You Have Arrived at Your Destination (Forward Collection, #4)

by Amor Towles

there was no better predictor of an earnings disappointment than a brand-new corporate headquarters.

A twenty-first-century fertility lab, Vitek had combined the decoding of the human genome and recent advances in behavioral science not simply to help couples become pregnant but to give them some influence over the intelligence and temperament of their child.

we’re going to push a few into the forefront and a few into the background. We like to think of it as genetic nudging.”

“The credit score was invented in the late 1980s by a mathematician and an engineer who realized that by analyzing historical patterns of consumer debt repayment, they could design algorithms that could predict an individual’s reliability as a mortgagee.

A second-act setback—in which, having started confidently along a particular trajectory, we come face-to-face with our own limitations.”

But our strengths don’t serve us well in every circumstance at every phase of our lives. As we grow and enter new contexts, our longer-term strengths can suddenly hamper our worldly progress, which in turn can create dissonance at home. When we find ourselves in that situation, eventually we have to confront the fact that the way we’ve approached life in the past is not effective in our current situation. Just as Daniel has to recognize that his good-natured predisposition, which served him so well in his youth, may not serve him as well when he is an urban professional in a competitive field.”

Rather than changing his behavior, he changes his context. He picks up his family and moves to a world where his virtues are more closely aligned with a path to happiness. We are who we are, right? There’s no point in pushing our personalities uphill.”

But our genes don’t merely express who we are. They contain all manner of talents from previous generations that we may not benefit from personally but that can be passed on to our progeny. So who was to say that he couldn’t father a son with the natural finesse of his old classmate?

It goes without saying that our lives are intricate and multifaceted. But they also tend to have a larger arc that takes us from a position of youthful self-assurance through a period of setbacks, leading to a third phase in which, if we’re lucky, we’ve confronted our limitations and become deeper people ready to lead richer lives.”