The Life Lessons from Choose Your Own Adventure Books

Greg Thomas
2 min readMay 21, 2024

As a kid, Choose Your Own Adventure Books were a staple of any book sale — you had to pick up one — it didn’t matter what the content was, if anything I remember leafing through the contents to see how many twists and turns there might be, because that’s what made the book that much better.

Not finding the one route, but finding the multiple routes, finding the failures, avoiding them, and the paths to success.

Somewhere in my parents' basement, there are a stack of them lying around collecting dust.

So many of those books are ingrained in what we do when trying to solve problems.

You can go down the wrong path and start over

You went through seven, maybe eight, twists and turns and you ended up where? A dead end? Fell off a cliff? Got cornered by a monster.

Start again, avoid the pitfalls you just faced, and do it again.

What’s that the monster cornered you AGAIN?

Get back out there and try again.

You are never successful the first time

How many times did you actually get the success to pass on your first time through?

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Greg Thomas
Greg Thomas

Written by Greg Thomas

Software Architect, Developer, Author and Leader helping organizations build scalable software delivery teams and implement cloud-based solutions