Soul Shelter

Last week J.D. Roth wrote about seeking one’s fortune or pursuing fulfillment, calling it “closing the gap between dreams and reality.”

Here’s a specific technique for closing that gap. It’s an easy-to-use version of “gap analysis,” a two-dollar MBA word for a simple idea. My version involves asking yourself three crucial questions.

Keep in mind that this three-question method is designed for complex, long-term goals. Shorter-term, less complicated aims such as studying PHP, saving for retirement, or planning a trip to Korea are best achieved by simply taking action, as J.D. advises. But if you’re planning a new career, starting a new business, or seeking a significant life change, these three questions—and most important, thoughtful answers—will prove indispensable. Here they are:

1. What is your goal?
This question lies at the heart of gap analysis. Let’s say Joan’s goal is to start a restaurant (a really poor idea for the overwhelming majority of aspiring entrepreneurs, but for some reason one that enthralls many people). We can envision Joan’s situation using the diagram below.

Point A is Joan today, without a restaurant. Point B is Joan in the future, with her restaurant. In between is the “gap.” Think of it as a goal map: Joan wants to journey from Point A to Point B.

Now, once the goal (Point B) is established, shouldn’t it be a simple matter to figure out intermediate destinations (milestones) separating Point A from Point B? Joan can read books, talk with half a dozen restaurant owners and chefs, query food suppliers, and do plenty of yummy market research by eating at establishments comparable to the one she imagines. As she uses multiple data sources to research how to start and manage a successful restaurant, recurring themes should emerge that enable her to identify specific steps needed to travel from Point A to Point B.

In fact, determining those steps is the easy part. The hard part is deciding upon the goal. Most failures to achieve result not from lack of know-how, but from lack of clear goals. Everyone’s heard the self-help cliché that “if you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.” That says it all.

2. Do I have the right strategy to achieve my goal?
Next, it’s time to reality-test your strategy. Your strategy is simply the set of intermediate steps you’ve recorded in detail in response to Question 1.

The best reality-test is showing your strategy to knowledgeable non-competing parties (obviously you wouldn’t show it to potential competitors). In Joan’s case, chefs, food suppliers, real estate brokers, and others who might eventually benefit from her establishment should be willing, even eager, to critique her plan. They’re likely to point out weaknesses—maybe even fatal flaws—she hasn’t considered. They may well identify unforeseen opportunities or strengths.

3. Can I execute the strategy?
Now for the tough question: Can you execute? In other words, do you have the personal, professional, and financial resources to accomplish each of the steps you’ve laid out? Can Joan hire, train, and manage people? Does she have, or can she raise, enough money to fund her venture? Does she possess the grace and stamina to take a lower-level job with a restaurant to gain needed experience? Some answers to this query may become evident during Question 2; some will require soul-searching or further feedback from knowledgeable outsiders. In any case, if you can answer “yes” to Question 3, you’re off and running. If not, return to Question 1 and revisit your goal.

This post was inspired by a wonderful article I use in all my entrepreneurship classes, “The Questions Every Entrepreneur Must Answer,” first published in 1996 by Amar Bhide.

So do yourself a favor: Skip the fancy “gap analysis” and focus on the Three Questions, the most important of which is, “What is your goal?”

You may also enjoy:

“Three Things I Wish I’d Known Before Starting My Own Business”

“Pursuing Fortune and Fulfillment with Blogger Extraordinaire J.D. Roth”

“Entrepreneurship: A Primer“

Warren Buffett is now the world’s richest man, according to the latest Forbes ranking. Worth some $62 billion, Buffett displaced Bill Gates after markets punished Microsoft for its baffling $44 billion bid to purchase Yahoo.

Let’s put $62 billion in perspective: Invested in treasuries at 2%, it’d throw off interest of $3.39 million per day. Just to remind ourselves, a billion is a thousand millions.

Warren Buffett knows how to build wealth, and while he was unavailable to share fortune-building tips with Soul Shelter readers today, my brother Charles, who attends Berkshire Hathaway events in Omaha each year, relayed this anecdote from Buffett’s 2006 shareholders’ meeting:

One shareholder asked a question along the lines of ‘how should I study investing in order to build wealth in my spare time?’

Buffett replied that, for most people, the bulk of their income is going to come from earning power in their chosen profession. Therefore, from the standpoint of building wealth, free time is better spent sharpening one’s professional skills rather than studying investing.

Coming from the world’s most successful investor, that’s powerful advice. Deep attention to one’s work surely is the path to fortune—and fulfillment—for most of us.

