The Half-Known Life: What Matters Most When You're Running Out of Time

Virginia author Ryan Lindner earned his degrees in strategic leadership and organizational behavior and wellness from Liberty University and Virginia Tech and serves as Senior Project Manger for NeuroLeadership Institute, Federal Wellness Coach for Military OneSource, and is a speaker and organizational culture specialist.Powered by the impact of near death experiences (x 2!), Ryan has propelled his career into a mission to actually LIVE life, both for himself and for the many people and companies he coaches. “We all have this clock, but I can always hear its tick, the ever-present reminder to manage my energy as I walk the tightrope, always a misstep away from falling into my dark world again.’ Pulling back the curtain on getting a grip and living a full life opens this volume of shared experiences, contact with his ‘patients’ whom he counsels. Ryan states that this book ‘challenges conventional thinking about success, identity, and personal change…It’s about what’s real and exploring answers to the right questions, perhaps allowing you a different life perspective and helping you to take the first step toward change….Life is made up of countless tiny microdecisions about what is or isn’t worth your energy.’Ryan addresses our relationship with other people (connecting), with ourselves (perception), with the world, and with time, helping us consider what actually is important and what is often not important. Making those decisions, with Ryan’s guidance, results in a transformative experience in reading his book. He inserts Lessons from Near Death – such as ‘There’s no such thing as “work life” or “personal life.” There’s just life. Stop wishing it away as you wait for a better tomorrow that never comes.’ With a fine sense of immediacy and with skillful writing, he makes us stop, think, rethink, and change. ‘Be the guardian of your energy.’ This is one of the most exhilarating books to actually initiate that change from ‘being’ to actually living! Very highly recommended. Grady Harp, May 22

The Half-Known Life: What Matters Most When You're Running Out of Time by Ryan Lindner is a fantastic self-help book that is meant to help the reader take control of his life before it passes by. Ryan took control of his life after he suffered a near death experience. Since then, he has rethought his priorities and started to live his life to the fullest, and this book is his way of sharing that motivation with others. I really liked the message that we need to stop wishing for things to get better and start doing things that will make our lives improve. No one is going to do that for us, and we should not wait for something bad to happen to us or to someone we care about to try and make those changes. We only have one life, so we better live it and love it. The messages here were clear and the author writes in an easy-to-understand way. The formatting was nicely done which made it easy to move from one topic to the next. I think anyone who is struggling in their life, or thinking that the grass is greener somewhere else, would benefit from reading this.

The Half-Known Life: What Matters Most When You're Running Out of Time is a collection of lessons that the author, Ryan Lindner, has learned since suffering from cardiac arrest. Lindner, at the time young and athletic and otherwise building a successful life for himself outside of the small mundane things, suffered two cardiac arrests in what is still a mystery to doctors. From this experience, he provides wisdom from someone who has walked a path we hope not to.This book is definitely a trigger for looking at your own life more closely—your motivations and validations—and potentially changing priorities. I think I’ve glided through life and ended up where I am, like many people, and Lindner’s book is very thought-provoking for the everyday, average person.

This is an important book, written by a person with a unique perspective on life. It is as much a tome of venting as it is full of insight and valuable perspectives on life and the many lessons the author has learned as a life coach. This guy gets it. He sees life in all its soul-sucking foibles and failures. His clients feed it to him by the barrel, and he had tried to share some wisdom with us as he stands knee deep in his own challenges.There's a ton here, and perhaps that is the book's one short coming. The author's style is smooth, and he picks many wonderful quotes to emphasize his point. While the book is organized into well-defined chapters, I often felt overwhelmed or overloaded halfway through each chapter as the examples went on and on. It felt at times as if the author was falling into his own trap. Still, there's a huge amount of wisdom here that is much needed in the world today. My favorite was the chapter on relationships being interactions rather than transactions.I highly recommend this book for the insight it brings to our daily existence.

One take-away I got from this book is that “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel'', which the author quoted from Maya Angelou. A life coach, I believe, is someone that we look for whenever we feel that we need someone to help us put our life together. The author is a life coach with whom he has shared his experiences and at the same time has taught me ( and will teach you ) how to act now and not wait for a second chance in things. His experience empowered him to seek better experiences and live happier. It is an easy approach on the step by step process on how to put yourself together, at your own pace but with the guidance of someone who has experienced the same thing as you do, as I did. People are important, people matter and people will always be there for you when you need them, all you have to do is ask. I have learned so much from this book and will gladly re-read it to keep myself on track for the future that I want .