1.3 | What is True Success?

What is True Success?

As we have previously established, success is the alignment of three layers: your External Layer (titles, positions, wealth, status), your Capability Layer, and your Internal Self-Cognition Structure.

The Capability Layer refers to whether you possess the skills corresponding to your external labels: your knowledge, experience, thinking capacity, innovation, risk tolerance, and stress management. The Internal Structure, meanwhile, is your deep-seated judgment of "the Self": who you are, what you consider meaningful, and what you believe is worth your entire life's devotion.

When can a person truly achieve consistency across these three layers? In reality, most people in our society—regardless of their external class, wealth, or status—rarely achieve complete alignment.

Why? Because most of the time, we do not truly know what we want. What we think we want is not necessarily what we truly need. All our efforts and struggles are based on our perception of ourselves and society. But what if that perception itself is biased? A correct answer can never emerge from a set of incorrect input parameters. If our fundamental inputs regarding "Self" are skewed, then regardless of our effort, we cannot output a correct result.

Therefore, the foundation of true success must include:

• A re-understanding of the "Self";
• A re-understanding of "Capability";
• A recalibration of our "Way of Thinking."

To obtain true success is to find the position of your true self and discover your mission. Once found, you will realize that your capabilities, your pursued goals, and your internal structure finally align. You have already become that destined "You" within, and your external results will miraculously and automatically align.

True success is always inside-out: first successful within, then naturally manifested without.

Measuring Success: Not Your Bank Account, but Your State

Consequently, our measurement of success is entirely different. We do not necessarily help you become the wealthiest person, the president, or a star. If that is not the "You" that was meant to be:

• Your Capability Layer will not match;
• Your Internal Layer will not validate it; You will either fail to achieve the result, or if you do, you will feel even less happy, less free, and less satisfied.

Our standard for measuring success is your state of being:

• Whether you feel healthy (both physically and psychologically);
• Whether you feel happy, satisfied, and free;
• Whether you possess a sense of abundance and a heart full of gratitude.

These are the markers of your success—not the digits in your bank account, the size of your house, or the titles on your business card.

Of course, this does not conflict with the wealth, status, or luxurious lifestyle you currently desire. In many cases, you can only discover what you truly need by actually obtaining what you thought you wanted. Life is like solving a difficult problem: you must eliminate the wrong solutions before finding the right one. Thomas Edison could not have found the correct answer without those 5,000 "wrong" experiments.

Only by obtaining what you "thought you wanted" do you have the chance to explore what you "truly need." This is a law of human cognition: Only through true experience can there be true understanding; only through understanding can there be true "disillusionment." Without experience, we cannot transcend based solely on logic and imagination.

In other words, to find the true self, we often must first obtain those "things we don't actually need." Or to put it another way: We only have the capacity to say "I don't need it" after we have truly "owned it."

If you have never possessed wealth, it is difficult to completely let go of the chase for it and achieve a life that is materially simple yet internally full. You will always imagine that once you attain your ideal wealth, all problems will be solved. If you have never experienced being envied or respected, you will always imagine those in higher positions as being superior. You cannot truly "de-mystify" what you have never owned. Life is, in fact, a process of finding the true self through continuous "de-mystification."

Therefore, this book on success is not a moral judgment, nor is it "chicken soup" for the soul. We do not stand on a "high ground" trying to convince you that "these things are not important." That would be like a person who is already well-fed—perhaps even suffering from high blood pressure due to overindulgence—trying to advise someone in a famine: "You must learn to stay hungry; rich food is bad for your health." That is both ill-timed and naive.

Even God never demanded that we start as saints. King Solomon and the Buddha both enjoyed all the riches of the world before attaining enlightenment and realizing what was most important and what their true missions were.

This system of success will help you obtain anything you want. We do not pass moral judgment on what you seek. Even Jesus Christ never passed value judgments on our requests. We are simply providing a proven methodology:

• To help you truly obtain what you want;
• To ensure that, in the process of obtaining it, the method itself will step-by-step break through the deceptions of the self and society, leading you to your true self.

You can have anything you want; and the process itself will inevitably point toward what you truly want. We believe this is the only way to achieve "True Success": not just the success you imagine, but the success you were destined to have.

In the next chapter, I will tell you why I believe this is the only true way to "succeed."