Still, can’t the world’s richest man offer some behind-the-scenes clues to riches? The Internet abounds with Warren Buffett quotes, but here’s a revealing look at the behavior of the man himself, again from brother Charles:

Sunday night we went to a shareholders’ party at Warren Buffett’s favorite steakhouse, a place called Gorat’s. I don’t know whether I can put this diplomatically, but I will bet that in Wayne and Oakland counties, Michigan, it is not possible today to find an establishment as déclassé and frozen in the 1950s as is Gorat’s.

While we were enjoying, or I should say, consuming, our overcooked meals, who should walk in but Bill Gates, who sat down three tables away. He was followed a few minutes later by Warren Buffet. The world’s two richest men soon seemed to be having the time of their lives there in Omaha, chowing down dreadful food (aka ‘The World’s Finest Steaks’ according to Gorat’s roadside sign.)

I told this story later that evening to a waiter at a cigar bar to which we’d retreated. ‘Warren Buffett!’ he said. ‘When he comes here, he tips a dollar for parking the car, and pays two dollars for a Scotch and water from the well. We ask him, does he want a particular Scotch? No, just the house brand.’

Frugality: A primary “secret” of the wealthy.

A few years back, I met Chris Flowers, one of the billionaires who appears on the Forbes list. My buddy and co-author Carl Kay arranged to have him serve as master of ceremonies for a talk I gave in New York about my first book.

Chris arrived at the venue about seven minutes before the event was to begin. We quickly reviewed logistics with the organizer, then went downstairs to begin the presentation.

The talk, about “cultural arbitrage” by foreign entrepreneurs in Japan, went well, and I was flattered when the billionaire emcee stayed around to chat for a few minutes afterwards. He told me he’d read portions of my book, where I’d written about his own cultural arbitrage in executing what remains one of the largest private equity deals in history.

As we parted, I asked whether I might contact one of his flunkies regarding participation in his upcoming fund.

“I don’t have flunkies,” he replied cheerfully. “Hiring flunkies means we make less money.” Then he offered his card.

Another secret worth remembering: No flunkies, even when you can afford them.

I haven’t met any more billionaires since that day, but I’m taking advice from those two: instead of fretting over my portfolio, I’m buckling down on improving my career prospects—and staying away from flunkies.

You may also enjoy:

“Changing Scenes with the Law of Requisite Variety”

“Recognizing the Opportunity Within”

“The Barn of Fortune? (Thoughts on Happiness and Financial Freedom)”

At age 19 I made the decision to become a writer. I hadn’t finished college yet (and wouldn’t) and did not formally study creative writing (though I delved deeply into good literature both contemporary and classic). And because from the start I possessed precisely zero affiliations in the publishing or academic worlds, I’m living proof that one needs no golden key or inside connections to pursue the work one most desires.

If you find doors closed against you, set your shoulder to them. Push.

I had no MFA degree, no roster of famous acquaintances, nor even any friends whose friends knew somebody’s friend who worked with Editor A at one of the big Manhattan publishers. Still, at age 22, in blind defiance of practicality and lacking all credentials save perhaps a singular passion for fiction and poetry, I began composing a novel set in my own backyard in the nineteenth century — that is, in the Black Diamond Coal Fields about 30 miles east of San Francisco, a place once inhabited mostly by miners from Wales.

Before starting this book, I knew nothing about coal mining, Welsh culture, or geology, though all were essential elements of the story. Neither did I know much about life in nineteenth-century California.

Furthermore, I hadn’t a single publication credit to my name, and hence not the slightest rational basis to believe that this historical novel would ever be published. I had, however, acquired a bit of writing experience, having fumbled my way through a learning process of intensive reading, compositional experimentation (i.e. bad writing), and minor personal successes in my chosen art. Some of my short stories had their virtues, but I’d also dashed off, already, the full manuscript of an entirely different novel, which I’d judged a failure and consigned to a drawer.

While working on my coal-mining novel’s first draft, which took me a year, I was employed fulltime as a bookstore clerk, earning $8.25 per hour. Later I temped in a commercial mortgage office for slightly higher pay.

Beyond these day jobs, my time was spent in long, solitary hours at my desk; or reading in a chair; or walking in the pastoral hills that surrounded my apartment-home; or watching movies with my wife; or receiving rejection slips in response to my endless outflow of short story submissions (to date I’ve collected enough to stuff two shoe boxes — size ten; see “Redefining Rejection“); or dreamily forecasting the future date when I’d have a full-length book published under my name.

