The Secret to Life
By Michael J. Zappa, MD, FACEP
Comprehension of the secret to life starts by knowing the facts of life. No, I am not referring to where babies come from! I am talking about the indisputable facts of life - the exciting reality of birth and the inescapable eventuality of death. When most people think of life, they are envisioning what happens between these fixed points of birth and death. Not only is the distance, or time, between these two points uncertain, so is the kind of life one will have. Neither the situation you were born into, nor your current circumstances dictate who you are or what you can do with your life; it is completely dependent on what you choose.
Simply stated, the secret to life is choice. Where each of us are currently is a result of the choices we made, not where we started. Imagine two equivalently successful professionals, one born into a family that was able to sacrifice and help them with cost of a professional education, while the other, coming from an equally supportive family just could not afford to help their child pay for their professional education. Each of these individuals had choices to make: the first one deciding to commit to a professional career, and then deciding to excel at their studies, the second one making the choice to pursue a profession, and deciding to sacrifice their social life to work while attending school in order to succeed. Today, both individuals are in the exact same place.
We are faced with choices every day, from seemingly small ones to obviously major ones. You choose your attitude, you choose the easy path or the challenging one, you choose to just do something or excel at it, you choose what to devote your time to. Wouldn't it be great if we made the perfect choice every time? We are human, so that's not possible, but as intelligent humans, those less than perfect choices should help us make better choices going forward.
