Some days the news is loud, the work is heavy, and the path forward is unclear. The Sun Will Come Up Tomorrow: Finding Happiness at Life’s Stops Along the Way is for those days — and for the long game of building a life that holds together no matter what any single day delivers.
Drawing on a career that spans Navy submarines, executive boardrooms, and decades of guiding leaders through uncertainty, Jim Petersen, PhD writes a quiet, practical book about what actually makes a person whole. Not motivational slogans. Not five hacks for happiness. Just a clear-eyed look at the small handful of things that, taken together, change the texture of a life: perspective, gratitude, purpose, resilience, and the willingness to keep showing up when results don’t match effort.
What This Book Is About
This is a book about the choice you make first thing in the morning, before the world starts asking things of you. It’s a book about how to read a setback without letting it write you. About the difference between being knocked down and being defeated. About what people actually mean when they say peace — not as the absence of struggle, but as a steady relationship with whatever today turns out to be.
The Sun Will Come Up Tomorrow draws from real stories, leadership lessons, and a framework Petersen calls Life’s Stops Along the Way — the moments when life pauses you long enough to ask whether you’re still going in a direction that makes sense. Through five anchors — Perspective, Relationships, Purpose, Gratitude, and Resilience — the book gives you something to hold onto when the immediate situation tells you nothing makes sense.
Who This Book Is For
- Leaders carrying weight they can’t put down
- Anyone navigating a season when effort isn’t translating into outcome
- Parents, teachers, coaches, and mentors who guide other people through their own hardest seasons
- Readers who liked Stoic and faith-adjacent writing on resilience, but want it grounded in a working-life context
- People in transition — between jobs, between roles, between chapters of a life
You don’t need to be in crisis to read this book. You just need to be willing to look honestly at the difference between the life you have and the life you want to be living.
What You’ll Take Away
- A working definition of happiness that doesn’t depend on circumstance
- A way of reading hard days that keeps you in motion
- The five life anchors — Perspective, Relationships, Purpose, Gratitude, Resilience — and how to put each one to work
- A reframe for resilience that goes beyond grit and toughness
- A reset button you can press whenever the day demands one
Where This Book Fits in the Petersen Library
The Sun Will Come Up Tomorrow is the broadest of Jim Petersen’s books — a step out from leadership and into the wider question of how to live well. It pairs naturally with The Petersen Philosophy, the “life keynote” framework that builds on the Petersen Leadership Triangle and adds Happiness as a fourth dimension alongside Character, Style, and Judgment. Readers who came to Petersen through Who Let the Dogs Lead? or The Facts Don’t Matter often describe this book as the one they keep coming back to.
About the Author
Jim Petersen, PhD is a Navy submarine veteran, executive coach, and author of multiple leadership books including The Spirit to Soar, Who Let the Dogs Lead?, and The Facts Don’t Matter. He is the founder of the Professional Business Coaches Alliance (PBCA) and has trained thousands of leaders, advisors, and coaches across business, military, and athletic environments. The Sun Will Come Up Tomorrow is his most personal book — a wider lens on what it takes to live well, not just lead well.
If today is the kind of day where this book would help, today is the day to read it.