A year after completing my novel’s initial draft, I received my first letter of acceptance from a literary magazine in Alaska. The following autumn, they printed a 30-page short story of mine. And the following year (2003), after 60-odd query letters to publishers and agents, a New York agent said she wanted to represent me and my coal-mining novel (which was then in its tenth or eleventh draft).

In autumn of 2004 that peculiar novel, The Green Age of Asher Witherow, appeared for sale in bookstores throughout North America. In the month of its release I traveled to Minneapolis, 2,000 miles from home, to give the first public reading of my career, and had the pleasure of meeting folks who had read and enjoyed my words. It was strange and wonderful, I remember, to be so far away from my home and the novel’s setting, and yet to talk with people about my local history and the landmarks relating to it — to find that these provincial details, because I’d featured them in a narrative, had become things of interest to these distant readers.

As it turned out, my profound experience at that first bookstore appearance was just the beginning, and the year ahead would become the most social one of my life, consumed with the fun and frenzy of first-novel promotion. More than 30 reviews of my book appeared, all of them (save one) complimentary and several of them glowing (I’d had hopes, but no explicit expectations). Booksellers across the nation selected the novel as a No. 1 Book Sense Pick, and it was nominated for the Book Sense Book of the Year Award.

Thanks largely to this avid bookseller support, the novel began to accrue a readership. It went into a second printing within a month of publication, was listed as a “Best Book of the West” by the Salt Lake Tribune, and enabled me to travel through 13 cities in seven different states. It was all much, much more than I could have hoped for.

Obviously, I am by no means famous. Nor am I what the publishing industry adoringly dubs a “bestselling author.” I did not rake in heaps of royalty payments. And the arduous, mystery-shrouded process of writing has grown no easier or more streamlined in the past four years. I still spend most of my time alone in a room with pieces of paper, and usually while writing I feel I’m fumbling in the dark. My vocation is by no means financially profitable, either. Figured on an hourly rate, my income amounts to barely a fraction of what it was when I clerked in that bookstore (this past year my earnings were well below poverty level). What’s more, I still receive a few rejections a week.

But…I’ve forever checked off “dreamily forecasting” from that list of pastimes I mentioned above — and this fact causes me wonder every day.

How could so much good stuff happen to a rather naïve, unassuming guy — an anonymous dreamer — in what cynics would call a celebrity-driven era of sales-obsessed publishing and corporate gluttony?

There I was: an upstart, undistinguished by privileged association, lacking formal education and hard life experience, unable to boast of past achievements. With qualifications no stronger than a high school diploma, some hard-won literary magazine publications, and a manuscript that people liked, I found myself embarking upon the literary life I’d dreamt about.

A charmed existence? In some ways, certainly. But with the passing of time, I’ve continued to think there’s more to it than that — and my experiences so far have taught me one thing conclusively:

You don’t have to be an insider. The golden key is yours already. The closed door can be opened.

As the samurai and teacher Hideyoshi states in our book, The Prosperous Peasant, “Conceivable Means Achievable”:

For every stage of a journey, one must keep a clear end in mind. If you can conceive of the steps along the way to your destination, isn’t it a straightforward matter to plot those steps and reach them one by one? Men fail less for lack of ability than for lack of clear intermediate goals…What can be accomplished that the mind has not first conceived?”

[Hideyoshi’s] two listeners shook their heads. “Nothing,” they agreed.

“Precisely. But once the goal of your journey is fixed, it is simple to plot the course.”

My breakthroughs, such as they are, have all required a great deal of work and persistence, as much on my wife’s part as on my own — including (don’t forget) the writing and scrapping of that first novel I referred to above (a two-year process) before I could confidently write a book like The Green Age of Asher Witherow.

But though I’m still in an early and modest chapter of my career, I’ve learned that impractical hopes can become sustainable reality. To paraphrase Henry David Thoreau:

Endeavor to live the life you’ve imagined and you will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.

One of my favorite tunes from decades past is Whip It, by the technopop unit Devo. I used to play Whip It in a cover band (along with Uncontrollable Urge), and it always made partygoers jump to their feet. Back then, I could hardly have known that I would later run into Devo founder Mark Mothersbaugh at a Tokyo art show, or that years after that, I’d be referring to Devo in a blog.

But here I am, facing a daunting task (designing and executing doctoral research) and I find my mind casting back to days of playing music, and drawing on the wisdom so neatly described by Devo’s lyrics.

Some listeners thought Whip It is about kinky sex; it’s actually about problem-solving:

When a problem comes along, you must whip it.
Before the cream sits out too long, you must whip it.
When something’s going wrong, you must whip it.

