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

by Amor Towles

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.

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.

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.”