I bid him look into the lives of men as though into a mirror, and from others to take an example for himself.

Other people’s lives are the cheapest instruction available. Every path you might take is being walked somewhere by somebody a decade ahead, with the costs already visible: what the job does to a marriage, what the move does to friendships, what that appetite looks like at sixty. It is all there for the price of paying attention.

Choose two people this month, one whose life you would want and one whose situation you would not, and look at them honestly rather than politely. What did each of them do repeatedly, in ordinary weeks, to end up there? Copy one habit from the first and remove one from your own that matches the second.