I'll be honest with you—I hate health-n-wealth prosperity conferences.
The messaging promises something rarely delivered… if ever! It’s not because I don't believe in personal growth or professional development. I do. It’s actually my vocational job coaching entrepreneurs, emerging leaders, and executives leaders. But there's something about those glossy presentations, the promised silver bullets, and the inevitable graph showing someone's exponential success trajectory that makes me want to throw something. You know the graph I'm talking about—the one that starts at the bottom left corner and shoots confidently toward the upper right, depicting a life or business or portfolio that just keeps climbing. Up and to the right. Always ascending. Never plateauing. Certainly never declining.
It's a lie.
Or at the very least, it's profoundly incomplete.
The real story of our lives—yours, mine, the guys I meet with every Friday morning—looks more like an EKG readout than a hockey stick graph. Peaks and valleys. Rises and falls. Moments when we're crushing it followed by seasons when we're getting crushed. Days when God feels close enough to touch and months when He seems to have left the building entirely.
And here's what makes it worse: we've been sold a version of success that not only ignores these valleys but actually shames us for experiencing them. We're told that if we just work harder, pray more, hustle better, optimize our morning routine, and download the right productivity app, we can finally achieve that elusive upward trajectory. We can finally arrive.
But what happens when we get there and discover it's not what we thought? What happens when we check all the boxes—the career milestone, the financial goal, the family achievement—and still feel empty? Or worse, what happens when life doesn't cooperate with our carefully crafted plans at all? When the diagnosis comes. When the marriage crumbles. When the business fails. When the dream dies.
Most of us respond in one of two ways.
Some of us double down. We become more ambitious, more driven, more obsessed with achievement. We convince ourselves that we just haven't succeeded enough yet. If we can just push a little harder, climb a little higher, earn a little more, then we'll find what we're looking for. This path leads to burnout, broken relationships, and a quiet desperation that we're terrified to acknowledge because slowing down feels like failure.
Others of us make a different kind of bargain. We compromise. We lower our expectations. We tell ourselves we're being "realistic" when really we're just protecting ourselves from more disappointment. We settle for less—less joy, less purpose, less engagement with life—and call it wisdom. This path leads to a different kind of death: the slow suffocation of dreams deferred and potential unrealized. We survive, but we don't truly live.
The writer of Ecclesiastes knew this tension intimately. After pursuing every conceivable measure of worldly success—wealth, pleasure, wisdom, achievement—he arrived at a brutal conclusion: "Vanity of vanities! All is vanity." Everything he'd chased, everything he'd built, everything he'd accomplished—when viewed from the perspective of mortality and meaning, it all seemed like grasping at the wind.
But here's what's remarkable: Ecclesiastes doesn't end there. Neither does the biblical story. Neither, if you're willing to stay with me, does your story.
What if the problem isn't our ambition or our dreams? What if the problem is how we've been taught to measure success in the first place?
This book was born from a crisis. Actually, several crises. Mine included.
Every Friday morning, a group of us men gather around coffee that's honestly not that great (sorry, guys) to talk about our lives. We call ourselves the Mission Men, though that name makes us sound more organized and impressive than we actually are. We're businessmen and tradesmen, fathers and husbands, Christ-followers trying to figure out what it means to live faithfully in a world that seems increasingly hostile to faith.
We don't have it figured out. That's kind of the point.
Over the past year, we've watched each other navigate divorces and diagnoses, financial setbacks and spiritual droughts, teenage rebellion and midlife reckonings. We've celebrated wins and mourned losses. We've prayed together, laughed together, and occasionally wanted to punch each other in the face (we're still working on our sanctification).
And somewhere in the midst of all that messy, beautiful community, we started asking different questions about success. Not the sanitized, Instagram-ready questions posed at leadership conferences, but the raw, 3 AM questions that wake you up in a cold sweat:
What is success, really? How would you even define it?
What does the world tell us success looks like, and is that actually true?
What does the Bible say about success—and does it even use that word the way we do?
How have your biggest failures and setbacks reframed your understanding of success?
From where you sit today, with all you've experienced, what are the actual criteria for a successful life?
These aren't rhetorical questions. They're not meant to prompt easy answers or produce neat conclusions. They're meant to make you uncomfortable, to challenge the unexamined assumptions you've been carrying about what makes a life well-lived.
Because here's what we've discovered: when you scratch beneath the surface of most men's lives, you find a quiet desperation born from trying to measure up to metrics that were never meant to measure what actually matters.
The American Dream promised us that if we worked hard and played by the rules, we could achieve prosperity, security, and happiness. Our constitutional rights enshrined "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" as foundational to our identity. The capitalist system that shapes our economy rewards efficiency, productivity, and growth—always growth, always more, always upward and to the right.
And for a while, many of us believed it. We ran the race. We climbed the ladder. We checked the boxes.
But somewhere along the way, we started to notice something troubling: the treadmill keeps speeding up. The German sociologist Hartmut Rosa calls this phenomenon "social acceleration"—the relentless quickening of the pace of life that leaves us feeling perpetually behind, perpetually inadequate, perpetually striving without ever arriving. Rosa argues that we're caught in a "frenetic standstill," working harder and faster while somehow feeling like we're getting nowhere.
The answer, he suggests, isn't simply to slow down (though that helps). It's to cultivate what he calls "resonance"—building meaningful, responsive, and emotionally engaged relationships with the world around us, relationships that actually nourish our souls rather than simply checking another optimization box.
In other words, the cure for our success addiction isn't to succeed better or work harder. It's to redefine what we're actually pursuing in the first place.
