Why Splendid?

Once in a while, a line stays with you because it holds an entire idea without effort. One of mine comes from a decades-old movie: How many ten years do we have?

In early 2025, I was working through a hard question — whether to restructure the business I had spent thirty years building. The easy path was to stay exactly where I was, running the company I love in the same capacity. I had chosen that path several times before. I would have been content, and ten years on, somehow unfinished.

Safe, and increasingly uncomfortable.

How many ten years do we have?

At my age, not many. Not even many five years.

So what did I want the next five to look like? How did I want them to feel? The questions kept circling like the pinwheels in my garden — spinning, going nowhere.

Sometimes it takes a while to find the right word for a feeling you are already carrying.

I wanted something boundless and joyful, something reaching beyond how I had lived so far.

Meaningful. Awesome. Excellent. All beautiful words; yet insufficient — I had felt them before. I was looking for something I had not yet lived.

It came on a routine morning walk under the brilliant desert sky. Splendid.

It has a soothing, exuberant quality — quieter than awesome, deeper than excellent, more radiant than meaningful. Like a warm family drama, it carries weight without being heavy.

Around the same time, I found myself drawn to a singer 9,000 miles away, from the world I had left half a century ago. It was his story, his perseverance, his artistry. I thought my grandchildren could learn from the way he taught, on and off the stage. Somewhere inside that thought was a book.

I had not written one in twenty-three years. I did not expect to write another, though the thought never entirely left. It moved through my peripheral vision like a hummingbird — there, then gone. And, in the way of all deferred dreams, there was always a reason to defer it again.

Then the word and the dream found each other.

Part of living my five most splendid years, I realized, was finishing what I had set down.

That became Inspiration from 9,000 Miles Away, the founding book of Five Most Splendid Years™ — and an artifact of the philosophy it describes.

Splendid may sound like an old-fashioned word to some. To me, it feels fresh.

It carries no obligation, no measuring stick.

It does not ask to be earned or explained.

It asks one thing: whether you feel alive, and whether the years ahead are worth saying yes to.

[Say Your Yes ] [ See the Book ]