At one point in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell notes that regrets are simply illuminations that arrive too late. In the past few years, I’ve had some ups and downs. And, in the wake of that, I’ve had countless illuminations, as well as more insights and moments of growth than in entire decades prior. But, happily, I don’t think those are arriving too late.

Today, I turned 39. And, at least based on good family genes and the best estimates of actuarial tables, I’m hoping to have a whole second half of my life ahead of me. Which is why I’m feeling particularly optimistic this birthday. I’ve been considering today a pivot, the point after which the years ahead are open vistas of possibility. And I’m looking forward to decades of putting those new-found, hard-won insights and illuminations to good use.

If you, like me, were a teenager in the 90’s, this should hit close to home:

It’s all that and a bag of chips.

In a brilliant parenting move, my mother used to let my brother and me sell her as much of our Trick-or-Treating haul as we were willing to part with. At a cost of what couldn’t have been more than $20 all in, we gleefully handed over at least half of the candy collected, reducing the odds of both our developing childhood diabetes and our making her totally crazy from weeks of sugar-addled antics.

Still, candy sales paled in comparison to the more crucial candy swapping: trading terrible stuff with friends who had poor candy taste, and who’d give you something you actually wanted to eat in exchange for pointless crap like Almond Joy and Mr. Goodbar.

So I particularly enjoyed this helpful instructional video, on how to trade candy like a pro:

When I started elementary school at Ohlone, it had just inherited an acre or so of weed-ridden, fenced-off land at the very back of the campus, which the students called “no-man’s land.” A few months into the year, the staff decided to put the space to use, converting it into a small farm.

Each class elected a representative to the ‘farm council’ to help with planning, and I was elected from the kindergarden class. Kids, parents and teachers cleared out the weeds, and laid in plot markers. And then, class by class, we planted collective plots. I was hooked from that first year, planting carrots, lettuce, herbs. I remember pulling radishes from the ground, rinsing them off and eating them raw. I didn’t even like radishes at the time, but I couldn’t help but relish something I’d planted and grown myself.

Throughout elementary school, my love for the farm deepened. I spent my free time studying seed catalogues and gardening manuals. When I was in third grade, I planned out an elaborate drip irrigation system, which the school later purchased and installed. I served on the farm counsel every year, and, by the time I was in sixth grade, was appointed honorary ‘farm historian’, and ceremonially given a key to the farm.

But what I loved most about the farm were the animals, which the school slowly accumulated. By the time I graduated, the farm housed ducks, goats, potbellied pigs. And, nearest of all to my heart, chickens.

I’m not sure what it was about the chickens that I loved so much, but I found them endlessly fascinating; I could sit with them happily for hours on end. To this day, my mother reminds me that when she washed pants or jackets I’d worn to elementary school, she’d have to empty handfuls of chicken feed from my pockets.

One spring break, with new chicks just out of the incubator, I convinced my parents to let me take the dozen of them home, to roam in our fenced backyard rather than stay at the farm alone over the vacation. Several of the birds had terrible intestinal distress, trailing diarrhea everywhere, but my parents were remarkably game about it; I remember my father hosing the patio down, while talking on the phone with the farm’s vet to make sure we didn’t need to do anything but wait it out.

Each year, the farm would have a parent-child farm work day, when helpful hordes would descend, spades and power drills in hand, to fix up what we could. After just a few years of use, the chicken roost the school had purchased initially began to fall apart. So at one year’s work day, my father suggested that we make a new chicken roost from scratch. I remember shopping for the wood – a trunkful of 2×4’s and dowels – and then learning to use various power tools under his watchful eye as we pieced together an elaborate setup. At the end, we soldered in an inscription: Newman & Sons Chickenworks.

About fifteen years after I graduated, my father got a call from the then principal, who had previously taught me in third and fourth grade. After long use, that roost was in need of repair or replacement, and he had remembered our bringing it in. He wanted to see if we still had contact info for the Chickenworks. Laughingly, my father explained that we were it, then shared the plan we’d used so that a new parent-child duo might build the next generation’s.

I still think about that farm occasionally, and I’m proud of the hand I had in getting it up and running. But whatever impact I had, I’m sure it’s had a far bigger impact on me.

Growing up in Palo Alto, most kids attended one of a dozen neighborhood elementary schools. But parents also had the option of sending their kids to two ‘choice’ elementary schools.

One, Hoover, was extremely structured and disciplined; if the class was doing math, everyone was open to the same page in the same book working on the same problem at the same time.

The other, Ohlone, was the complete opposite. No tests, no grades, no homework; kids learned in mixed-grade classes, called teachers by their first names, and met in small seminar groups with the teacher for part of the day while self-supervising project and problem set work the rest of the day.

I went to Ohlone.

As a result, by the time I headed off to Yale, I still couldn’t place all fifty states on a map. (Seriously.) But I had mastered the kind of learning I’d be doing at Yale, and the kind of work I’d be doing thereafter running companies.

As the old saw goes, I really did learn everything I needed to know in kindergarden.

Courtesy of my parents, a birthday look back at where it all began:

As Jess points out, while I don’t yet look like myself at a day old, I do by a year; by a year and a half, I’m apparently already more or the less the guy I am today.

When I was two years old, on my first day of preschool, the teacher asked if I’d like some apple juice and crackers.

“Actually”, I replied, “I’d prefer a croissant.”