Surely you didn’t expect me to turn 40 without getting philosophical on ya.

I turn 40 in a week, and today I’m gonna get philosophical.

First: Mis-spent youth.

Everybody has some.

In my case, I wasn’t into the party scene and never spent a single night drinking myself into a stupor. (Although Laura did take me to the bars for my 21st birthday and I had a Moscow Mule and a Sex on the Beach and couple of other drinks and I did have a hangover the next day. I said, “never again”…)

Nah, my mis-spent youth was my Amway pink koolaid days. A subject I have written at length about, which I won’t repeat here.

But that leads me directly to my point which is:

Every day you trade your youth for experience, wisdom, and hopefully some kind of asset.

Experience is experience. Means nothing unless and until it’s transformed into wisdom by some serious reflection about what you actually learned. Mine it for all it’s worth.

Sometimes the only asset you have from doing stupid things is wisdom.

It’s reward enough, IF you fully employ it going forward. (Most people don’t, by the way. They just medicate themselves with a movie or something and get up the next morning and do it again.)

How do you gain discernment?

In my experience, you plunge into the gray areas of life; you do the very best you can, you still make mistakes, you get banged up, and you assess what you’ve learned.

Discernment is your reward for untangling what *really* happened and getting to the core principles of why an endeavor succeeded or failed. Discernment is the ability to recognize the difference between the principle and the technique; between the apparent reason and the real reason.

Once you start to “get it” you begin to trade every day not just for experience and wisdom, but for some kind of real tangible asset.

Obviously that asset could be money but it could be other things too. One of my favorite tunes is “Time and Motion”, an obscure Rush song, it says:

Time and motion
Wind and sun and rain
Days connect like boxcars in a train

Fill them up with precious cargo
Squeeze in all that you can find
Spontaneous elation
And the long-enduring kind

I for one am especially interested in “the long-enduring kind.”

One of the assets that I value much more than I used to is deep friendships. I remember one time about 4-5 years ago, thinking “I’ve got a lot of colleagues but I don’t really have very many friends.”

I wondered if that was OK or not.

Later, some mid-life turbulence hit and I realized, “Um, no, that is not OK.”

I am happy to report, the state of my close friendships is much healthier now than it was then.

Case in point: I’ve got my own list of Facebook Friends, and I find the news stream of daily minutia hardly interesting. I hate small talk and I couldn’t care less about the fact that Sophia has joined the cause, “Citizens against The Proposed Tollway Expansion.”

I’d much rather go deep with 2 or 3 people.

If I had a wish for you, it would be this:

That at your next milestone birthday, you’d be able to say to yourself:

“If I could go back and do it again, I wouldn’t, because I wouldn’t trade the wisdom I’ve accumulated for anything. I like being the age that I am, right now.”

Fill that train with precious cargo, my friend.

When my affiliate manager Jack Born put together this birthday bash I’m doing, we obviously had the intention of selling something. And of course we are.

But one of the things we hoped to accomplish was to put some hard-earned marketing wisdom into some affordable packages and that’s what we’ve done. In particular, I think the Gold package is nothing short of a kick-ass value. And it gets taken away April 10 and will never be offered again.

Get some of my accumulated, hard-won wisdom super cheap before the April 10 deadline:

http://perrymarshallbirthday.com/

Perry Marshall

About the Author

Perry Marshall has launched two revolutions in sales and marketing. In Pay-Per-Click advertising, he pioneered best practices and wrote the world's best selling book on Google advertising. And he's driven the 80/20 Principle deeper than any other author, creating a new movement in business.

He is referenced across the Internet and by Harvard Business Review, The New York Times, INC and Forbes Magazine.