New Heading, the Personality and Character Ethics At the same time I was doing this study of perception, I was also deeply immersed in an in-depth study of the success literature published in the United States since 1776.

I was reading or scanning literally hundreds of books, articles and essays in fields such as self-improvement, popular psychology and self-help.

At my fingertips was the sum and substance of what a free and democratic people considered to be the keys to successful living.

As my study took me back through 200 years of writing about success, I noticed a startling pattern emerging in the content of the literature.

And because of our own pain and because of similar pain I had seen in the lives and relationships of many people that I'd worked with through the years, I began to feel more and more that much of the success literature of the past 50 years was superficial.

It was filled with social image consciousness, with techniques, quick fixes, image building, with social band-aids and aspirin that masked chronic problems and only addressed acute problems and sometimes even appeared to solve them temporarily, but left these underlying chronic problems untouched to fester and resurface time and again.

In stark contrast, almost all of the literature in the first 150 years or so focused on what could be called the character ethic as the foundation of success.

Things like integrity, humility, fidelity, temperance, courage, justice, patience, industry, simplicity, modesty and the golden rule.

Benjamin Franklin's autobiography is representative of that literature.

It is basically the story of one man's effort to integrate certain principles and habits deep within his nature.