Secrets to Success Introduction: 1st Post of 18
IDH-3930, Fall 2024, FGCU
Good intentions and idyllic wishes do not elevate the trajectory of people’s lives!
You have one life to live—and are incredibly lucky to reside in the land of freedom and opportunity. How will you use these gifts? How can they help you attain health, prosperity, happiness, and a full life? How will you ensure freedom and opportunity are available to future generations?
In 1978, at age 19, I participated in an economic development field study in Latin America, and a year later, in a similar program in Western Europe, Eastern Europe, and the former Soviet Union. Experiencing varying qualities of life at an early age ignited a fire within me to identify the most advantageous cultures and practices. I studied economic development at Purdue, public policy at Cornell, and business at Harvard. I read over 2,000 books about history, religion, science, culture, government, economics, and leadership, and spent time in all 50 states, over 50 countries, and over 200 major cities.
For over four decades I sifted through hundreds of perspectives and practices, weighing their effects on the individual, larger group, and environment in the short term and generationally, as I raised my family, operated several businesses, and led numerous nonprofit organizations. After our youngest child graduated from college, I began assembling a coherent, synergistic mix of advantageous perspectives and practices from the hundreds that exist. The Secrets to Success books and courses are the culmination of this effort.
Most people know our genes, parents, and choices affect our life, but few recognize that our culture, a type of human software and reservoir of intergenerational practices, affects it. People only flourish as a collection of perspectives and practices—like the perspectives of causality, competition, meritocracy, comparative advantage, and fitness, and the practices of honesty, scholarship, work, free enterprise, and the rule of law—are prevalent in a population. A particularly potent collection of American practices enabled our ancestors, communities, and country to flourish like none other through the 1960s. Then our success went to our heads, we took for granted what worked, and gradually started to exchange Elevating Practices for losing ones.
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Human services worker 2 at State of Florida
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