[What's the best advice you've ever received? Here's what 24-year-old CEO of GiveTide, Pete Ghiorse, posted on Quora. --Ari]

One day a few months ago, in the very early days of my business, I had a call with a man named Birju Pandya.

We began the conversation by exchanging “hello’s.”

Then Birju said, “Peter, before calls like these, I like to start with a minute of silence.”

“Oh…Okay!” I replied. There was something about the way he said it that caught me off guard. It was powerful and confident, yet calming.

Over the next 60 seconds, my thoughts would relax, only to be shaken by the fears and worries that dominated my thinking at that time in my life.

A minute later, “So how can I help you today Peter?”

Maybe it was that 60 seconds of silence. Perhaps it was my frazzled state of mind. Something about that moment made me feel comfortable. I felt it was safe to open up to this complete stranger.

So I did.

I told him how I felt burnt out, that the entrepreneurial grind was taking a toll on my sanity. I told him that I spent the majority of my day frozen, paralyzed by an insidious cocktail of opportunity, ego, and anxiety.

“Peter,” he said, “I’d like to tell you a story.”

Nearly 30 years ago, a man named Larry Brilliant was diagnosed with cancer. He was in his early 20’s, and had just graduated from medical school. He had wanted to be a surgeon. Though the treatment was successful, it took a toll on Brilliant’s body. Inspired by his recent brush with mortality, he decided to travel the world with his wife. For two years Larry Brilliant and his wife drove East from London. They eventually crossed paths with a guru in Nepal.

My ears perked up.

Brilliant and his wife spent another two years in the guru’s monastery, nestled high in the Himalayan Mountains. He meditated, studied the religions of the world, and swept the floors of the monastery.

I stood up and began pacing the room I was in, enthralled.

One day, Brilliant finished meditating to find the guru standing before him. His guru said to him, “It’s time for you to leave the monastery. You are to go down to Delhi and join the United Nations as a diplomat. You’re going to be a UN doctor, and you’re going to help eradicate smallpox.[1]”

Birju paused, allowing me to absorb what he had shared thus far.

Less than 10 years later, Brilliant and his team of 150,000 UN doctors celebrated the last case of Smallpox to scourge the Earth. The entire world celebrated with them.

The line went silent.

Do you know why I told you that story, Peter?

I didn’t answer for a long moment. Though it would take me months to verbalize it, one very important lesson fell into place at that exact moment.

I do.

And I did. Here was this Brilliant (Sorry, I love puns too much to let that one go) man who had managed to build great potential at a young age, only to have it ripped away from him.

I’m 24, which makes me almost the exact same age as Brilliant was when he set out on his journey. If Larry Brilliant, the man who would eventually eradicate Smallpox, spent his mid-20’s road tripping, meditating, and sweeping floors, how could I possibly take every minute of my own time so seriously?

I was so wrapped up in stressing and analyzing and expecting things in the future, that I had forgotten how to actually live life. I almost burnt out as a result.

Sometimes in life we reach a fork in the road. We spend so much of our energy and awareness distracted by noise, agonizing between “left or right.” But sometimes a night off, or a drink with a friend, is all it takes to realize that both paths cross just a few feet down the path.

Birju’s story was just the first domino in a complex series of events in my life at that point. I would go on to make serious changes in my life. They would be hard changes, but they would be good ones.

But all that would happen later.

In that moment, Birju and I finished a great conversation, and I was happy.

Footnotes [1] Transcript Of Larry Brillant's Remarkable Awakin Talk