Trey Gowdy - Start, Stay, or Leave: The Art of Decision Making

I only remember two things from my wedding ceremony. I remember trying to take off my white gloves so my bride could slip the ring on my finger, even though she had told me no fewer than one thousand times she would slide it on over the glove. (Oh my heavens was she unamused.) The pain of that relatively poor decision did not last very long, though. It was the other thing that happened during the wedding that weighed on my mind for decades, and still does from time to time.

At the end of the ceremony, our wonderful and dearly loved pastor said, Now I present you with Mr. and Mrs. Trey Gowdy; he will be in the governors mansion one day, and she will be our first lady. I was twenty-four years old, one week removed from taking the bar exam, and had not even had my first legal job. But the expectation was set. A lofty one. In front of all of our family, friends, and acquaintances in the church we grew up in. It was an expectation that I could not imagine reaching. I wish he had said, Terri will be the governor one day, and Trey can be her first gentleman. That I could get behind.

On that day and for a season thereafter, I let someone else set the expectations for what my life should look like. Perhaps you would have viewed the comment as harmless fun, which it was. Perhaps you would have viewed it as a goal to shoot for and nothing more. I should have done that. But I did not. I let other people define what was success for too long in my life. And I spent many years chasing the fulfillment of other peoples expectations. This is not the only example of me allowing others to chart my course, but it is one I remember thirty years removed.

Some people die trying to meet the expectations of others. It is a lifelong sentence they submit themselves to. I was on that path. So, I want to ask you a question. The one I should have asked myself a long time ago.

What is the standard by which you judge a life to be well lived?

Some believe life is defined by their work: their career path, how high theyve risen in a company, or how happy they are in their job. Others would measure the quality of their relationships with friends and family. For some, the pursuit of education and the unceasing craving for knowledge drive a meaningful life. Or maybe the photo sections of our phones or our photo albums are really what tell our stories, revealing who and what we treasure.

For most of my life, I evaluated my significance by the type and quality of the work I did. I firmly believed that my life could be judged a success by othersif I could secure this job or master this set of responsibilities. Through work, so I thought, I could prove my value to the world.

On those frequent days when the jobs, titles, and responsibilities did not match the expectations I had setor let others setfor myself, my fallback marker was my relationships. I could rely on success by association, since many of my friends were more noteworthy than I was.

Admittedly, this is not an ideal way to navigate through life, but it is, candidly, how I operated for more than half of my existence.

I have come to realize that there is something larger that binds a life together. There is an inherent link among the jobs you take and the ones you dont, the people you befriend and the relationships you end, the schools you choose and the hobbies you pursue. Every one of those pursuits is initiated, nurtured, extended, or perhaps severed because of the decisions you make.

If you believe life is primarily defined by your career paths, think of the myriad decisions that shape that road. You have to decide which field to go into. You have to decide where to apply for work and which offer to accept. You have to decide when its the right time to leave a job and when its better to stay.

If you believe the essence of life is the relationships and friendships made, you have to make the decision to befriend someone else or make the decision to accept their offer of friendship. And for those relationships that we dont actively choosemothers, fathers, siblings, or our natural childrenwe decide how intimate we are with them through the course of our lives.

For those who conclude that life is what we learn, formally or otherwise, and how we educate ourselves, some decision precedes that bit of education: where to attend school, what to study, how hard to apply ourselves, what to study or read even after our formal education has ended.

Decisionsthese invisible underpinnings are the subject of this book. They are the building blocks of life. They touch every area of your life and they chart your course. I have found that if you excel at the art of decision making, you will undoubtedly craft a well-lived life.

I am not a psychologist or a career counselor. I am not a statistician or a fortune-teller. My only credentials are my half centurys worth of decisions made and not made, and the life that flowed from those decisions. I have placed some of the riskiest bets you can ever wager and I have succumbed to fear. I have won and I have lost. I have even lost by winning and won by losing. I have regrets and I have beautiful memories, and sometimes I have a hard time telling those two apart.

Through it all, I found that the most consequential decisions in life boil down to three simple questions, which Id like to share with you: Do I start? Do I stay? Or do I leave?

Experience is a wonderful teacher; its just that the course takes so long. Oh, to be able to go back and make the decisions of early life using all the knowledge and (possibly) wisdom I have now! Sometimes I look back at my winding path to divine whether I ever had a plan, or if my life choices were simply a series of reactions. Did I choose my course or did I allow othersor, more accurately, my perception of their expectationsto make my decisions for me?

I started working at the age of fourteen, delivering newspapers on a motorized bicycle at 5:00 a.m. Now, half a lifetime later, I deliver news on TV on Sunday nights and on podcasts on Tuesdays and Thursdays. You could argue that my life has been something of a circle, professionally speaking, although going to work at 7:00 p.m. in an indoor television studio is much better than starting my day at 5:00 a.m. on a moped being chased by dogs.