The Highest Goal: The Secret That Sustains You in Every Moment [Hardcover]

Michael Ray (Author), Jim Collins (Foreword)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 16, 2004

The Highest Goal reveals the secret discovered by thousands of people who took the author's Stanford School of Business creativity course: that having a meaningful goal is a source of power, inspiration, and guidance that helps one persist even through the worst of times, and ultimately leads to success. The book combines practical business advice with spiritual motivation and creative insights. In addition, it discusses proven steps that people can use on a daily basis to take a personal stand and turn the chaos of difficult times into a complete and fulfilling life.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"The Highest Goal is the distillation of years of accumulated wisdom from a great teacher." -- From the foreword by Jim Collins, author of Good to Great

"The Highest Goal shows all of us how we can achieve a meaningful and fulfilled life from our highest aspects." -- Heidi Roizen, Managing Director, Mobius Venture Capital

"This incredible book examines the life-force that gives us a reason for living!" -- John Renesch, author of Getting to the Better Future

"With his revolutionary and refreshing insights, Ray helps you discover and pursue your highest goal." -- Don Maruska, author of How Great Decisions Get Made

From the Publisher

Dubbed "the most creative man in Silicon Valley" by Fast Company magazine, Michael Ray created and taught Stanford University's celebrated Personal Creativity in Business course for 25 years.

From the beginning, Ray's course had a more profound impact on graduates than he'd ever intended. They seemed to blossom, to have access to some secret source of energy and inspiration. They found new ways to contribute to their organizations, thrived on diversity, fought gracefully, treated others with compassion, acceptance, appreciation, and respect. As one graduate put it, "This is transformation that works and lasts."

Ray came to realize that his creativity course was helping people discover what he calls their "highest goal"-the one force that gives real meaning to your life, that speaks to the very core of your being. It's what makes you feel connected, motivated and sustained. It has nothing to do with worldly success or achievement, but Ray found that all of the successful people who had been through his course had a sustained connection to it. In fact, it was what they ultimately attributed their success to.

Here, through practical exercises, stories and reflections, Ray helps you discover your own highest goal. By getting in touch with this inner resource, following a path in tune with it, and letting it inform your every decision, you'll vastly improve not only your own life, but also the lives of everyone around you. Ray shows you how to open this inner font of creativity, compassion, and courage.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 184 pages
• Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers (June 16, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1576752860
• ISBN-13: 978-1576752869
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #158,380 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

121 of 125 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Might be the most important book you ever read, July 26, 2004

By 

Joe Tye "CEO and Head Coach, Values Coach Inc." (Iowa) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Highest Goal: The Secret That Sustains You in Every Moment (Hardcover)

This might be the most important book you ever read. Michael Ray's "Creativity in Business" class was the most influential course I took as an MBA student at the Stanford Graduate School of Business (or anywhere else for that matter). The life-changing insight I drew from his class was that my own inner Voice of Judgment (VOJ) is the only obstacle to my becoming the person I am meant to be by doing the work I am meant to do.

That, of course, should be a pretty self-evident notion. What made Michael's course so helpful was that he gave us heuristics in the form of systematic exercises that he calls "live-withs." These help transform mere intellectual insight into real experience of life. When you "live with" behavioral guides such as "Pay Attention," "Walk Into Fear," or "Be Loyal to Your Own Values," you start seeing unexplored potential in yourself and endless possibilities in the world around.

The Highest Goal shows how these simple yet sophisticated live-withs can help you find and pursue the highest goal that gives your life an overarching sense of purpose and meaning. Some of what he has to say will surprise you - such as the advice to move beyond passion and success. Some of it will challenge you - such as the counterintuitive notion that the path to True Prosperity can start by living with "Do Only What You Love, Love Everything You Do."

Michael says that finding your highest goal is like the experience of falling in love: nothing around you has changed but everything is different, because you have changed. The experience is energizing, it is catalyzing, and it is endlessly generative. It's not always easy, as some of the stories in his book make clear, but it is always worth the effort.

As Jim Collins (author of Good to Great and coauthor of Built to Last) says in his foreword, Michael's book "is a deeply subversive work; if you follow its teachings to their logical conclusion, you will almost certainly make significant changes in how you orient your life." I am living proof of that statement. Had I not taken Michael's class in 1985, I don't know where I'd be today, but I do know it would be a place created in response to the goals of others instead of a place from which I can pursue my own highest goal.

