An ultra mini-series adventure

in 30 minutes and in eight episodes.

Episode one, The Call to Adventure.

Before we begin, let me just establish the fact

that I don't know much relative to what I need to know.

Whatever success I've had in life

has more to do with my knowing how to deal

with my not knowing than anything I know.

That I should be telling other people what to do

sounds kind of presumptuous to me.

But I'm going to do it because I believe

that the principles that have made me successful

could help other achieve their own goals.

I'm now at a stage in my own life

in which it is much more important to me

to pass along what I've learned about how

to be successful than to seek more success for myself.

What you choose to do with these principles is up to you.

You have to be an independent thinker because only you can

develop your own principles based on your own values.

This brings me to my first and most fundamental principle

which is that you need to think

for yourself about what is true.

So let's get started.

Early on, I've discovered I needed principles.

Principles are smart ways for handling things

that happen over and over again in similar situations.

There are principles for everything.

From skiing, to parenting, to cooking, and so on.

I'm going to share some of my most important

overarching life principles that influence

how we approach everything that we do.

I didn't start out with principles,

I acquired them over a lifetime of experiences.

Mostly from making mistakes and reflecting on them.

My life principles are simple but they're not complete.

I still struggle to make the best decisions

and I still make mistakes

and learn new principles all the time.

This is the reality.

At the beginning, I needed to escape

the conventions that surrounded me

which meant that I needed to think for myself.

Unless you want to have a life that is directed by others,

you need to decide for yourself what to do

and you need to have the courage to do it.

But I didn't know that at first.

I only learned that from going on my adventure.

Looking back on my own journey,

I now see that time is like a river,

that carries us forward into encounters with reality

that require us to make decisions.

We can't stop our movement down this river

and we can't avoid the encounters.

We can only approach them in the best possible way.

In your lifetime, you will face millions of decisions.

The quality of your decisions

will determine the quality of your life.

Over the course of my lifetime,

the most valuable things I've learned

were the results of mistakes I've reflected on

to help form principles so I wouldn't

make the same mistakes again.

These principles took me from being

a very ordinary middle-class kid

from Long Island to becoming very successful

as judged by conventional measures.

They also gave me the meaningful work

and meaningful relationships that I value even more

than these conventional successes.

People often ask me how I did it.

I can assure you it wasn't because

of my uniqueness as a person.

It was the result of a unique approach

to life I believe almost anybody can adopt.

It starts with embracing reality and dealing with it.

In episode two, I'll explain what that means.