You Can’t Buy a Stairway to a Meaningful Life

What if one of the greatest rock songs ever recorded was never really about a stairway at all?

I have wondered for years if one of the greatest rock songs ever written was never really about a stairway at all. I think it might be about the way we choose to live before we ever reach the top.

I grew up on Led Zeppelin. Growing up in the seventies, they were unlike anything else on the radio, powerful, complicated, a little mysterious, hard rock that somehow still meant something. No song captured that for me like Stairway to Heaven. I have probably heard that song a thousand times over the years, and for most of those times it was just a great piece of music. Then I got older. I built a career, I lost people who mattered to me, and on January 15, 2009, I ended up in the Hudson River as the last passenger off US Airways Flight 1549. Somewhere in all of that, the song stopped being background noise and started meaning something different to me. That shift is really the whole idea behind my book, Moments Matter.

Robert Plant has spent decades refusing to explain what that song is actually about, and honestly, I think that’s part of why it still works. But there is one thread running through it I cannot unhear anymore. We spend so much of our lives climbing toward money, titles, recognition, the next achievement, and somewhere in that climb we miss the actual life happening underneath our feet. You cannot buy your way to purpose. You cannot buy back a day you already spent. You definitely cannot buy a conversation with someone after they are gone.

I learned that the hard way, twice, long before I ever set foot on that plane.

One of the most important mentors in my life was a man named Bill. He never just handed me answers. He shaped how I made decisions, how I treated people, how I saw the opportunities sitting right in front of me that I might have otherwise walked past. And then one day I sat down with him for what turned out to be the last time, and I had absolutely no idea it was the last time. Nobody ever tells you that in advance. There is no moment where someone taps you on the shoulder and says, pay attention, this is the one you will replay for the rest of your life. It was just an ordinary conversation, until years later I understood it wasn’t. I still think about whether I would have stayed a little longer, asked one more question, told him plainly what his influence had actually meant to me. That is the lesson underneath all of this. You rarely know the value of a moment while you are still standing inside it.

The second lesson came from people who were, quite literally, standing right next to me. My neighbors. I found out, well into knowing them, that they had survived a concentration camp. I remember being stunned, not just by what they had lived through, but by the fact that I had no idea. Here were two people carrying an entire history of survival and resilience, living a few feet from my front door, and I had walked past that story more times than I could count without ever knowing it was there. It changed how I look at people now. How many extraordinary stories are sitting quietly inside people we consider ordinary. How many lessons are sitting across the table from us at dinner, or in line at the grocery store, that we never bother to ask about because we are too busy looking at what’s next.

Then my own moment arrived, and it did not wait for me to feel ready.

I boarded that flight expecting a completely unremarkable trip home. A few minutes later, we were going down into the Hudson. I ended up being the last person off that aircraft, and for years afterward people mostly wanted to know what I did that day, what actions I took, what I said, how I helped. It took me a long time to realize that was the wrong question. The real question was what had already prepared me to respond that way, long before the plane ever left the ground.

It was not one seminar. It was not one book I read at the right time. It was not a single accomplishment I could point to and say, that’s the one that mattered. It was thousands of ordinary moments stacked on top of each other. Conversations with mentors like Bill. Things my parents taught me without ever framing them as lessons. Failures that stung at the time and successes that felt bigger than they probably were. People I had crossed paths with and mostly forgotten about. Small decisions made back when the stakes felt low enough that I barely noticed I was making them. All of it got stored somewhere inside me, without my permission or awareness, and when the moment came that actually mattered, that was what I had to draw on. Nothing else. Just what was already there.

That realization is the whole foundation of Moments Matter, and it is why Stairway to Heaven means something completely different to me now than it did when I was a teenager with the record spinning in my room. Back then I heard Jimmy Page’s guitar and Robert Plant’s voice and thought it was just great music. Now I hear something closer to a warning. Don’t confuse what glitters with what actually matters. Don’t get so locked in on reaching the next level that you miss the entire life happening on your way there.

You do not buy a stairway like that. You build it, the same slow, unglamorous way you build anything worth having, one conversation at a time, one relationship at a time, one decision at a time, one small act of kindness nobody will ever write about.

My last conversation with Bill mattered, even though I did not know it at the time. Finding out who my neighbors really were mattered. Every ordinary moment before that flight went down mattered, whether I recognized it or not. And the moments happening in your life right now matter too, even the ones that feel completely unremarkable while you are living them.

None of us know in advance which ordinary Thursday is quietly becoming the moment we will look back on for the rest of our lives. That’s probably the real connection between a song I first heard more than fifty years ago and a lesson I had to survive before I actually understood it. You cannot buy a stairway to a meaningful life. You build it, one moment at a time, whether you’re paying attention or not.