Now whip it! Into shape. Shape it up! Get straight!
Go forward! Move ahead! Try to detect it. It’s not too late! To whip it! Whip it good!

When a good time turns around, you must whip it.
You will never live it down, unless you whip it.
No one gets their way, until they whip it.

Maybe because I played Whip It so many times, and maybe because I happened to meet Mothersbaugh in person, something about the song struck me deeply and stayed with me over the years. While pondering my approach to daunting tasks recently undertaken, I came up with seven steps that have worked for me. Take a look, and see if they might work for you, too.

1. Abandon Either the Task or the Result
Read The Underachiever’s Manifesto and know that it’s okay to give up before you start. You don’t have to set the world on fire. Undertake the task only if it’s truly meaningful, and you have the time, energy, skills, and psychic bandwidth to handle it. Sure you want to proceed? Then abandon attachment to the result and immerse yourself in the process. The value of completing Daunting Tasks lies in the journey theretoward, not in the end state of accomplishment. Still on board? Then on to Step 2!

2. Start Now
Start right away, “before the cream sits out too long.” Immediate action, even baby steps, generates momentum and confidence.

3. Enlarge Yourself
In your mind, make yourself bigger than the task. You are huge and powerful: you look down on this puny job like a towering giant who twiddles trees like matchsticks. Grab your Daunting Task by the, er, family jewels, and squeeze until he begs permission to shrink to a manageable size. Grant such permission. Now kiss and make up. You’re friends, but you had to show who’s in charge.

4. Brainstorm a Quick & Dirty Plan
Quickly write down a strategy for dealing with the Task. Don’t think hard about it, just jot down whatever thoughts come into your head. Write badly and don’t edit. Later, look over your notes and rearrange the order of your thoughts. Try to see how the job might be broken down into manageable sub-tasks.

5. Draft or Rehearse
Based on your notes, write a draft plan for accomplishing the Daunting Task. Alternatively, if it’s a job interview, presentation or the like, “rehearse” the task: shut yourself into a room (preferably with a video camera) and let ‘er rip. Who cares if you sound goofy or your draft plan reads terribly? By blurting out the words you need—whether on paper or by voice—you’ll start to understand what you want to say, and perceive the gaps in your plan. And by blundering through one “dress rehearsal”—sloppy as it may be—you’ll feel like you’re 50% of the way home. See how your confidence has jumped?

6. Be Confident and Be Friends
You can do it! View your task as a challenge, a job, a project—anything but a problem. Thinking of something as a problem from the get-go immediately positions you to fight the Daunting Task rather than collaborate in achieving the promise of its purpose. Remember, you bought into tackling the job during Step 1. So be friends with it. Let the challenge of your work create curiosity rather than despair. If you feel stuck, read a book on the subject, or seek out and approach an expert for advice.

7. Do First What You Want to Do Least
Clark’s Rule About Priorities (CRAP™), the first of Clark’s Rules, says Do First What You Want to Do Least. It’s based on the difference between urgency and importance. Even though you’re friends with your Daunting Task, somehow you may find it easier to start each day by responding to e-mail, browsing the Web, and accomplishing little, “urgent” errands. Resist the temptation. Stick with the important task: the Daunting Task.

Finally, celebrate the process as much as the end result by treating yourself as you pass through major milestones. You’ve earned it!

The foregoing is hereby formalized as Clark’s Axiom Regarding Daunting Tasks (CARD TASKS): Abandon either the task or attachment to the result. Earlier this week, Mark put it beautifully as “Think Progress, Not Completion.”

As always, read the disclaimer, and be advised that Clark’s Rules may apply only to Clark, who can barely follow them himself.
You may enjoy some related posts:

“Clark’s Law of Work” (Attractiveness is inversely proportional to compensation)

“Clark’s Communication Potency Theorum” (The power of communications improve exponentially with proximity, either physical or psychological)

“Clark’s Option on Opportunities Theory (COOT^TM)”

Books have always been important to me. Once I acted on a very specific piece of advice from How to Sell Your Business and Get What You Want and earned, in the space of six months, more money than I’d ever had in my entire life before then.

Rarely is the value a book delivers quantifiable in dollars; most often it’s an immeasurable dose of pleasure or inspiration. Think about it: how else can you acquire, for only fifteen or twenty dollars, the fruits of a thousand hours of someone’s thought and hard labor?

So today I’ll describe eight other books that have had a big impact on my life; that have shaped Soul Shelter’s twin themes of Fortune and Fulfillment.

First up, my favorite pick in the Fortune category: The Richest Man in Babylon by George Clason.

