Hi! Welcome to chapter 1.3 for those who skipped right here from the beginning since they were too impatient to understand what values are and what they are not. You missed a lot of good stuff, but I don’t want to waste your precious time any more. Here we go, the secret to success revealed! (Oh boy, you’ll be so disappointed noticing you have to go back to what you skipped.)

1.3.1 The secret to success!

How would you define “success”? Now the wittiest of you think that the point I’m trying to make here is that there can be as many definitions as there are people answering. True, for Samantha success might be earning 1 million dollars, for Samuel it might be winning the Champions’ League, for Khaleeb it might be becoming a famous rock star, but that was not my point.

People have a tendency of thinking that becoming successful in life is a certain point in time when some explicit goal is reached - and hopefully maintained for a longer duration of time. In my mind, however, it’s much more a question of the process than the results. From Samantha’s point of view the real success might be the exhilaration, challenge and bold decisions that lead him (yes in Sri Lanka it’s a male name) to his goal. From Samuel’s point of view the success factors could be for instane teamwork, physical endurance and joyous love-life. How about Khaleeb? Depending where Khaleeb is from, the road to stardom might include the support, feedback and financial benefit through winning the American Idol (if he’s from USA) or maybe the days of rejoice after buying his first acoustic guitar with the money he got from selling his cow (if he’s from Pakistan).

What does this all have to do with values? And where’s the friggin’ secret to success? Here:

Being able to lead a life according to your values makes you successful every day.

That’s it? Oh crap! I’ve wasted all this time to finally read one sentence that sounds like something that I’ve been deleting from my email account all this time since I could not unsubsribe from www.quoteoftheday.com due to a technical failure!

Let’s take a step back. Why do you think so many football players move to coaching career once their active years are over? Love for the game is what they say in the interviews but deep inside it’s exactly their values that they can live through the game. Why do you think Gene Simmons is still licking those dirty old guitar strings at the age of 58? Most likely a band that is the third biggest commercial success (KISS) in the history when it comes to record sales - let alone the productized paraphernalia - doesn’t need to work for their pension money anymore. In come the values: “thrills”, “musical enjoyment”, “fame”, you name it. How about Samantha who happened to become the latest web-millionaire overnight? Do you really think he’ll stop his entrepreneurial career and move to Bahamas? Living your values equals success.

1.3.2 Why reading self-improvement books makes you miserable

Good news and bad news coming your way. What do you want to hear first? The bad news is that 95% of the self-development books and how-to guides are useless. No matter how extensive your library of those are they are rarely worth more than the paper they are printed on - yet the author of “I became a millionaire, you can too” might have become one just because you bought the damned book. There’s more. Once you buy the lies in those books and get inspired for about two weeks without really changing your life you just feel more miserable. So, you better find those 5% or use your time for something else. Of course it’s not that black and white. Even in the case of a bad book (the 95%) your pay-off is usually more than not reading anything at all. As long as you maintain a critical eye you will find an idea or two that will take you forward in life.

The good news is that this is not one of those books. If you are willing to put in some effort on personal reflection, the following chapters can work for your benefit. I’m not even aiming to give answers but instead just lead you to the source of happiness through value-driven life. Those values are not in this book but within you (unless they are exactly the same as mine, which I doubt).