Although Mark Albion's book, More Than Money, was specifically written for MBA graduates, it is full of life lessons that anyone can apply to build true success.
The MBA set is a great platform for Albion's message, though.
Often, they are force-fed the idea that success = money for many years as they pursue their education and begin their careers.
Albion asks this unique audience to start sculpting their careers from a different perspective - from the opposite end of the telescope, so to speak.
What are the results that you hope money will bring to your life? He asks his reader to use that question to sculpt a backward journey to success.
If you had wealth and riches - what would you do with them? (Fall in love? Give joy? Relax and enjoy free time? Build a legacy that would last for many years to come?) Albion then poses the idea of using those goals to build one's life path.
With those end results in mind, rather than wealth and status, the obvious choices are sometimes pretty far off track.
And the "right" choices clearly become those one might never have considered.
The most important message in Albion's book is, thus, an uncommon one - especially for a business book, especially one geared toward MBA's:It is balance.
This book envisions a life where what is truly valuable will provide the direction to what is necessary.
The formula to create this roadmap is built on four simple questions.
· Who are you? · What do you want? · What can you do? · Where are you going? Complimenting these four pillars are sixty-four questions to help the reader develop their own authentic career plan, followed by twelve "lifelines" - a pun on Albion's part.
These are guidelines to create a career inside of a life that is fulfilling and meaningful to you.
(The pun of course, is that if your choices take you off course, you can grab a lifeline to buoy you forward until you can regroup.
) And make no mistake, going off course is not only likely, but it is necessary.
Albion is a great storyteller, and his "good life" video storyboard has literally gone viral throughout the internet.
With good reason too.
Story after story, Albion paints living images that platform his main question - a question applicable to all at all stages of life.
He asks, 'In your life, you are going to make a living - the question is, "How are you going to make a life?"' Albion's book redefines success at the most important juncture, before a person's career begins.
It asks the reader to define success not in terms of wealth and status, but in terms of how they want to live their life.
It takes into account one of the most basic tenets of positive psychology - that success must be personally defined in order to create and live a happy life.
Anyone who stops to put that simple exercise into practice, to stop and personally define what a successful life would look like to them, begins to live life with a different set of criteria.
Quite simply, "Will this make me happy?" Instead of will this fulfill my "goals.
" Happiness itself becomes the successful goal - and THAT is definitely a life worth living.