This is one of the rare books that addresses the nature and meaning of work, not simply ways to grow wealthy. Through parables set in ancient Babylon, it reveals timeless laws of wealth creation, the most important of which is summarized in three words: Pay yourself first. It was published in 1926, so the style and language may not resonate strongly with younger (let’s say pre-AARP) readers.

Next up is a generational stalwart: Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill.

Abundant with anecdotes, this classic is based on the idea that whatever thoughts predominate in one’s mind tend to manifest themselves in reality (a sound notion backed by the Thomas Theorum). Think and Grow Rich may be dated, but it still turns my crank. See if it turns yours.

Batting third is Rich Dad, Poor Dad, by Robert Kiyosaki, whose mention will undoubtedly make J.D., my blogging mentor, roll his eyes. But Rich Dad, Poor Dad strikes a chord with me because it advocates entrepreneurship, and it’s written in a folksy, easily understood style with plenty of stories (my favorite is Kiyosaki’s admission—to a Singapore journalist critical of the Hawaii-born author’s writing skills—that he’s a “best-selling, not a best-writing” author).

Rich Dad, Poor Dad teaches the difference between assets and liabilities, explains why your home is a liability, and offers powerful arguments for self-employment. Just because it’s sold 30 million copies doesn’t mean it’s a bad book.

In the cleanup position is The Millionaire Next Door, by Thomas Stanley and William Danko. The most recent of my three picks, Millionaire Next Door is like a follow-up to Rich Dad, Poor Dad because it empirically demonstrates that self-employment is the most practical road to wealth for most people (Stanley is an academic who studied millionaires and discovered that most are small business owners living normal lives in ordinary neighborhoods like you and me). A strong endorsement of the basic message of Rich Dad, Poor Dad.

OK, enough about fortune. On to the second half of the equation: Fulfillment!

Leading off is Be Here Now by Ram Dass. The key point of this extraordinary book is that now is all we have—there is no yesterday or today, at least not in any way that we can experience them. There is the “now” that we experienced yesterday, and there is the “now” that will come tomorrow, but since it is always “now,” we’ll do best to try to live, well, now, or “in the moment.” On car trips my young son Ray used to continually ask “are we here yet?” I kept answering “yes” until he got the point. A terrific introduction to eastern spiritual thinking.

Batting second is James Allen’s As a Man Thinketh, about which I posted the week before last. Napoleon Hill, Dale Carnegie, and a host of other self-help gurus copped key licks from Allen, who wrote:

A man is literally what he thinks, his character being the complete sum of all his thoughts … Most of us are anxious to improve our circumstances, but are unwilling to improve ourselves.

Priceless.

Third up and swinging the world’s heftiest bat is the Tao Teh King by Lao Tzu, my favorite philosophy book. Make sure you get the Archie J. Bahm translation: its crystalline poetic logic stands in stark contrast to those literal—not literary—translations featuring ponderous, baffling prose. Reading Bahm’s edition, your mind will be boggled that such astounding wisdom has been around for thousands of years—and what a difference good translation makes.

In the cleanup slot, we have The Prosperous Peasant, a book of parables built upon true historical events surrounding Japan’s most extraordinary leader, a sixteenth century peasant-turned-samurai who achieved mind-blowing wealth and success, only to precipitate his own downfall with ill-advised overseas invasions (sound familiar?). I love The Prosperous Peasant because it uses the classic storytelling method to reveal millenniums-old wisdom more fundamental than any “how to” advice (an opinion only slightly tinged by the fact that I wrote it together with novelist/Soul Shelter partner Mark Cunningham).

So there you have it: Eight outstanding books pointing ways toward fortune and fulfillment. What books have made the most impact on your life? Send a short note to “authors” at this domain, and we’ll post some responses—and reward the writer of the most intriguing submission with a free, signed copy of The Prosperous Peasant.

Here are some more Soul Shelter posts about books and writing:

“Simplify, simplify!”

“Fulfillment: A Work in Progress”

“Steve Martin Tells the Story Before the Glory”

Rejection is a bothersome word. When one’s ideas or efforts are rejected, it can be hard to take it as anything but a setback–or worse: a cruel dismissal. As a writer, I’m extremely familiar with rejection. I’ve received hundreds upon hundreds of no’s for most every yes that’s come my way. And that’s just the behind-the-scenes part of what I do. Being a writer who hopes to sell books, I must also make occasional public appearances at bookstores or libraries, and every one of these events can lead to rejection of a more public nature. Sometimes, quite simply, no one shows up! One learns to be grateful for an audience of two or three, believe me.

