The Art of Achievement

The book is organized around these The 7 Cs of Success: Conception, Confidence, Concentration, Consistency, Commitment, Character and a Capacity to Enjoy. Powerful stuff.

Now, it’s officially time to look at a few of my favorite Big Ideas!

The first of The 7 Cs of Success tells us we’re gonna have a hard time rockin’ our most authentically awesome lives unless we have a clear Conception/Vision of what that ideal looks like. Reminds me of a few of my favorite teachers and their mojo on happiness.

First, Jonathan Haidt, a leading positive psychologist who wrote the brilliant Happiness Hypothesis (see Note) who tells us: “Aristotle asked about areté (excellence/virtue) and telos (purpose/goal), and he used the metaphor that people are like archers, who need a clear target at which to aim. Without a target or goal, one is left with the animal default: Just let the elephant graze or roam where he pleases. And because elephants live in herds, one ends up doing what everyone else is doing.”

And, Stephen Covey in his classic 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (see Notes) tells us: ““Begin with the end in mind” is based on the principle that all things are created twice. There’s a mental or first creation, and a physical or second creation to all things.”

And, finally, Robin Sharma, who gives us this goodness in his wise fable The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari (see Notes): “All I’m saying is that to liberate the potential of your mind, body and soul, you must first expand your imagination. You see, things are always created twice: first in the workshop of the mind and then, and only then, in reality. I call this process ‘blueprinting’ because anything you create in your outer world began as a simple blueprint in your inner world.”

So, it’s clear we need goals, but Morris points out that we need the *right* goals.

Too often, “success” books get us all hyped up about how we can “manifest” (I have an allergy to that word :) shiny stuff if we just visualize it long enough but they usually don’t stress the importance of setting *appropriate* goals. (And, often the importance of actually taking action.)

So, what are the right goals?

Morris talks about the importance of trusting our intuition and knowing that if it looks too good to be true, it probably is. He also says: “I recommend to people who feel they have no goals that they make a list of their likes and dislikes, because I firmly believe that our likes and dislikes, our loves and hates, our attractions and aversions, are often the keys to our talents, signs of what we are here in this world to do. They can also be signs of our deepest values.”

When I talk about goals, I like to differentiate between “Bling” goals and “Being” goals.

Bling = All the fame/power/wealth/bucket list stuff most traditional success books get us all geeked up about.

Being = What actually leads to happiness: Developing virtue while creating a life of meaning as we strive to see how we can use our greatest gifts in greatest service to the world.

As Tom points out later in the book, when we focus on our deeper purpose and aligning with The 7 Cs of success, the “bling” of fame/wealth/power, is, at best, a side effect or by-product of creating an otherwise extraordinary life.

He also has this genius wisdom: “One of the great modern ailments of humanity is the enslavement to illusory pursuits… If we get the prize, it strangely fails to satisfy as promised. If we fail in our quest, we feel unnecessary despondency. We’re oddly depressed about not getting what would not have satisfied us if we had managed to snag it. And then, all too often, we just begin a new and equally illusory pursuit.”

The solution? “The meaning of life is not to be found in having lots of money, fame, prestige, or stuff. It’s to be found in living your proper quest of positive achievement. Make a difference in the lives of other people, make a difference for good, create new relationships, new feelings, new structures of goodness in the world by what you do and who you are, and you will feel in that process what we so often seek with such futility in all the wrong places. The right sort of quest can be enjoyed at the deepest possible levels.”

* queue chorus of singing angels as I step up on a soap box *

In his incredible book, Mastery (see Notes), George Leonard tells us that our society is in an all-out war against mastery. From get rich quick schemes to magical genies telling us that our wish is their command, we’ve somehow missed the fact that true success and true greatness only come through diligent, patient, persistent (and playful) effort.

So, as Morris points out here, although visualizations and positive self-talk and all that jazz are awesome, our success is built on the foundation of our sustained effort and diligent work.

In other words: “To build confidence, build competence.”

