Context & Resources

The Ideas Behind Pick Your Gummy Bear

One Saturday morning, on a long bike ride, I popped a few gummy bears into my mouth for a quick energy boost. As I cycled, I found myself thinking about the choices that had shaped my life. Some had been big and deliberate. Others seemed almost insignificant at the time. Yet I realised that in each of those moments, it was as if I had eaten a gummy bear, a small spark of inner strength that helped me step into the unknown.

That was the beginning of Pick Your Gummy Bear. The book tells twelve stories from my life. Beneath them are a handful of simple ideas about choice, courage, and the strange way life takes shape.

The 0.1 Per Cent: Choices That Change Direction

We make thousands of decisions: what to eat, which email to answer first, when to leave for work. Most of them keep the life we already have functioning. I think of them as the 99.9 per cent.

But every so often, we meet a different kind of choice, one that changes our trajectory. It might involve a job, a relationship, a country, or simply saying yes to something we would normally have declined. These are the 0.1 per cent: not necessarily the best or most rational decisions, just moments when one path becomes another.

Gummy Bear Moments: Moving Beyond Comfort

I came to call these choices gummy bear moments. A gummy bear moment is a choice, large or small, that moves us beyond comfort into possibility: a moment when courage, trust and experimentation replace comfort, doubt and control.

A gummy bear moment does not guarantee success, and it is not about being reckless. We tend to judge decisions by their outcomes, but life is rarely that simple. A choice can disappoint us and still change us. Sometimes what matters is not where a decision takes us, but who we become along the way.

Looking back, I do not see one magical gummy bear that determined everything. I see a whole bag of them, some obvious and some almost invisible, and for me they come in two colours.

Green Gummy Bears: Bold & Dramatic Leaps

Green gummy bears are the bold and dramatic choices, the ones we recognise as significant while we are making them.

For me, one came when I left my childhood football club to join the youth academy of a first-division team. Another was when I walked away from a well-structured job at P&G, and at thirty-two, I left investment banking to start my first company in New York.

Green gummy bears ask us to trade certainty for possibility, and they don't always work. My football dream failed, and my first company barely survived two years. But both taught me things I could not have learned by standing still.

Yellow Gummy Bears: Quiet Inflexion Points

Yellow gummy bears are the quiet whispers that turn into something bigger. At the time, they barely register as decisions. Only later do we realise that something important began there.

At college, I chose Spanish rather than German, even though German is close to my native Dutch. It seemed like a small decision. It led me to a summer in Santander that changed my life's direction.

Years later, at a dinner in Seoul, I decided to pay the whole bill instead of splitting it. I had no idea how much that small gesture would mean to the woman sitting next to me, who is now my wife. It remains my most subtle yellow gummy bear, and the one that has had the biggest effect on my life.

We like to imagine that life is shaped by our great decisions. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it comes down to paying a dinner bill.

“The Sound of the Genuine”: Listening Within

How do we know which gummy bear is ours to pick? Many years ago, I drew a colourful triangle and wrote inside it a phrase from the American writer and theologian Howard Thurman:

“The sound of the genuine.”

For much of my career, I was driven by external measures of success and, if I am candid, by a fear of not being good enough. That can be a powerful engine, but also a noisy one, loud enough to drown out what we actually want.

When I look back at many of my gummy bear moments, I can see that they were occasions when I listened, however imperfectly, to something quieter: curiosity, an instinct, a sense that one path felt more alive than another. The challenge is learning to hear it.

“Why Not?”: Living Without Regrets

In the summer of 1987, in a Spanish class in Santander, I learned a proverb that has stayed with me ever since:

“A vivir que son dos días.” 

Literally, “To live, which is two days.” I came to understand it in my own way: life is short, so live with no regrets.

Over the years, the proverb became a question. At various crossroads, one road led towards the familiar, with all its good reasons – security, logic, the sensible thing to do – and another disappeared into uncertainty. And then, occasionally, another voice appeared: why not?

Pick Your Gummy Bear is not an argument for always choosing the uncertain road, nor a formula for making the right decisions. It is an invitation to pay attention to the green gummy bears we can see, to stay curious about the yellow ones we cannot, and, when life places something unexpected in front of us, to ask, ‘Why not?’

Exploring Further: Resources & Reflection

At the end of each chapter, I offer a few questions for reflection, best left to sit for a while. Below you will find resources to explore the ideas further:

• Reflection questions and book club guide: the questions from each chapter, with discussion topics for readers and book clubs.

• Photography: on the Photos page, images from Wonderful Tibet and Lingering Clouds, the two exhibitions I describe in the book.

• Influences and recommended reading: books, talks and practices by Howard Thurman, John Gardner, David Whyte, Krista Tippett, and Brené Brown.

Your bag of gummy bears is always within reach.