So even with two novels, a score of published short stories, and the ostensible stamp of validation thought to come of critical acclaim, several no’s arrive at my door every week. In this we can observe a strange paradox about the life of a writer today: where the private undertaking of his or her art requires the writer to cultivate high sensitivity–a dependably thin skin–the public act of producing and marketing that art requires a skin of bovine thickness. (But I suppose that’s a subject for another post.)

Because rejection is such a fundamental part of my vocation, I’ve learned to look at it in a special light. As I see it, each no that arrives by mail, rather than being an explicit stumbling block, is actually a stepping stone bringing me closer to a yes. And as for those poorly attended public appearances, well, those too, though awkward, are a means of moving forward, for they ensure that my book enjoys a prominent display-place in a bookstore for at least a few weeks before and after my in-person visit. Thus the rejection of public appearances is offset, to a decent degree, by a longer-lasting promotional bonus, while rejections from publishers clarify my vision as an artist, shedding light on the path ahead to publication.

Multiple refusals of a single short story provoke me to evaluate the work with new eyes. Often I will find at least a few small improvements to make. Sometimes I find many, and re-haul the story accordingly, then send it out anew. Sometimes, too, after serious consideration, I remain convinced that a story is as perfect as I can make it on my own, and I conclude (with as much self-awareness as possible) that the rejections so far do not reflect the work’s strength or weakness, but merely the highly subjective submissions process, or perhaps some age-old dissonance of art and the marketplace.

I should add that it’s crucial, and extremely difficult, to tone the muscle of critical discrimation that enables you to stand firm and believe in the worth of what you’ve produced without deluding yourself or being unduly hardheaded. Striking this precarious balance is a talent useful in all aspects of life; I suspect it’s the trait we often refer to as faith or trust–and sometimes love. Ah, but that too is subject for another post…

Occasionally, when faced with innumerable rejections of a story I believe wholeheartedly to be the best I can produce, I simply resort to the uncomfortable assurance that rejections, now and then, signify nothing. They’re just the stripes my work must earn before it finally arrives in print.

I recall a visit I once paid to Jack London’s estate in Glen Ellen, California. I was honing my own skills as a young literary aspirant, and had yet to enjoy my first acceptance from a literary magazine, but I’d already amassed a score of form-letters. I stood studying the contents of a glass case. Two or three rejections for London’s work were displayed there. One said something like, “Nobody cares to read about the Yukon.” A museum placard next to that letter declared that Jack London had received 600 rejections before breaking into print. Fascinating and instructive, when you consider that London became one of the first American writers to survive exclusively by his pen. The literary world is a tough and crowded one–it always has been–and one can’t expect to glide sweetly into any single accomplishment. (Check out the wonderful website, The Rejection Collection.)

But I’m reminded of a maxim Tim and I included in our parable of “The Vengeful Priest” in The Prosperous Peasant:

Average effort produces average results, but extraordinary effort produces extraordinary results.

Now, in possession of two large shoeboxes crammed mostly with form letter no’s, I’m long past the point where even a hundred rejections can weaken my belief. If I’m committed to a story, and have worked and reworked it till it represents what I know to be the height of my powers–and still it continues to meet with rejection, I tend to derive strength and resolve from each no it receives. A peculiar response, I suppose, but useful!

There goes The New Yorker, there goes The Atlantic, but I see a distinguished literary magazine ahead! Each rejection reminds me that I’m on my way. Each is a landmark on this journey through my art.

Join us again this Thursday, when Tim will write about the importance of taking leaps.

See also: “Poverty, the Pulitzer, & the Beauty of Letting Go” and “Fulfillment: A Work in Progress“

Working on a doctoral thesis has sent me on a book learnin’ kick, and the other day I stumbled across something that, to my mind, reveals much about how the world works.

It’ s a genuine sociology precept called the Thomas Theorem. Formulated in 1928 by the sociologist William Isaac Thomas, it’ s been described by one eminent scholar as “probably the single most consequential sentence ever put in print by an American sociologist.” Sometimes called the Thomas Dictum, it is accepted by many researchers as scientific fact—or at least as a powerful way of comprehending the human condition. Here it is:

If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.

The Thomas Theorum is no armchair theory. Law enforcement agencies use it to train officers in the handling of the mentally ill, and it’s been used effectively to explain everything from beauty contest outcomes to panic runs on bank deposits.

To me, the Thomas Theorem explains a lot: The healing power of religion, crowd behavior, a leader’ s ability to galvanize, the staying power of superstitions, Henry Ford’ s famous line that “whether you believe you can do a thing or not, you’ re right.”

Closer to my heart, the Thomas Theorem suggests that self-help books advocating the power of belief are basically right.

