Chapter 1: Who Are You?

You start by unlocking what you’re passionate about.

• Don’t Get Really Good at What You Don’t Want to Do. You’re told you’re good at something when you’re young, and that’s that. Years later, you realize that you’re really passionate about something else. At business school, it’s pretty much about being good at marketing or finance. But each one of you has special gifts. Have the courage to find them and be the best you—even if it is in marketing or finance!
• Listen to the Little Voice. Adult conditioning and the voices of your family, friends, peers, and society have overwhelmed your childhood instincts. At business school, hallway bulletin boards and digital televisions tell you what that voice should be. Don’t forget your instincts, expressed in your unique inner voice. You need to notice and develop that voice for the outside world.
• Broaden Your Vision of Life. You are born into one vision of the world: yours. At business school, you study several different case situations but learn one way of approaching them. It’s important to meet and learn from all kinds of people with different perspectives about life to help you round out what you believe in and how you want to touch the world.

Chapter 2: What Do You Want?

You need to know what is important to you and what your priorities are to begin on any path. You will get a four-part tool to measure what you want.

• 4. Know How You Measure Success. Only you can define what constitutes personal success. It may have many dimensions and change over time. At business school, the measurement of success is often assumed. It’s up to you to pro-actively search for your definition and use it as your North Star.
• 5. Money Doesn’t Talk, It Swears. I assume that one of your goals is making a good living. This lifeline serves to reemphasize how important money is in most lives. How you make it, what you do with it, and how much of it you consider is “enough” are tests of your character. At business school, its primacy is assumed. Getting your attitude toward money straight is crucial to future career opportunities and personal happiness.
• 6. Don’t Treasure Your Trash and Trash Your Treasures. As high achievers, it’s easy for MBAs to get sidetracked. In business school, that assumed set of values looms behind every conversation. Make sure you’re able to keep your priorities straight when the pressure of the business world conflicts with your values.

Chapter 3: What Can You Do?

The book takes on a cautionary tone to ensure that you find the right place to bring your values to work—today.

• 7. Turn Your Values into Value. Now that you understand who you are and what you want, it’s time to apply your passion and values to your work. At business school, elective courses or extracurricular activities can prepare you. But at work, creating value is less about your skills and more about your will to fight for what you believe in. You will go through a four-step process for creating value.
• 8. Keep Your Walking Costs Low. This lifeline is at the heart of reframing your perceptions of risk. At business school, you discuss economic risk and possibly “performance” risk. Yet it is a third kind of risk, psychosocial risk, that can dominate your life and needs to be managed, too.
• 9. Don’t Live a Deferred Life Plan. When considering career changes, there are always reasons to delay. Yet after making a change, most MBAs wish they had done so sooner. At business school, the focus is on your first job out of school in a select number of high-paying fields. MBAs today are examining other paths. Make sure you don’t forget what you learned in the first six lifelines and delay too long.

Chapter 4: Where Are You Going?

Shifting from approaching your career as a job to regarding it as a vocation, a calling, you focus on the service aspects of your destiny plan and refine it.

• 10. Look Not at the Masses but at the One. In crafting your destiny plan, it is easy to think of “contribution” or “impact” as requiring size and scale. That can be daunting. At business school, you get caught up in the law of growth for impact. But it’s easier and often more effective to start small and even to stay that way. Size and scale are not as important as purpose.
• 11. Surround Yourself with a Community of Love. MBAs who are happiest at work often say it is because of their relationships with colleagues and clients. At business school, you primarily practice analytical thinking, not relationship building. Don’t underestimate the importance of a community of respect and friendship for personal fulfillment and success.
• 12. Plant Trees Under Whose Shade You’ll Never Sit. A critical part of any destiny plan is to have an unreachable ultimate goal. Counter to business school teachings of achievable goals, unreachable goals add meaning to your life and energy to your work as they connect you with something bigger than yourself.

The concluding chapter reemphasizes the centrality of service to the process of crafting a life that is more than money. It summarizes the key arguments with a story of the service ethic in a man I met years ago in Goa, India.

A resource chapter follows. It contains a speech that will make you think deeply about your life and the role of money.

I hope that after you’ve read this book, you’ll do some journaling to help you become more aware of who you are and what you want. As you grow, these definitions will evolve as well. Journaling allows you to disconnect from the external electronic world every once in a while and connect to your inner world. How else will you find the work you love and for which others will love and remember you?

It’s time to get started by taking a closer look at yourself and the business school environment.