52 of 56 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Whitman was right: We are large...we contain multitudes, June 14, 2005

By 

Robert Morris (Dallas, Texas) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Highest Goal: The Secret That Sustains You in Every Moment (Hardcover)

In the Foreword, Jim Collins recalls his first encounter in 1982 with Michael Ray and Rochelle Myers, two Stanford professors who together taught a course for MBA students called Creativity in Business. (They later co-authored a book of that title based on the same course in which Collins had enrolled.) Myers quietly informed Collins and his classmates, "You are about to embark on a ten-week journey to discover your deepest inner essence." Immediately Collins began to search for a replacement in the catalogue. Later, at his wife Joanne's urging, Collins remained in the class and accepted "a fundamental challenge issued to all of us: [begin italics] Make your life itself a creative work of art. [end italics]" More than two decades later, Ray offers in this volume a core process based on the meta-concept of "live-with heuristics" whose objective is to help a person achieve her or his "highest goal."

Time out. Those who have read this commentary to this point may be tempted to move on, just as Collins once was. Please don't. Hang in there just as Collins once did.

As Collins explains, there are certain "mantras of living" that one implements for a period of time (usually a week or more) and then reflects upon what has been experienced as a result. For example:

If at First You Don't Succeed, Surrender
Pay Attention!
Ask Dumb Questions
Destroy Judgment, Create Curiosity
Don't Think About It
Be Ordinary
Do Only What Is Easy, Effortless, and Enjoyable

At Ray's urging, I came up with a few of my own:

Don't Resist...Absorb
When Encountering Abstract Art, Don't Look at It...Listen
Remember What Really Bothered Me Last Week [Note: I never can]
Each New Day Is a Mulligan [Note: I am an avid golfer]
When Hearing Music, Don't Listen...See It

As Ray explains, he realized over time that the impact of his course, Personal Creativity in Business, went beyond its structure, procedures, and exercises. "It touched something very deep in people. They made discoveries about themselves that informed their actions and transformed their lives. Even though we never mention it in our teaching, they discovered their highest goal -- the secret that would sustain them, come what may. As one participant put it years after taking the course, `This is transformation that works and lasts.'...[Students] learned -- most early in life but many much later -- through a crisis or through experiencing love and a connection to something higher that if they live for this connection, they keep growing closer to what is right for them. They are open to life and view it as an adventure." Only by tapping their inner resources can they make their lives a creative work of art, fulfilling themselves in service to others.

On several occasions as I read Ray's book, I was reminded of this passage from Lao-tzu's Tao Te Ching:

Learn from the people
Plan with the people
Begin with what they have
Build on what they know
Of the best leaders
When the task is accomplished
The people will remark
We have done it ourselves.

For me, this passage is directly relevant to the core process of "live-with heuristics" which can guide and inform those who aspire to lead others.

Each life is a journey from one moment to the next, from one experience to the next. What we learn is revealed within a sequence of discoveries. (The word "heuristics" is derived from the Greek infinitive "heuriskein," to find.) If reading this book is viewed as a journey, there is indeed much of value to discover from what it shares. With all due respect to Ray and his book, however, the discoveries of greatest value to me were re-discoveries of what I already knew (or thought I did). In Appendix A, Continue the Journey, Ray acknowledges that there will be obstacles to overcome, albeit ones "that can be enriching." He suggests several ways by which to face those obstacles and convert them into learning experiences. Of special relevance to me is this passage: "Many of us pack too much when we travel, and one thing you don't want to take with you on your journey to the highest goal is the VOJ, the Voice of Judgment. So write or draw the aspects of the VOJ or secret fears that you really don't want to take with you. Make them intense, because these are the remaining aspects of the VOJ that continue to trouble you." They do indeed.

Those who share my high regard for this book are urged to check out the aforementioned Tao Te Ching as well as James O'Toole's Creating the Good Life: Applying Aristotle's Wisdom to Find Meaning and Happiness, Alan Watts's The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, and David Whyte's The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America.

27 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Are You Ready to "Live With" Your Highest Goal?, January 26, 2005

By 

Tracy L. Needham "Marketing Copywriter & Stra... (Raleigh, NC) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Highest Goal: The Secret That Sustains You in Every Moment (Hardcover)

This book is based on the author's acclaimed Personal Creativity in Business class, which he taught at Stanford University for 25 years to the likes eBay entrepreneur Jeff Skoll and Good to Great bestselling author Jim Collins. But it's not another business management book, or even a book on how to tap your creativity.

Instead, Ray reveals the secret that all the successful people he taught ultimately attributed their success to - living their life connected and committed to their "highest goal." Essentially, your highest goal is the aspiration that gives meaning to your life, motivates and sustains you. Aligning your efforts with it will help you accomplish your dreams and find fulfillment. Ray suggests exercises to to identify it, then helps you better integrate it into your life based on your key challenges. His "live-withs" are simple but powerful tools for shifting your thinking and actions so you can benefit from living with your highest goal every day.

What you should know....to some, the title and cover photo may imply a very "new age-y" type book. While there is a little of that, the book overall takes a very practical approach to the subject.