Be True To Yourself

I have started to listen to an audio book called The Five Secrets You Must Learn Before You Die. I am up to chapter three in which the first secret is divulged. The basic thrust of the book is that some people when coming to the end of their lives are happy and content, and feel like they have lead a worthwhile and fulfilling life. Other people in the same circumstances are bitter, angry, and regretful about the course of their lives. The author maintains that the former group have developed wisdom, that they have worked out what is important and then used that knowledge to achieve their state. He then has set out to identify such wise people, interview them and from this take out what is the wisdom we really need to know.
The method used to identify these wise people was to ask 15,000 people to pick the one person in their life they considered to be happy and fulfilled. They received 1,000 responses and eventually interviewed 235 people from North America. They decided that all of those interviewed should be over sixty after some interviews as apparently all three of the interviewers could sense an increase in wisdom in general after the age of sixty.
This book relies on a number of assumptions. First, that wisdom is identical with being happy and fulfilled, the author even says that these two factors are in his opinion the basic drives of humanity (in contrast to Freud's pleasure/pain axis.) Second, that wisdom can be identified by the not-necessarily-wise. Third, that those over sixty are more likely to be wise than those younger than sixty, that is that people increase in wisdom rather than stay the same or decrease. Fourth, that there is wisdom that can be transferred from these older, wise people to younger, foolish people. Fifth, that this wisdom applied will result in bein happy and fulfilled. Essentially if you think that people identified by others as happy, fulfilled people over sixty know how people should live, this is the book to read.
I have some problems with those assumptions, in that basically I think they tend towards a correct position but are not axiomatic. I think you can be wise but unhappy, happy but without fulfillment, I think some people (perhaps many) become less wise over time (I think if you ask a six year old what is important in life you often get better answers than from a sixty year old), and I think it likely that there will be nothing in this book that isn't generally thought to be wise (I think we all know what wisdom is, the trouble is the practical aspects). But still, I bought this book for a reason as I think there is a lot to the basic premise.
By the way, in the preceding four paragraphs I think I pretty much gave every single important piece of information provided in the prologue and first two chapters, and then gave some analysis of it as well. The author has a tendency to repeat himself and find himself deep and important. He also seems pretty obsessed with death, harping on the urgency of finding all of this out because we could be dead at any point. His position seems to be that what really matters is how you feel about your life on your deathbed. I think it unlikely that that moment is any more important than any other moment.
So, Chapter Three finally lets us in on the first secret, Be True to Yourself. This is also referred to as Following Your Heart and Knowing Yourself. This is as far as I have gotten so far in the book and I wrote this post specifically because I wonder what this means? It seems to me trivially obvious that in order to be happy you have to know what makes you happy, and then do it. Likewise, if fulfillment actually matters then you should know what will make you fulfilled, and then do it. This isn't very helpful stuff. It seems to me that everyone knows these truisms, but the trick is working out what makes you happy, or fulfilled, before vast tracks of time have passed. How do you know yourself? What is yourself? How do you know when you know these things? What do you do if what is true to yourself, following your heart, is simply impracticable? There are many, many situations that I can conceive of that would lead me to feel happy and fulfilled, just that the path to get there would make me feel less happy than I am at the moment.
Finally, I have an issue with the author's belief that human beings need meaning in their lives, that they need a connection to infinity, that what they are and did mattered. I think that is something that lots of people want, many people find, but it also the antithesis of the philosophies of Buddhism and Hinduism (destroying the ego) the admonition of Jesus to be humble, and the wise teachings of the Tao Te Ching:

The Master stays behind;
that is why she is ahead.
She is detached from all things;
that is why she is one with them.
Because she has let go of herself,
she is perfectly fulfilled.

This is particularly true because there is no meaning other than what we make up. If you require meaning, but know at the base there is no meaning, this will lead to difficulty.

I hope the book continues to interest me, and if it does I will try to continue to post here about these five "Secrets", then you can be wise for $19.95 less than I.