The Little Prince

A pilot crashes in the Sahara with eight days of water. While he's trying to fix his engine, a small boy with golden hair walks up and says: "Please, draw me a sheep."

This isn't entirely made up. Saint-Exupéry was a pilot himself. In 1935 he crash-landed in the Libyan desert and he and his mechanic nearly died of thirst before a Bedouin found them. In 1943, living in exile in New York, he wrote this little book. The following year he took off from Corsica in a reconnaissance plane and never came back.

The little prince comes from an asteroid no bigger than a house, with three volcanoes and one proud, needy rose. Fed up with her moods, he leaves home and visits a string of tiny planets: a king who only wants to give orders, a vain man who only wants to be admired, a businessman busy counting stars because he believes he owns them. Every grown-up is deadly serious. Every grown-up is ridiculous.

Then he reaches Earth and finds a garden with five thousand roses, every one exactly like his. He cries.

That's when a fox appears and asks to be tamed.

Love isn't something you pick. It's something you grow with time. The fox explains that the prince's rose is unique not because she's prettier than the others, but because he watered her, sheltered her and listened to her complain. I think of this whenever people talk about finding their passion. We want to find the thing we love first and then commit. But often the love only grows after you commit. Your favorite dog isn't the cutest dog in the world. It's the one you've spent the most time with.

Don't decide in the third hour whether it's your rose. With anything you might come to love, don't only wait for love at first sight. Leave room for the slow kind. Be a gardener: keep watering the same patch of ground, and look back in ten years to see what grew.

What grown-ups lack most is the ability to see what's invisible. The drawing at the start that adults mistake for a hat is actually a snake that swallowed an elephant. It's a book for children, but the people who really need it are the adults who've forgotten they were ever children.

Read it again if you've been asking yourself what you actually love, or if it's been a long time since you spent hours on something useless. As a kid, it's a fairy tale. As an adult, it's an answer.

It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.