Love that. Morris talks about Aristotle and his virtuous mean of courage—which we’ve discussed a number of times throughout these Notes. I’m bringing it up again because a) it’s cool and worth repeating; and b) he makes an added distinction with the virtuous mean of confidence that I’m excited to share.

So, as we’ve discussed, Aristotle tells us that if we want happiness, we need to live with virtue and that virtue is the mean between the vices of deficiency and excess.

We can map the virtue of courage like this:

As Morris says, a coward is blinded by fear whereas a rash person is blind to fear (what a beautiful way to articulate it!) while the courageous person is smart enough to see the risks but committed enough to go for it if that’s what makes the most sense.

Now, Morris extends this to confidence like so:

As he says: “In praising confidence and extolling its attractiveness, I have to make it completely clear that I am not for a minute praising anything like arrogance or presumptuousness. Here again, Aristotle’s model may be helpful. We can think of the virtue of proper confidence as the mid-point between two extremes on a spectrum of responses to uncertainty.”

Wonderfully said! Here’s to the virtuous means of courage and confidence that spring from the foundation of hard work and competence! :)

Hah. How true is THAT?!?

Please see rant above re: our society’s all-out war against mastery and its obsession with quasi-magical “Secret” genies.

This is the lead idea of Morris’ third C: Concentration. As Morris says: “Concentrated effort—plain old hard work—is what it takes to realize any difficult goal. And that is exactly what it takes to sculpt and polish a human life into the work of art it is intended to be.”

Amen.

Powerful stuff.

Reminds me of another brilliant thought from Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits. He says: “If you were to fault yourself in one of three areas, which would it be: (1) the inability to prioritize; (2) the inability or desire to organize around those priorities; or (3) the lack of discipline to execute around them? … Most people say their main fault is a lack of discipline. On deeper thought, I believe that is not the case. The basic problem is that their priorities have not become deeply planted in their hearts and minds. They haven’t really internalized Habit 2 [Begin with the end in mind].”

So, how ‘bout you? Are you struggling to take consistent action in the direction of your goals?

Check in and see if you’ve *really* planted that goal deeply enough.

Awesome. I never knew that “consistent” meant to “stand together.”

Reminds me of the fact that we’re either in integrity such that our beliefs and our actions are integrated or we’re “dis-integrating.” Also reminds me of what psychologists call “coherence”—where long-term and short-term goals align along with actions/beliefs.

Having this coherence/consistency/integrity is not only essential for attaining our goals but for living with sustainable happiness.

Are you in integrity? Are your goals and actions standing together?

What can you do to get even more consistent?!

I love it when two of my favorite teachers say nearly identical things. Always a good sign a deep truth is at work, eh?

In this case, Morris’ wisdom parallels Tal Ben-Shahar’s thoughts in his book Happier where he delineates his four archetypes: the rat racer, the hedonist, the nihilist and the happy person. Check out the Notes for a more thorough look at the Big Idea. For now, I offer this goodness:

“The rat racer’s illusion is that reaching some future destination will bring him lasting happiness; he does not recognize the significance of the journey. The hedonist’s illusion is that only the journey is important. The nihilist, having given up on both the destination and the journey, is disillusioned with life. The rat racer becomes a slave to the future; the hedonist, a slave to the moment; the nihilist, a slave to the past. Attaining lasting happiness requires that we enjoy the journey on our way toward a destination we deem valuable. Happiness is not about making it to the peak of the mountain nor is it about climbing aimlessly around the mountain; happiness is the experience of climbing toward the peak.”

In short: Happiness = Consistent action toward a worthy goal + celebration of the moment!

Those are the final words of the book. As I was deciding to include them here as part of the final Big Idea, I was thinking about how much that passage reminds me of Viktor Frankl’s extraordinary wisdom in the Introduction to his classic Man’s Search for Meaning (see Notes):

“Again and again I therefore admonish my students in Europe and America: Don’t aim at success—the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long-run—in the long-run, I say!—success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it.”