Garry Fitchett

Garry Fitchett

Author of Life is a Bicycle - If You Stop Pedaling You'll Fall Off

A Living Philosophy to Finding your Authenticity

After graduating from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a master's degree in education, Garry Fitchett chose not to enter the teaching profession. Instead he followed his heart and became a business executive and eventually co-owned a business development company with his brother, John. Despite his business success, he longed to find deeply meaningful work that would allow him to display his authentic self. In March of 2012, after having sold his business, he embarked on a three-year intellectual journey in an effort to answer the riddle of how one goes about finding his or her authentic work. 'Life is a Bicycle' is the culmination of that philosophic journey, revealing the efforts of his research and self-reflection.

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The intuition - or maybe merely the thought - that the bicycle could be an illuminating metaphor for the act of work first came to me atop my bicycle in October 1991, while cycling around Lake Minnetonka in Minnesota. Finally, in the year 2002 I began to record my thoughts in a journal upon returning from cycling excursions in and around my family's new home in Williamsburg, Virginia. I listened and I wrote, while trying my best to understand the nature of my 'invisible engine' driving me toward something. I have many faults and flaws, but I am not a quitter. My anchoring thought that people are entitled to find and follow their most congenial work was surely congruent with the wishes of the heavens. After all, it's hard to imagine Nature's Creator ever experiencing a bad day of work. My vision for 'Life is a Bicycle' came to me with such force and repetitiveness, that I had no place to hide. Thus, I began the painstaking task of writing this book. I quickly grew confident that this was a large idea and I loved it. I soon gathered the knowledge and tools necessary to discover my work, and by extension, my life. It felt good to be finally throwing punches for something I believed in.

'Life is a Bicycle - If You Stop Pedaling You'll Fall Off' is really about finding your authenticity and living a life of which you can be proud. Since you spend so much of your life at work, finding your authenticity is centered on discovering the work you were elegantly engineered to perform. The American author Richard Bach said, "We teach best what we most need to learn." Finding my own authenticity was something I needed to learn. And I set out to learn this as I earnestly began writing this book in the spring of 2012.