To my daughters, to make much of time

About a year ago, I started writing a book called How to Quit Your Day Job. I have not finished it yet, because, um, I have not yet quit my day job.

Well, I have and I haven't. I am self-employed, having left my job of seven years to be a full-time actor on the Fox TV show Prison Break. But once that gig ended, I returned to my former employer as a freelance consultant.

But whatever. The point is, I was writing this book. I have great ideas about how other people should focus their lives and careers. Other people. But me, not so much. I am Mr. Career Schizophrenia. I never want to feel like I have left money on the table by walking away from a business opportunity. Having multiple talents is a blessing and a curse. It certainly makes it easier to make a living, but makes it harder to focus on any one thing (at least for me).

And focus is, in my humble opinion, perhaps the key ingredient to insanely great success. Everything else is distraction, period.

So, back to the book. As I wrote the book, it evolved from just a simple career guide to a more "how to live your life" guide, thanks to my conversations with friends and colleagues who were undergoing the same mid-life career crisis that I was: trying to find their true calling and go after it, despite the wife, kids, and mortgages.

During all the introspection inherent in this process, I realized that there are really only three (3) things that I need my daughter to learn about:

1. Health
2. Spirituality
3. Money.

That's it. Everything else is an offshoot of one of those three. What's more, my faith in the public school system's ability to teach these things (heck, to teach anything!) is rapidly eroding. I earned three degrees, including two master's degrees. I understand what college does and does not do for you. Most of what my daughter needs to learn will come from her mother and I, not school.

Well, if we are going to teach her, I realized, then we need a textbook. Aaaaaaaaand, we're back to the book. The book, currently titled Notes to my Daughter: How to have the life you want, is what the book has evolved to.

Recognizing that I am not supremely qualified in all (any?) of the above areas, I have enlisted the help of others whom I consider to be experts. Some of them may be famous, others not, but they are all people whose opinions I respect, and so I have distilled and included them in the book.

Hopefully it will prove a lot more useful to her than analytic geometry did for me.

UPDATE: Since writing this post, we've been blessed with a second beautiful daughter, Madeleine. So Notes to My Daughter becomes plural. We'll test everything out on Danielle, and then Madeleine can benefit from the second edition. ;-)