In fact, Thomas may have gleaned inspiration from one of the Granddaddies of the self-help movement, a man who intuitively understood the Thomas Theorum decades before Thomas himself: James Allen.

A soft-spoken, retired Englishman who lived quietly in the southwest coastal town of Ilfracombe, Allen wrote a short book about positive thinking called As a Man Thinketh. The key theme of Allen’ s ground-breaking book is that one’ s thoughts determine one’ s circumstances. As Allen put it:

A man is literally what he thinks, his character being the complete sum of all his thoughts … As the plant springs from, and could not be without, the seed, so every act of a man springs from the hidden seeds of thought, and could not have appeared without them.

And more to the point:

Most of us are anxious to improve our circumstances, but are unwilling to improve ourselves.

Oddly, Allen contradicted his own thesis when he decided that As a Man Thinketh was unworthy of publication. Fortunately, his wife disagreed, and the book spawned an industry now worth several hundred billion dollars each year.

You can view the complete text of As a Man Thinketh at sites such as the Project Gutenberg.

Allen died in 1912, long before witnessing the seminal effect his work had on today’ s gargantuan “wellness” industry. Allen wrote 19 books, many with undeniably broad appeal (it seems another becomes a bestseller in Japanese translation every year).

In my view, James Allen was to the self-help industry what Chuck Berry was to rock n’ roll music. Berry was influenced by many musicians, but he was the first to combine numerous traditional elements into an original, enduring new form.

Similarly, writers preceding Allen by decades—even centuries—covered comparable topics, but Allen crystallized the “power of positive thinking” concept in humble, poetic language utterly devoid of hucksterism (I haven’t read most of The Secret’s source texts, many of which preceded Allen and seem more focused on money-making—if you’ve read any, please share your thoughts).

Later self-help gurus—Dale Carnegie, Napoleon Hill, Tony Robbins, Wayne Dyer and many others—owe a huge debt to Allen. And the industry is poised for even more explosive growth, analysts say. Economist Paul Pilzer, in a book entitled The Next Trillion, predicted the U.S. wellness industry will be worth a trillion dollars by 2010. So there’ s plenty of opportunity to do good by helping others be well.

But most important, the Thomas Theorum suggests that our own fortune and fulfillment are, indeed, largely the result of our beliefs. In fact, I feel a new Clark Rule coming on … wait a minute … yes, here it is! And with an easy-to-remember acronym: TTTTT™ (Tim’s Take on The Thomas Theorum):

“Make it real in your mind first, then real in fact.”

Or as Mark and I put it in The Prosperous Peasant, our own personal success parable released late last year: Conceivable Means Achievable.

See also:

“What We Really Need to be Happy”

“Life Without Principle (or Interest)”

More than a century ago, President Teddy Roosevelt raved about a new English-language work by a Japanese author, and bought five dozen copies of the book to distribute to family and friends.

The extraordinary text was entitled Bushido: The Soul of Japan. In this slim volume of less than 35,000 words, author Nitobe Inazo interprets Bushido, the samurai code of behavior, which explains how ethical people (samurai in particular) should act in personal and professional life. This was the first time that these millenniums-old, unspoken precepts of Japanese chivalry had been codified and published in a comprehensive work.

Bushido turned into the most important modern philosophical preachment ever published by a Japanese writer and became a global bestseller. It was translated into ten languages, and Nitobe went on to become the world’s most famous Japanese citizen of the early twentieth century. He later became an influential bureaucrat and an undersecretary of the League of Nations. His likeness was featured on the 5,000 yen note from 1984 through 2004.

Some scholars have criticized Nitobe’s work as romanticized yearning for a non-existent age of samurai chivalry. I believe Bushido contains extraordinary thousand-year-old precepts that did, in fact, originate in chivalrous behavior on the part of some—certainly not all—samurai. But more important, I believe Nitobe’s book captures the Japanese ethic of life—as the author himself put it, “an exposition of Japanese thought.” Ten years living in Japan convinced me that Bushido’s Eight Virtues are not only real practices, but a potent way to understand Japanese society. One thing is certain: None of Nitobe’s critics ever published an international bestseller translated into ten languages.

Here are brief overviews of Bushido’s Eight Virtues.

I. Rectitude or Justice
Here Nitobe refers to martial rectitude, but later and often he refers to personal rectitude: of behaving in accordance with an absolute moral standard, one transcending logic.

