For What It's Worth: In Search of a Good Life - Softcover

Inhaltsangabe

By any standard, I'd made it. I had the career, the money, the house, and the holidays to places that looked great on a postcard. A life that had a built-in filter. But sitting still on a beach was impossible. I couldn’t exhale. I had done everything the world promised would bring contentment, but I wasn’t content. And I had no idea what to do about it.

The day that changed everything was unremarkable. Another airport, another win, another flight back to London. I moved through the airport like a method actor, counting my bonus and holding my head high, but none of it was real. I was playing the expected role. Yet a voice began to whisper: pay attention. But pay attention to what? Everywhere I looked, people seemed to be in the same predicament. Using filters to gloss a deep dissatisfaction. Leaving that world wasn't immediate—it took time for me to muster the courage to make a change. Eventually I walked away from a twenty-five year career in finance not because I had a grand plan, but because I had no choice.

We are taught that the realization of a good life is an outcome—something you achieve first and enjoy afterwards. For What It's Worth argues that this approach is backwards and explains why so many achievers realize everything they’ve wanted only to feel unfulfilled. Contentment is not the reward for an optimized life; rather it is the starting point.

T. S. Cobb spent 25 years chasing the first version. He writes about the seven traits that allowed him to course correct: contentment, wisdom, belief, integrity, courage, discipline, and perseverance. Drawing on his own experience as well as on the lives of people who seemed to have found what he was missing, he offers a map along with a compass— but a compass whose true north can only be fixed by the reader.

None of what he says is new, and that is the point. It is a reminder of an alternative; one that redefines success. Cobb doesn't ask the reader to give up ambition or to turn away from material success. He provides the means by which a life can remain durable and grounded.

This book is for readers of David Brooks, Arthur Brooks, Oliver Burkeman, and Richard Rohr. Written from the other side of a life everyone calls perfect. It is short enough to finish in an afternoon, but one you are likely to reach for time and again.

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