I am writing this from Alaska, traveling with my father, who is 85. Somewhere between Anchorage and Denali, I mentioned the car-buying advice he gave me decades ago, the one this essay is built on. He smiled and told me something I had never known: his father gave him the same line.
Three generations of being told to be ready to walk away. I suspect his father needed it through harder decades than mine, and I know it carried me through a December I would not want to repeat.
So I will ask what I have been asking myself on this train: what is the negotiation in your life right now where you have not actually defined your walk-away point? Not the feeling. The actual answer.
I am writing this from Alaska, traveling with my father, who is 85. Somewhere between Anchorage and Denali, I mentioned the car-buying advice he gave me decades ago, the one this essay is built on. He smiled and told me something I had never known: his father gave him the same line.
Three generations of being told to be ready to walk away. I suspect his father needed it through harder decades than mine, and I know it carried me through a December I would not want to repeat.
So I will ask what I have been asking myself on this train: what is the negotiation in your life right now where you have not actually defined your walk-away point? Not the feeling. The actual answer.