Dear Blog Subscribers: Welcome to the Sort of Book Club of the Month. Sort Of … because I am only going to post a book review when I have actually read one that I like a lot. No matter how often that is. Which could turn out to be more or less once a month, since I read a lot of books. As you may know, I read a lot of different kinds of books so there won’t be any pattern here – other than they will probably all be non-fiction. The only kinds of novels I read are running novels, and even I understand this is a narrow niche … Here we go …
There is only one book that I listen to every year, and it’s good enough that sometimes I creatively extend my road trip so that I can keep listening. It’s called The Five Secrets You Must Discover Before You Die, and it’s by John Izzo.
I think we all have a fear that we will get to the end of our life and have regrets – regrets that we can no longer do anything about. I know that I do. And that fear more than anything else is why I read The Five Secrets in the first place, and why I listen to it every year. Izzo and his team interviewed over two hundred people before they wrote the book, from age 60 to age 106, and they were all people who were identified by others as “having found happiness and meaning” – two things in life that can be in short supply no matter what else you have. The book convinced me that there’s something even scarier than dying, and that’s dying with the sense that you never really lived. It turns out that wise people at the end of their life don’t regret their mistakes nearly as much as they regret what they always wanted to try but never did.
I’ve read a ton of books but only a few have actually changed how I live my life. This book is one of them. Ever since I read the book, I’ve made big life decisions differently. I think less about the risk, and more about the potential lost opportunity. I envision myself sitting in the proverbial rocking chair near the end of my life and I ask, “will I regret it deeply if I never took this chance?” I can’t say this has eliminated all of my fears. I still envision all possible outcomes before I decide to take a leap, including negative ones – and sometimes I obsess way more about what could go wrong than what could go right. But I can say I’m much more prone to take the leap anyway. And when things work out, well that’s great – and when they don’t, I once again learn something about the importance of getting back up off the ground.
I’m not saying the book really struck me with a series of “aha moments”. It was subtler than that, and perhaps better. The book has grown on me over time.
My favorite secret of the five is called Become Love. It seems to me that quite frequently even really, really successful people struggle with becoming love – with learning how to genuinely love others and accept love in return. It’s hard to think of anything at the end of your life more important than having loved well and having been loved. And that comes through from all of the stories in the book. In all the recent tributes to John McCain, what really stood out to me was how much he lived this secret.
The Five Secrets is a profoundly moving book but, beyond that, it’s also a really enjoyable book. It has some wonderful stories and anecdotes in it, many of them about funerals – which I suppose is a natural result of having interviewed so many old people. The best funeral story in the book is about the daughter who notices a woman standing by herself at her mother’s funeral. When she asks the woman how she knew her mother, the woman says “I am sorry to say that I didn’t.” The daughter is perplexed but keeps asking the strange woman why she came to her mother’s funeral. It turns out the stranger at the funeral had recognized the face in the newspaper obituary of a woman many years ago who had sat next to her on a bus and talked her out of committing suicide that day. That woman was the daughter’s mother. Attending her funeral was the stranger’s way of showing gratitude – the only way she had since she did not know the woman’s name until she saw the obituary.
In case you don’t get a chance to read the book, here are the other four secrets:
Be True to Yourself – “The greatest tragedy in life is to spend your whole life fishing only to discover it was not fish you were after.” Henry David Thoreau
Leave No Regrets – “To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.” Bertrand Russell
Live the Moment – “At its simplest, live the moment means to be fully in every moment of our lives, to not judge our lives but to live fully. It means we must not focus on the past or the future but experience every moment with gratitude and purpose.”
Give More Than You Take – “Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as I can before handing it on to future generations.” George Bernard Shaw
Reading “The Five Secrets You Must Discover Before You Die” can change your life – it did mine. In those kind of small ways that add up to big changes.
If you read it, let me know what you think. Thanks.
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