Rectitude or Justice, is the strongest virtue of Bushido. A well-known samurai defines it this way: ‘Rectitude is one’s power to decide upon a course of conduct in accordance with reason, without wavering; to die when to die is right, to strike when to strike is right.’ Another speaks of it in the following terms: ‘Rectitude is the bone that gives firmness and stature. Without bones the head cannot rest on top of the spine, nor hands move nor feet stand. So without Rectitude neither talent nor learning can make the human frame into a samurai.’

II. Courage
The influence of Confucius is conspicuous here and elsewhere throughout the text:

Courage is worthy of being counted among virtues only if it’s exercised in the cause of Righteousness and Rectitude. In his Analects, Confucius says: ‘Perceiving what is right and doing it not reveals a lack of Courage.’ In short, ‘Courage is doing what is right.’

III. Benevolence or Mercy
Again we see the strong influence of ancient Chinese philosophers (one wonders when China will again become as successful a wisdom-exporter as it was thousands of years ago):

Love, magnanimity, affection for others, sympathy and pity, are traits of Benevolence, the highest attribute of the human soul. Both Confucius and Mencius often said the highest requirement of a ruler of men is Benevolence.

IV. Politeness
Discerning the difference between obsequiousness and politeness can be difficult for the casual visitor to Japan:

Courtesy and good manners have been noticed by every foreign tourist as distinctive Japanese traits. But Politeness should be the expression of a benevolent regard for the feelings of others; it’s a poor virtue if it’s motivated only by a fear of offending good taste. In its highest form Politeness approaches love.

V. Honesty and Sincerity
True samurai, according to Nitobe, disdained money, believing that “men must grudge money, for riches hinder wisdom.” Thus children of high-ranking samurai were raised to believe that talking about money showed poor taste, and that ignorance of the value of different coins showed good breeding. He wrote that:

Bushido encouraged thrift, not for economical reasons so much as for the exercise of abstinence. Luxury was thought the greatest menace to manhood, and severe simplicity was required of the warrior class. The samurai earned his income from land and could even indulge in amateur farming if he had a mind to; but the counting machine and abacus were abhorred. This social arrangement kept the distribution of wealth more equitable, preventing riches from accumulating solely in the hands of the powerful.

VI. Honor
Though Bushido deals with the profession of soldiering, Nitobe’s explication is equally concerned with personal, non-martial behavior:

The sense of Honor, a vivid consciousness of personal dignity and worth, characterized the samurai. He was born and bred to value the duties and privileges of his profession. Fear of disgrace hung like a sword over the head of every samurai … To take offense at slight provocation was ridiculed as ‘short-tempered.’ As the popular adage put it: ‘True patience means bearing the unbearable.’ The great Ieyasu left to posterity a few maxims, among which are the following: ‘Reproach none, but be forever watchful of thine own shortcomings … Forbearance is the basis of length of days.’

VII. Loyalty
Among Japan’s salaried workers, the hard economic realities of the past two decades have dealt a body blow to corporate loyalty. Nevertheless, compared to the U.S.’s free-roaming, free agent business culture, loyalty remains important in Japanese society:

Loyalty to a superior was the most distinctive virtue of the feudal era. Personal fidelity exists among all sorts of men: a gang of pickpockets swears allegiance to its leader. But only in the code of chivalrous Honor does Loyalty assume paramount importance.

VIII. Character and Self-Control
What accounts for Japan’s prosperity as a nation? In my view, the virtues of Character and Self-Control explain much:

The first objective of samurai education was to build up Character. The subtler faculties of prudence, intelligence, and dialectics were less important. Intellectual superiority was esteemed, but a samurai was essentially a man of action.

So there you have them: Eight difficult, outdated ways to achieve excellence and success—from a foreign country, no less! (a future post will share thoughts on why I believe Japan is earth’s most prosperous nation).

I find Nitobe’s preachments inspiring, and wanted to share them with new generations of readers. So Mark and I decided to include an abridgment of the entire text of Bushido in The Prosperous Peasant.

To accomplish this, we trimmed the text to 5,000 words, modifying archaic punctuation and spelling in the process (Nitobe’s century-old language is dated and flowery, and he cites dozens of philosophers and writers unfamiliar to today’s readers).

If you prefer to read Bushido in the original text, you can download it free of charge at the Gutenberg Project and other locations.

By the way, full-color PDF posters of the Eight Virtues, designed by Keiko Onodera with the original kanji characters, can be downloaded from the “Gifts of Wisdom” section of The Prosperous Peasant Web site.

So enjoy! And please take refuge at Soul Shelter again on Monday, when Mark writes about American Prosperity.

You may also enjoy:

“Life Without Principle (or Interest)”

“Simplify, simplify!”