A J Thorne
When did you stop deciding where
your life was going?
For me, it felt like a fucking car crash.
Not because I'd lost my job. My marriage hadn't fallen apart. There wasn't some great tragedy or dramatic rock bottom.
On paper, my life was fine.
And then, almost out of nowhere, came a thought I couldn't shake:
When did I stop deciding where my life was going?
I realised I'd spent years doing what needed doing. Working. Paying bills. Raising a family. Dealing with whatever was in front of me.
I'd been busy. Responsible, even.
But somewhere amongst all of that, I'd stopped taking hold of the steering wheel.
And once I'd seen it, I couldn't unsee it.
So I started trying to work out what the fuck had happened — and what I was going to do about it.
That's what AJ Thorne is about.
Not having life figured out.
Taking responsibility for where it's going next.
Maybe you know the feeling.
That was one of the harder things to admit.
I hadn't spent years making terrible decisions. Quite the opposite.
I'd made sensible ones.
I'd thought about what my family needed. What was expected of me. What made financial sense. What was secure. What other people would think was a good decision.
And none of those things are wrong.
The problem was that I'd done it for so long that I'd stopped asking a fairly important question:
What do I actually want?
Not in some selfish, fuck-everyone-else sense. I have a wife, children and responsibilities. Their lives matter enormously in the decisions I make.
But mine matters too.
I'd somehow built a life that made sense on paper, and that other people would probably look at and think I was doing alright.
I just wasn't sure how much of it I'd actually chosen.
That was a difficult thing to see.
It was also where things started to change.
WORKFAMILYMONEYSECURITYEXPECTATIONRESPONSIBILITYME
THE BETTER LIFE
☐ Wake up at 5am
☐ Perfect morning routine
☐ 90-day transformation
☐ Follow the diet
☐ Build better habits
☐ Be more productiveWhose life is this anyway?
Once I'd realised how I'd got there, the obvious thing was to look for answers.
A better routine. A 90-day plan. A diet. A morning ritual. Someone successful telling me which habits to build, what time to get up and what my priorities should be.
But eventually something occurred to me.
That was the same fucking problem.
I'd spent years allowing other people, expectations and circumstances to shape what my life should look like.o
Replacing all of that with somebody else's blueprint for a better life wasn't taking back control. It was just choosing a different person to hand it to.
So before I could change anything, I had to work out what my version of a good life actually looked like.
What mattered to me.
What kind of husband and father I wanted to be. What I wanted from my work. What enough looked like. What I wanted to get better at. What I was willing to sacrifice for — and what I wasn't.
I'm still working on it.
And that's why I'm not here to give you my blueprint.
I don't know what your life should look like.
I want to help you define it for yourself.
I'm not here with the answers
The more I started talking about what had happened to me, the more I realised I wasn't the only one asking these questions.
Other men had their own version of it.
Different lives. Different circumstances. But that same nagging sense that somewhere along the way they'd stopped choosing and started reacting.
I thought maybe my story could help.
Not because I'm a guru, an expert, a therapist or someone pretending to know the answers to your problems.
I'm just a man who found himself asking some difficult questions, worked through them as honestly as I could, and found something that helped.
That's what became From The Wreckage.
It's my story, the things I had to confront, the principles I decided I wanted to live by, and the exercises I used to work out what I actually wanted my life to look like.
I'm not standing in front of you pointing towards the answer.
I'm standing shoulder to shoulder with you, facing the same problems.
Maybe what helped me will help you.
Maybe it won't.
But if you've found yourself asking some of the same questions, I think it's worth finding out.
From The Wreckage
From The Wreckage is the result of me trying to make sense of what had happened — and work out where I wanted to go from there.
I talk honestly about the point where I realised I'd stopped actively choosing my own life, what I discovered when I started pulling that apart, and the principles I eventually decided I wanted to live by.
But this isn't just my story.
Throughout the book there are questions and exercises designed to make you stop and look properly at your own life — what matters to you, what you've been tolerating, what you've been avoiding, what you actually want, and what needs to change.
There's also the creed I wrote for myself: a set of principles for the man I want to be when life gets noisy and it's easier to drift again.
It's there as a guide. An example of what I did.
You cannot take my rules and apply them to your life.
If you're looking for something that easy, you're in the wrong place.
But if you're willing to sit with some uncomfortable thoughts, shine a light on the places you've kept in the shadows, and really look at yourself in the mirror — imperfections and all — then this might be for you.
I'm not promising it'll transform your life in 30 days.
I'm not going to tell you what time to wake up, what to eat or what your priorities should be.
The point is almost the opposite.
It's there to help you work out what YOUR life should look like — and start making your decisions accordingly.
Build YOUR OWN creed. One that's specific to you, your life and the man you want to be.Because nobody else can decide what that life should look like for you.At some point, you have to take hold of the steering wheel yourself.£14.99
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