You Can Check Out Any Time You Like, But You Can Never Leave

Welcome to the Hotel California. Welcome to the next four years—2025-2029.

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You’ll need action plans that are more thoughtful and detailed than any planning you did until now. Face it. Most plans are wishes without accountability markers and no preparation for harsh consequences.

The next few years will be rough. Not possibly. Will be.

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If you want to benefit from practical steps and wisdom assembled from the best thinkers surrounding me for the past 40 years, you are welcome to look at my playbook.

One of the greatest advantages of my life was the opportunity to spend days in rooms full of big thinkers. A majority of professionals will experience one or two life-shifting workshops, retreats, strategic planning sessions, or immersion training incubations in a year. Because I served as the facilitator and story-creating journalist for multiple national organizations every week, I often found myself surrounded by exceptionally talented leaders with breakthrough ideas that took everyone’s breath away.

At moments of high density of genius dialogue, I was glad for my training as a journalist, to listen, take notes rapidly, and absorb every nuance and ounce of wisdom.

On the plane ride or train back home, I rapidly filled bound journals with a narrative of what I learned. I created order out of the emotional high of high-density dialogue to capture the useful steps people can take to not just succeed, but endure when things get shaky or go sideways.

Those bound journals of great wisdom and brilliant thoughts fill two shelves in my library. That’s a lot of thinking and thousands of handwritten pages. Thanks to technological advances in the past 40 years and the introduction of personal knowledge management tools and principles, I’ve increased the value of all of those hours of listening, interviewing, and note-making into immediately accessible answers for problems or unprecedented situations.

I stopped giving advice around age 40 when I realized nobody wanted more information. Instead, what people wanted more was transformation. They wanted the stories from my notebooks. They wanted to develop their own lens for every lesson learned so they could create physical and mental action plans that fit their situations and concerns.

Here’s my playbook to navigate the next four years. Let me know in the comments or by email if any of this lines up with your present situation.

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Practical Steps and Wisdom for Living Playbook

Funny or die—Laugh as much as you can and when you feel like it. Find something humorous even in stupid, but not life-threatening, situations. Science shows people with a strong sense of humor live longer and have stronger immune systems.

Make the fancy china and crystal your everyday place setting. Stop waiting to enjoy the finer things. Nobody wants your heirloom china from three generations. Save money by not buying another set of everyday dishes.

Tell your partner you love them every night before falling asleep. Someday the other side of the bed will be empty.

Grief and love go together. The joy of unconditional love comes in the same package as the pain of loss. You do not pass through grief. It sticks with you as much as the love does.

Treat your body like a house you must live in for another 50 years. Regular maintenance is better than periodic remodeling or drastic makeovers.

Keep your mind sharp for the long haul. That means learning about metacognition (thinking about thinking) and doing mental exercises that cause you to notice your brain health, instead of shuffling through life in repetitive, mindless mode.

Talking louder and repeating yourself works only in emergencies when you are guiding people to safety. Raising your voice and pounding your point rarely works or resolves anything.

Find awe. The best of life is with people and things that make your eyes sparkle. Happiness is overrated and people get miserable by chasing it. Awe is better than happy.

If you don’t have a plan then you are a pawn in someone else’s plan. You need a purpose to stay in control of your potential. Understanding agency and how the mind works can help you distinguish between average and rare. High-agency people create their goals and pursue them without permission from another. Low-agency people pursue the goals someone else assigned them because their minds do not see other options.

Getting old is complicated, challenging, and frustrating. You are no longer who you were and your best days are right now, in the present, and in the grace you give yourself to think large while living one day at a time.

Who you love and who loves you matters more than what you do. As important as your life work seems, the people you are serving and the relationships that support you matter the most.

Work on relationships constantly because time and changes bring in new people who are eager to meet you for the first time while you experience shedding old relationships like a snake sheds its skin—to become what is next for you in life.

If you are confused about priorities, here’s the formula. First, work on yourself—your health and your communication skills. Second, work on relationships, including family, friends, colleagues, and everyone in your network. Third, work on the thing that captures your identity (the name of your profession or job) and earns money. If you do a poor job with the first two priorities, the third one will forever frustrate and disappoint.

When you meet someone, do whatever you must to remember their name. Always say their name. Your name is the first thing you were given when you came into the world and it is the only thing you take with you into death.

When you start a relationship or meet someone again, always begin by finding out which of the three things they want from you: Your help, to be heard, or a hug. Never assume any of the three—ask. Do they want your advice or do they want you to listen to them? Sometimes they don’t want advice or any words—they want a hug.

Everyone likes to feel smart. Why argue? You may win the argument and lose both a friend and your credibility. What’s the point of that?

Think about what you don’t want more often than thinking about striving for ideal lifestyle. You learn only when your mind is hungry to adapt and evolve so that there is less pain and fewer problems. Think about the worst things that could ever happen that you never want to experience and describe them in detail, in writing. Add pictures, graphs, and visuals to make the anti-vision clear. Because your mind is hardwired for survival, then everything you do will propel you to great success, once you get honest with yourself on the anti-vision and permit yourself to step into the unknown, defeat your demons, and figure things out.

Why always matters more than how. Humans desire to create, expand, and transcend. Title and roles are distractions and abstractions. Artists fulfill creative needs. Nurses want to help others. Writers pursue mastery of human experiences and transcendence. Always start with why. Find the one thing you can’t pull yourself away from and constantly experiment with it and grow with it. Skills and AI, in particular, matter only when you are sure about your why. That is what you were meant to do and where meaning happens.

Money is only a relationship. If you never developed a relationship with money or you don’t know why you need it and it needs you, the relationship is unhealthy. Learn the difference between value and money. Value is a measure of how many people support and care about your creations. Getting paid for the amount of work you do makes no sense. Getting paid for the value you provide matters and that’s how reality works. Money is not completely evil. The person possessing money may be evil. The reality is you can make as much money as you want to and at the same rate as your creative level plus your ability to form bonds with people who support your goals. It’s a myth that you can do everything by yourself. Wherever there are two or more people, there is progress and there is money.

Credit LangrangeHerve from Pixabay

The single best predictor of people’s happiness is the depth and breadth of their social connections. The single biggest risk factor for humans is the growing amount of time people spend alone. Loneliness was never easier to find than right now in our digitally connected world. Choose connections and none of this needs Wi-Fi access: Connect with the natural world. Connect with family, friends, neighbors, and colleagues. Connect with history and traditions. Connect with community groups, in person. Connect with spiritual values. Connect with music and art. Connect with everything a computer can’t provide, including love, trust, empathy, and kindness.

Do you feel like you're on the edge of something amazing and you just can't figure out what it is? That's where I come in. My name is Georgia Patrick. I work with curious, intense, understanding professionals—still in practice and retired, to tap into their full potential and get extremely clear on their gift (their value) to individuals actively seeking such wisdom. It starts with an email. Maybe, later, a short call to make sure I understand you.

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