group, Inc., used under license by Simon & Schuster, Inc., the publisher of this work.

ISBN-13: 978-1-4391-0172-8
ISBN-10: 1-4391-0172-8

Certain names and identifying characteristics have been changed and certain individuals are composites.

Visit us on the World Wide Web:
http://www.SimonSays.com

With love, respect, and gratitude,
I dedicate this book to the 10-10-10ers who shared
their stories of transformation

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 beautifulpoised and stylish too. I dont want you to get a Wild-Wild-West kind of impression of her. Its 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 Ive ever done.

I have four children. Actually, theyre not really children anymore. But theyre 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. Its OKtruly. Its a good reminder that they should have their own lives.

If I had a magic wand, though, Id 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 wont. And I guess thats 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 abouta new approach to making choices that will allow you to create a life of your own making, no matter where you were born, how youve spent your days, and what mistakes youve made along the way.

Its 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.

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

Nowplease! Im not suggesting that Ive got it all tied up in a bow. There are still plenty of times when I cant 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 todays 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 didnt. 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 wasnt 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 didnt 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 coupons 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 couldnt 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 trips organizer. The clients might be extremely demandingher words exactlybut my kids were extremely mature. They were practically little adults! The clients wont even notice theyre there, I promised.

Back home, I gathered Roscoe and Sophia into my arms. Were going on a wonderful adventure, I told them. Mommy has to work a little with some clients. But you wont even notice theyre 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 thoughta 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 didnt forget sunscreen. I over-remembered it, slathering ladlefuls on Roscoes 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 clients festivities that evening. To compensate, however, I immediately leaped into mingle-and-chat mode, introducing myself to everyone.