This isn't just an American problem, though our particular cultural moment intensifies it. Talk to someone born in a different cultural context—where success might be measured by family honor, or community contribution, or spiritual devotion—and you'll hear different stories about the pressure to perform, the fear of failure, the exhausting burden of other people's expectations.
The tyranny of achievement is a human problem, not just a Western one.
But it is a problem that demands a solution. Or perhaps better said: it's a crisis that demands a reframing.
What you're holding is not a fix-it book. I'm not going to sell you a new system for achieving success or promise that if you follow these seven steps, your life will finally work out the way you hoped.
What I am going to do is invite you into a conversation—the same conversation we've been having on Friday mornings, the same conversation that's been challenging and changing us from the inside out.
This is a book about redefining success criteria for your life. Not according to the world's standards or your father's expectations or your own anxious striving, but according to something deeper, truer, and ultimately more hopeful.
Each chapter of this book will explore a different dimension of what it means to live well—not perfectly, not without struggle, but well—in a world that's constantly trying to convince you that who you are and what you have isn't enough.
You'll hear stories from the Mission Men, raw and unfiltered accounts of our own journeys through peaks and valleys. Some of these stories will make you uncomfortable. Good. Comfort isn't what you need right now.
You'll also find biblical wisdom—not platitudes or easy answers, but the kind of hard-won, ancient truth that has sustained God's people through every imaginable crisis for thousands of years. Scripture has a lot to say about success, failure, suffering, and hope, but it rarely says what we expect it to say.
At the end of each chapter, you'll find questions for reflection. I encourage you not to skip these. The goal isn't just to read about a different way of thinking about success—it's to actually examine your own life through a different lens. That requires honest self-examination, and honest self-examination requires time and space and a willingness to sit with uncomfortable questions.
You'll also find a challenge—something concrete to do, to practice, to implement. Because theology without practice is just philosophy, and philosophy without application is just entertainment.
Here's what this journey will look like:
Chapter 1 explores the journey of rises and falls itself—the unavoidable reality that life doesn't move in a straight line upward. We'll examine what success actually is, how the world defines it versus how God might define it, and how our setbacks and failures often teach us more about true success than our victories ever could.
Chapter 2 dives deeper into understanding the pattern of life—the cycles of order, disorder, and reorder that characterize every human journey. We'll explore the biblical pattern of death, burial, and resurrection as the actual shape of transformation, not the sanitized "up and to the right" trajectory we've been sold.
Chapter 3 focuses on what I call "the anatomy of the spiral"—recognizing when you're in a downward trajectory and learning to name it honestly. We'll sit with the Psalmist's despair and discover that permission to acknowledge pain is itself a form of spiritual health.
Chapter 4 is about the practice of remembering—how intentionally recalling God's faithfulness in the past provides strength for navigating uncertainty in the present. We'll talk about creating memorials, telling stories, and building a personal history of God's presence in both the peaks and the valleys.
Chapter 5 tackles transparency and vulnerability—breaking the masculine stereotype of emotional stoicism and discovering the healing power of actually letting others see us. This isn't weakness; it's courage. And it's essential for the kind of transformation we're pursuing.
Chapter 6 addresses living well in the mystery—learning to be comfortable with unanswered questions and acknowledging our limitations without abandoning faith. The difference between contentment and complacency might be smaller than you think, but it's more important than you realize.
Chapter 7 explores humility in both success and failure, examining how pride can corrupt us whether we're on top of the world or flat on our backs. We'll talk about self-awareness, the circle of control, and what it means to quiet your soul like a weaned child.
Chapter 8 is perhaps the most important: identity beyond circumstances. How do you separate who you are from what happens to you? How do you find your steady line when everything else is fluctuating? Character formation, not circumstantial achievement, is the true measure of growth.
Chapter 9 makes the case that you can't do this alone. Community isn't optional; it's essential. We'll explore how to create cultures of authentic sharing and how to respond when someone trusts you with their story.
Chapter 10 ends with hope—not the cheap optimism that pretends everything will work out fine, but the biblical hope that anchors us even when we can't see the shore. This is hope that persists, hope that trusts, hope that waits "now and forevermore."
And in the Conclusion, we'll look back at the whole journey and recognize that even through all the valleys, even through all the failures and setbacks and disappointments, there actually is an upward trajectory. Not the one we expected. Not the one we planned. But an upward trajectory nonetheless—the transformation into Christlikeness that happens not despite our struggles but often because of them.
I don't know where you are as you read this. Maybe you're on top of the world, crushing your goals, checking boxes, feeling like you've finally figured it out. If so, I celebrate with you. But I also invite you to consider whether the metrics you're using to measure success are actually measuring what matters.
Or maybe you're in a valley—one of those dark nights of the soul where God seems silent and your dreams seem dead and you're just trying to survive another day. If that's you, I want you to know: you're not alone. You're not a failure. And this valley might be exactly where God does His deepest, most transformative work in you.
Most likely, you're somewhere in between. Most of us are. We're navigating the ordinary chaos of real life—work stress and marriage tension and financial pressure and health scares and aging parents and struggling kids and all the thousand small deaths that never make it onto our highlight reels.
This book is for all of us. Because all of us need to reckon with the gap between the life we expected and the life we're actually living. All of us need to question whether we've been climbing a ladder that's leaning against the wrong wall. All of us need the courage to redefine success according to something deeper and truer than the world's scorecards.
So here's my invitation: Let's stop pretending that life moves smoothly upward and to the right. Let's acknowledge the valleys. Let's name the failures. Let's admit the disappointments. Let's sit with the mystery and the unanswered questions.
And then, with honesty and humility and hope, let's discover together what it actually means to live a successful life—not by the world's standards, but by God's.
The journey starts here. And I promise you, it won't be what you expected.
But it might be exactly what you need.