Pick Your Gummy Bear: Lessons from My Biggest Life Choices
An Invitation to Embrace the UnknownFrom muddy football fields in Belgium to a dot-com start-up in New York, from the heights of the Tibetan Plateau to the stillness of a meditation hall in Kyoto, Johan Depraetere's journey has been shaped not by caution but by moments of daring. He imagined these choices as reaching into a bag of gummy bears and pulling out the rare green ones: dramatic, bold, life-changing. Others were like picking a yellow gummy bear: quieter, softer. Yet each choice, whatever its colour, opened doors to possibility and growth.
Through twelve vivid, personal and honest stories, Johan shows how both subtle whispers and bold leaps pushed him beyond comfort and into a fuller, unbounded life - the thrill of stepping past the familiar. This is an invitation to recognise the inflection points in your own journey: the moments when comfort pulls one way and curiosity beckons another.
Pick Your Gummy Bear is your companion for those crossroads in life, when you pause and ask: Which gummy bear will I choose?
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Community Reviews
I am the author and think my first book is well suited for non-fiction book clubs.
The book is built from twelve true and honest stories spanning forty years and six countries, exploring the choices, bold and subtle, that shape who we become. It sits in the tradition of Oliver Burkeman and Alain de Botton: reflective non-fiction that takes ideas seriously without taking itself too seriously. It currently has 29 reviews on Amazon UK, averaging 4.9 stars and has been featured in Fast Company, the Belfast Telegraph and Business Impact Magazine.
The central idea: of all the decisions we make in a life, 99.9 per cent are maintenance. It is the remaining 0.1 per cent, often invisible at the time, that determine who we become. Some are bold, dramatic leaps (the green gummy bears). Others are quieter, a language course taken instead of an internship, a dinner bill paid in a particular way on a cold night in Seoul that became a marriage. The book maps both, and asks readers to look at their own.
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