Messages to My Younger Self

Abstract

This chapter offers the reflections of a late-career scholar working on private entrepreneurship in the public interest. The author imagines what she would say if she could reach back in time and offer advice to her early-career self: Figure out what is important about what is changing in the world. Know yourself as a scholar, citizen, and educator. Know what is going on phenomenologically in deeper ways than what may be discussed in the news, or even contemporaneously in the journals. Once you do this, then try to contribute constructively as best you can to peaceable, responsible, satisfying, prosperous developments on the things that are important to you. Drop everything else.