Becoming the Hero of Your Own Life

Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.

That’s the opening sentence from Charles Dickens’ most biographical novel — and my personal favorite novel — David Copperfield. The thing about favorite novels is that you often reread them, and with each rereading comes better understanding and new insights.

Over the last decade, I have realized that I have not been living as the hero of my own life. Personally and professionally, I have been the side character in the lives of other people.

Fixing that is what The Lost Pages Bookstore is all about.

Make no mistake, I love literature. Reading it. Writing it. Talking about it. A bookstore is a natural business decision for me, and I think I’m going to absolutely love being the proprietor of my little shop.

Opening this store isn’t just a whim. It’s not just a business venture. This is me turning 60 years old in 2026, looking back at my life and hating that my livelihood has been at the mercy of a string of bosses with other priorities since I turned 16 in 1982.

The Lost Pages Bookstore is me finally… FINALLY stepping out of the comfort zone of being a cog in somebody else’s machine and taking the reins of my life into my own hands. Success or failure will be on my own terms. No one else will get the credit or the blame for what I do in this store.

I’ll think about my freedom every time a customer walks through the front door. No more time clocks. No more dress codes. No more mandatory trainings or meetings just to have meetings. Just me putting great books into the hands of eager readers. And shelving and dusting those books, doing the bookkeeping, ordering inventory, vacuuming the carpets, creating displays, and cleaning the bathrooms.

I want to sign off with this message: Don’t wait to take control of your own life. Maybe that doesn’t mean working for yourself. That’s for you to decide. But do what you need to do — as uncomfortable as it might be in the short term — and make sure that you are the hero of your own life.