Fortune‘s readers take life seriously as a project. You measure. You plan. You optimize. Let me speak to you in that register, and then quietly tilt the frame.

The exit nobody pitches me

Hardly a week goes by without a young entrepreneur telling me, with shining eyes, about the exit. The last round. The unicorn valuation. The acquisition that is going to change everything. I love their energy. I was once that energy. But I have started asking a question that lands, at first, as a joke.

Have you thought about your final exit?

Not the liquidity event. The other one. The one every founder on the cap table is quietly headed toward, and for which nobody has built a playbook. How will you make that exit graceful, dignified, peaceful? Is there a term sheet for that?

The room usually goes quiet. Because the honest answer is no — this question does not occur to anyone intoxicated by the wine of youth. It arrives, if it arrives at all, through a crisis: a sudden death in the family, a terminal diagnosis, an acute catastrophe that puts a hairline crack in the windshield through which one glimpses the road ahead. That is a very expensive way to acquire wisdom. There ought to be a cheaper round.

Careers as chapters, not as a staircase

We are taught to imagine a career as a staircase — junior, senior, executive, emeritus. But a staircase suggests meaning lives at the top and that the last step is a fall. In reality, a working life is a series of chapters, each with its own logic, its own vitality, its own way of asking who you actually are underneath the title.

The final chapter is not where the story ends. It is where the author becomes visible.

In every earlier chapter, we are so busy inside the plot — building the company, running the desk, closing the round — that we forget there is someone reading. Awakening, at any age, is the moment attention turns from the sentence to the reader. Nothing on your résumé disappears. It simply stops being the thing you mistake yourself for.

The wisdom that outperforms experience

Boardrooms respect experience — pattern recognition, worth what companies pay for it. But experience has a shelf life. Ask anyone who ran a newsroom in 2005, a taxi fleet in 2012, or a knowledge-work team the year before last.

Wisdom is different. Wisdom is what remains when your experience becomes obsolete. It is not a bigger database of situations; it is a quieter relationship with situations in general. The wise executive is not the one who has seen everything. It is the one no longer frightened of not knowing.

If you are in the second half of your career, this is the promotion nobody offers you. You have to give it to yourself. The package is excellent, and it vests immediately.

Personal finance and the arithmetic of enough

I am not a financial adviser and will not pretend to be one. But I have watched, at close range, many people who accumulated more than they will ever spend, and noticed something the spreadsheets miss. Money answers one question extraordinarily well — do I have options? — and every other question badly.

The great personal-finance mistake of successful people is not overspending. It is asking money to solve problems that are not financial: the ache of being unseen, the loneliness inside a marriage, the fear of irrelevance, the grief of a body aging on schedule. No portfolio has ever cured any of these. Yet we keep refinancing them into the balance sheet, hoping the next number will do the work that only awareness can do.

The final chapter is where you finally ask the question underneath the number. Not how much do I have? but what is enough, and what have I been buying instead of it?

Love, beauty, creativity — the underpriced assets

Fortune has spent nearly a century reporting on the assets that show up on balance sheets. I want to name three that never will, and that compound faster than anything on the exchange.

Love. Not the sentimental kind. The willingness to let another person actually matter to you, and to let yourself be seen. In the final chapter, the people you loved well are the only wealth that travels with you into the room where nothing else fits.

Beauty. The capacity to be stopped — by a sentence, a face, a slant of light across a conference-room floor. Beauty is not decoration. It is evidence that the world is not only a set of problems to be solved. Executives who lose the ability to be stopped tend to lose, soon after, the ability to lead.

Creativity. Not the industrial kind that fills product pipelines, but the deeper current that made you interesting to yourself when you were young. It does not retire. It waits.

The lesson under all the lessons

If you asked me to compress five decades of teaching, writing, and being wrong in public into a single lesson for the pages of Fortune, it would be this: freedom is not something you earn at the end. It is something you notice you already had, and mostly declined to use.

Every job I ever took, every book I ever wrote, every ambition I ever pursued was, in some quiet way, an attempt to earn permission to be at peace. The final chapter is where I stopped negotiating for that permission and simply took it.

So by all means, chase the unicorn. Build the company. Ring the bell. But somewhere along the way, plan the other exit too — the one where you leave the building not because you were pushed, but because you were, at last, awake.

The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.

Deepak Chopra’s new book, Awakening in the Final Chapter: Aging with Grace, Love and Freedom, is published September 8.