Empires of the Mind Denis Waitley

In a world in which people anywhere can communicate and do business with people anywhere else, it is not the nation but the individual that is becoming the focus of our questions about wealth and poverty. Future tomes may have to explain why one person creates great value, inspiring and energising their community, while with access to similar or even greater resources, another becomes a TV-watching wage slave who will risk nothing.

Empires of the Mind may just inspire you enough to avoid the latter fate. A great example of how the lines between personal development and business literature are blurring, Denis Waitley’s book is a blueprint on how an individual might approach their life within a supercharged, irrational and ceaselessly changing 21^st century economic world. Where once we saw change as punctuating time, now we see it as the nature of life itself, and in its wake lie the notions of solidity, status and security that characterised the world of our parents. It is up to us, not institutions or family, to lead ourselves.

Waitley says we will be lost if we do not cultivate four things: knowledge, openness, integrity and vision. The new world does not revolve around institutions, organisations or set patterns, but knowledge, therefore those who live in a continual state of learning will not only prosper from it but enjoy it the most. Openness to new ideas is a must; any prejudice or outworn assumptions will be an invisible roadblock keeping us from entering the territory where dreams happen. Real, lasting success in work/business life will come from personal integrity; do I ‘walk my talk?’ Finally, we must to some extent live life backwards, the substance of our days and our relationships lit up by a unique vision of the future.

Towards the book’s end, Waitley quotes the famous first line of Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities: ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.’ Despite our relative prosperity and personal safety compared to Dickens’ era, the fear of bad things stalks us. We live in an epoch of unparalleled opportunities for personal growth and success, but that very fact seems to make us choose a narrow path with limited responsibility. Yet the act of taking responsibility for who we want to be and where we want to go - this is real freedom.

In a globalised, knowledge-based economy, we must see ourselves as individual business units, rather than employees - even if we are working within a firm. We must embrace what the Japanese call kaizen, or continuous improvement - of the self. Yet we are not simply the sum of our work and financial status at any one time. Continuous self-improvement gives us the larger perspective, inner security and depth that make us truly valuable to the world over a sustained period.


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"Each of us must be willing to stand out while fitting into society."

Empires of the Mind

Dennis Waitley

Waitley was born in 1933. His father was an alcoholic and his parents divorced early on, but his grandmother provided inspiration. He won a scholarship to the US Naval Academy and flew carrier jets during the Korean War. After leaving the Navy he became the fundraiser and PR person for Jonas Salk (developer of the polio vaccine) and his Institute for Biological Studies. Salk introduced Waitley to Abraham Maslow, Victor Frankl and Carl Rogers, and persuaded him to pursue further studies.

At La Jolla University, Waitley wrote a doctoral thesis on the experiences of prisoners of war in Korea and Vietnam, which helped him to design seminars for NASA astronauts. Back at the Salk Institute the author met the inspirational speaker Earl Nightingale, who with Norman Vincent Peale, became his mentor.

During the 1980s, Waitley was the psychology guru to the US Olympic team, and has worked with numerous Fortune 500 companies. His other classic, The Psychology of Winning, has been the bestselling personal development audio-tape of the last two decades, producing the spin-offs The Psychology of Winning as a Woman (with his daughters) and The Psychology of Winning for the 21^st century. Other books include The Seeds of Greatness and The New Dynamics of Winning.

The author lives with wife Susan and seven children in California.