People keep congratulating me on publishing my book, for selling copies, for celebrities mentioning me.

I like those things, but the book is a medium of communication. I consider it a means to an end.

The point of the book is to give people tools to improve their lives, to develop the skills of empathy, compassion, responsibility, self-awareness, discipline, creating meaning, value, importance, purpose, passion, and related social and emotional skills that traditional education doesn’t teach. “Leadership” is the closest word to it, but conjures up mental images of a man in a business suit giving orders for many people that my material doesn’t relate to.

I’ll measure the success of my book most by how many people report that it enabled them to improve their lives and of people around them and how much they changed those lives.

I also intend for the book to prompt widespread changes in how we teach social and emotional skills and that we teach them at all in many traditional academic institutions. So I’ll also measure its success by how much it changes traditional education and leads people to see empathy and the other skills above as skills they can learn like learning to ride a bike.

• ← The first Leadership Step by Step sold!
• Non-judgmental Ethics Sunday: What to Do About a Co-Worker Who Drinks on the Job? →