When he tumed the latch and pushed, the huge door moved easily, but dust fell from the space where the door met the jamb. Tentatively, he stepped in.

He was in his first office, a converted warehouse space with no windows and meager light. But where his old grey army surplus desk had been was his huge new cherrywood desk with unfamiliar stacks of files and ledgers on it. Behind the desk was a long table upon which was a single keyboard hooked to a huge screen showing the image of his own face. At the keyboard was an old man with a long white beard cloaked in flowing white robes. Vaguely, the trader thought of Father Time. The cloaked figure tumed and spoke as much with his piercing eyes as with the rich voice that disowned the aged face, "What took you so long? Ive been expecting you."

"But I dont even know what this is, or why I am here," quavered the trader. "Sure you do; you came here to leam about success," smiled the aged one. "But I know about success," said the trader defensively, "I am a success!" "Perhaps. But by what standard?" And without waiting for an answer, the robed man tumed around and started punching buttons on the keyboard, paging through the events of the traders life.

The trader watched as episode after episode of his past appeared before him on the screen. He saw things that he had long forgotten, and things that he had known of, but never seen. As he watched, he, the man who had prided himself on his emotional control, found himself crying and laughing at strange and unexpected times. He cried as he watched himself sell his guitar in college because he had decided playing it was a frivolous pursuit. He laughed watching the anger on his face on the day he lost $300,000 in a bad trade. He cried when he saw his former wife give birth to their child while he had been working. He laughed when he saw her graceful movements and joyous expression as she played tennis with the man who had become her lover and later her new husband. And as he continued to laugh and cry with the changing imag es, he began to see how shal low he had become and the richness of the things he had denied himself. Then the screen went blank, and the old man tumed to him.

"Do you still think," he said with ageless fire in his eyes, "that you know so much about succes s? You have done so much-achieved fame and fortune-but where are you in the equation? What do you want? What do you dream off" He paused thoughtfully, patting the stack of ledgers, then continued, "Some dream and never do. Others do and never dream. But th en there are those very few who dream, and do what they dream."

Shaking his head slowly, the trader whispered, "Who are you?" But as he said it, the old man drifted away in a misty haze and he awoke repeating aloud, "Who are you?"

A cool breeze blew through the open window as an early cold front purged the city of its damp, stale air. The trader watched as the grey clouds were pushed away by the clear autumn air. Soon, the leaves would tum and fall, driven by the promise of new life in spring. He arose fro m the couch and began to walk toward the door to his office. And as he walked, he heard the echoes of his own footsteps in the hallway ... and he began to dream.

I think the meaning of this fable is clean To be rich and famous is not syn onymous with success. For everyone and in any endeavor, success isnt achieved through the attainment of any particular goal-it is a state of living. As one market professional put it, "A successful life is a progression of successful years, which is a progression of successful months, which is a progression of successful weeks, days, hours, minutes, and moments. Success is the achievement of a goal or set of goals. Therefore, to be successful, you must have goals not only for the long term, but for the moment; and each goal should be related to the other, unified by a single purpose-happiness and fulfillment in life."

There is nothing new or revelatory in the idea that goals are required for success. Pick up any book about how to achieve success, any biography about a successful person, and you will find that goals and success are inextricably linked. In the absence of clearly set goals, it is impossible to focus, impossible to plan, and impossible to acquire and maintain the energy needed in the pursuit of excellence. But goals alone dont provide the formula for success. The trader in the fable, after achieving his lifelong ambitions, felt empty and unmotivated he lost the will to execute.

I think that all of us have shared some semblance of the traders experienc e. In variant forms and to different degrees, all people experience conflict between their emotional state and their conscious convictions. When the conflict becomes so great that it is impossible to function effectively, we make mistakes ... sometimes huge mistakes. One of the toughest challenges in human life is to attain a state of integrity; a state in which reason and emotions combine on a common front, providing us with knowledge, method, and motivation to succeed. Reaching this state involves integrating knowledge of the external world with your unique inner experience. The central problem is how to establish goals that are not only viable, but also feel real and drive you toward achievementrealistic goals that are experienced emotionally as important and life serving.

For all animals there is one fundamental alternative: life or death. Each species has its distinctive method of survival, but human beings stand apart; the tiger hunts and the deer roams in search of safe pasture, but man thinks. 2 He is the only known creature that must choose to live through the conscious, active exercise of his mind. For any animal, success means sustaining life by living according to its distinctive nature. For man, this means living as a rational animal. He must us e logic and reason to identify reality, define the requirements for survival, and leam how to achieve his needs. Then he must act to realize them.

Success requires a complete dedication to reality, to identifying and living the tmth, not because it is the "Tmth" as passed from Heaven with a capital "T," but because only the real, the actual, the tme, has power in human life.

Translating the tmth into action is the fountainhead of meaningful success. In philosophical terms, this is the source and power of the virtue of honesty. Honesty is the practice of continuously striving for knowledge, including selfknowledge, and basing your actions on nothing else; it implies a recognition that anything attained through self-deception or the deception of others is uneamed and will have destmctive consequences. Honesty isnt living according to the dictate, "Thou shalt not bear false witness," for fear of punishment; it is a requirement for survival as a thinking, rational human being.

In the fable, the trader, while honest in his intentions, did not practice personal honesty, and so brought himself to a state of near paralysis. Instead of constantly striving to grow by examining and evaluating both his inward and outward states, he made his goal to be rich and fam ous, and in so doing became shallow. By measuring his self-worth in terms of money and influence, he diminished his capacity to enjoy the process of living. He created what the noted psychologist Karen Homey calls "an idealized image of himself," which he could support only by living according to a rigid set of "shoulds" that had little or no relation to the values which could bring him happiness. 3 His "shoulds" of hard work, productivity, and pride, which could have been life -serving values, served instead his idealized image of himself and gave him a feeling of detachment from life; values that could have helped produce a sense of self-esteem produced instead a feeling of self-alienation. Because the trader failed to strive for selfknowledge-because he lacked deep personal honesty-his values and virtues became a destmctive agent in his life.

Thus far, nothing that Ive said about success applies exclusively to a career in the financial markets, so why do I bring it up? The answer is that far too ma ny people enter the markets in a quest for money and fame that is doomed to fmstration. The trader in the fable represents an element in most of us which says, "If I just had enough money, then I could do anything I wanted and every one would adore me ... I would be free ... I would be happy!"

My personal experience and my observations of others have taught me that to react to this element in ourselves can be devastating. Money can bring out the best in people, but it often brings out the worst; and the reason is lack of selfunderstanding. Many, too many financially successful people end up in the cardiac ICU from stress-induced heart disease. Some find calm each day at the end of a bottle, using their money to gradually dissolve the abilities that produced it. Others, who have made and lost fortunes several times over with seeming calm, take their own lives. Then there is another whole category of people who enter the world of the financial markets with vigor, intelligence, and enthusiasm, but leave with their heads bowed and their confidence destroyed, unable to perform under pressure.

A compulsive desire to be rich may indeed drive you to leam about the markets and make money, but only at tremendous personal cost. A driving desire for fame usually has at its root a fundamental

lack of self-confidence and self respect, and any fame achieved on that basis will be empty and meaningless. The extent to which you are motivated solely by the desire for money and fame is the extent that you will fail as a p erson, and usually as a businessperson as well.

The reasons for this are complex, and I will discuss them in detail in this section. My sole purpose is to provide knowledge that will enhance your ability to see yourself as you truly are and enable you to start the process of change required for success. What it all revolves around is the nature and source of emotional discipline-the will to execute knowledge.