Shine: How Looking Inward Is the Key to Unlocking True Entrepreneurial Freedom
Gino Wickman and Rob Dube
BenBella Books, Inc. (March 2024)         He

Why the pursuit of happiness should be a quest for being good, not feeling good — the pursuit of lifelong virtue, not short-term pleasure

AMAZON: Why the pursuit of happiness should be a quest for lifelong virtue, not feeling good

Long ago, Socrates is believed to have said that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” Gino Wickman and Rob Dube are among a countless number of people who agree with him. Others include one of Socrates’s students, Plato, as well as Saint Paul, Confucius, John Bunyan, Michel de Montaigne, William Shakespeare, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and more recently Bill George and Clayton Christensen.

These and other thought leaders struggled to find the correct answers to questions such as these:

o Who am I now and who am I not?
o Who do I wish to become? Who do I fear ?”
o What do I value most in my life?
o How and where can I do more to help others?
o When am I happiest? Why?

According to an African proverb, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” I was again reminded of that insight as I began to work my way through Shine. Wickman and Dube are staunch and eloquent advocates of effective communication, cooperation, and collaboration with others but point out that each person must look inward to unlock their full potential for personal growth and professional development.  “It now time to shift to a fuel that is more powerful, from motivators inside you — following your calling, your intuition, your soul’s desire, love, and listening to your True Self.” As Bill George would describe it, to follow, to be guided and informed by your “True North.”

In this context, I now share a paragraph from Jeffrey Rosen’s uniquely valuable Introduction to The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers and Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America. He points 0ut that the Greek word for happiness is eudaimonia, meaning “good daimon,” or good spirit, and the Greek word for virtue is arete, which also means “excellence.” Rosen notes that in The Nicomachean Ethics, “Aristotle famously defined happiness as virtue itself, an ‘activity of soul in conformity with excellence.’ These terms are confusing to us, because  excellence and virtue aren’t self-defining. For this reason, although eudaimonia is hard to translate, it might be rendered as ‘human flourishing,’ ‘a purpose-driven life,’ or, in modern terms, ‘being your best self.’ The Latin word for virtue is ‘virtus,’ which also means valor, manliness, excellence, and good character.”

Rosen then adds, “What Cicero and Franklin called ‘virtue,’ therefore, might be translated as ‘good character.’ Today, modern social psychologists use terms like ’emotional intelligence,’ which they define as ‘the ability to understand, use, and manage your own emotions in positive ways to relieve stress, communicate effectively, empathize with others, overcome challenges, and defuse conflict.'”

Presumably Wickman and Dube agree with Rosen that by reading the classical Greek and Roman moral philosophers who inspired the Founders, they understood the pursuit of happiness as a quest for being good, not feeling good — the pursuit of lifelong virtue, not short-term pleasure.

Wickman and Dube’s goal with Shine “is to ping your soul, lift the veil, and flip the way you’ve been functioning and how you see the world. To get a sense of where you are right now, please  think of a spectrum. On the far left end are people who might be feeling empty, unfulfilled, lonely, or in pain. Sadly, this is the state of most driven entrepreneurs who have succeeded in the outer world. On the righteousness end of the spectrum are those who have mastered their inner worlds and feel whole, and complete, fulfilled, and peaceful, along with enjoying their many accomplishments.”

Obviously, not everyone on the negative side or the positive side of the spectrum is located in exactly the same place nor must they remain there. Success and failure, happiness and sadness, and healthy and or unhealthy are subjective terms,  all must all be measured in terms of nature and extent or degree. If you are now “feeling empty, unfulfilled, lonely, or in pain,” Gino Wickman and Rob Dube urge you to take the True Self Assessment (Pages 95-97) before reading further. You will be asked to complete the same assessment after reading the entire book.

In fact, they urge you “to take the assessment quarterly and keep measuring your progress toward becoming your True Self. You can also take it at The10Disciplines.com/book. Also, please send the link to a driven entrepreneur you know who would benefit from taking the assessment.”

* * *

In school, college, and then graduate school, I learned more and learned it faster when I discussed material in a group with 3-5 others who were taking the same course. I also recorded key Q&As on 3×5 file cards (based on course material, whatever the subject) with a Q on one side and the A on the other, held together by a thick rubber band. I carried them with me and reviewed the content whenever I had a few minutes to spare.

Here are two other suggestions to keep in mind while reading Shine: Highlight key passages, and, record your comments, questions, action steps (preferably with deadlines), page references, and lessons you have learned as well as your responses to key points posed within the narrative. Also record your responses to specific questions posed, especially at the conclusion of chapters.

These two simple tactics — highlighting and documenting — will facilitate, indeed expedite frequent reviews of key material later.