What often distinguishes fulfilled from unfulfilled lives is an ingredient that's not part of the educational curriculum,
and that can sound vague, silly, and Californian in the bad sense.
Confidence
It's humbling to realize just how many great achievements haven't been the result of superior talent or technical know-how,
merely that strange buoyancy of the soul that we call confidence.
Why is confidence so easy to lack?
Partly, it's a hangover from the past.
For thousands of years, for most of us, there simply were no opportunities for hope:
we were serfs and slaves,
and the central psychological survival skill was to keep our heads down and our expectations low.
Each of us still carries a little of the legacy from that past,
an attitude of inner serfdom that threatens our spirit deep into a democratic, technological, modern age.
Hope can feel dangerous.
There might, in addition, have been parents who sent out subtle messages:
"People like us don't." "Who do you take yourself for?"
We should feel compassionate about where those defensive parental messages came from;
they were a protection, a survival strategy, and an escape from humiliation.
School didn't necessarily help either;
it wanted us to be good boys and girls, and taught us to trust in established authority.
But we may, naively, have gone on too long, putting too much faith in existing institutions,
and now suffer from doing whatever is asked of us a little too obediently.
Part of becoming an adult seems to be to embrace the painful realization that
grown-ups don't actually have the answers,
and therefore, that we have every right, indeed a duty, to break certain rules and think things through independently.
We need to learn a calculated form of disrespect,
which can be a surprising thing after twenty years or so of enforced obedience.
We need to learn a constructive suspicion of authority:
a path between total compliance on the one hand, and sullen skepticism on the other.
In addition, confidence seems to involve a courage to accept imperfection.
It's tempting never to get going when everything has to be perfect,
but that's a recipe for remaining under the bed,
and yet, how often so-called "great lives" have been riddled with errors, that nevertheless, didn't sink them.
Confidence begins with a capacity to forgive oneself the horrors of the first go.
Death is a necessary thought too.
We should use it not to further sadden us, but to scare us, fruitfully, into taking some action.
Our fear of messing up should give way to the only real danger there is: that of never trying.