The choice that makes a good story isn’t always the one that makes a good life.

Stories reward drama, and drama is mostly things going wrong in interesting ways. A life rewards something duller: sleep, people who stay, work you can keep doing. Those two scoring systems disagree far more often than anybody admits, and the decisions that sound best in the retelling are often the ones that cost somebody a year.

When you notice yourself picturing the telling of it rather than the doing of it, pause there. Ask which version you would want on an ordinary Wednesday two years from now. Keep the stories that happen on the way to something, not instead of it.