How well do you know your ABCs? It’s been probably a long time since you last went over the basic English alphabet. In this book you’ll have the opportunity to revisit each letter, from A all the way to Z, which sequentially marks the 26 basic guideposts to achievement that I’ll be discussing. But first, let’s backtrack to that time when we were first taught to read and write our ABCs. We didn’t have any idea then about its value and much less about its importance in our lives, but we surely found learning those 26 letters a lot of fun. We treasured almost every moment of it. In my case, I was so excited to go home and to show my parents how well I was doing in my ABCs. I wanted to show off to them whatever accomplishments I had done in school. It didn’t matter what grade my teacher gave me for them. It was enough to know that I’ve done something when the school day was over. Finally, my parents would take a look at my masterpieces from school and then sometimes say that I didn’t do that well. They’d tell me to my face that I messed up. I didn’t like that because instead of focusing on my achievements, no matter how small, it seemed to me as if they were always too much in a rush to really look over and appreciate what I was doing. This left with no choice but to do whatever it took to get better grades in school. I learned to cheat a little like so many others of my classmates—but just a little, mind you—and got stuck with that habit! My parents were proud of my progress in school but deep inside me, I felt that there was really nothing about what I was doing to be proud of. I knew that some of my classmates and acquaintances didn’t do it my way. Instead of facing the challenge thrown to them by their parents, they found it easier to fight back and rebel. They simply decided to no longer pay attention to their schoolwork. What’s the point, they’d ask, if all that their parents and most people could see are their weaknesses and failures? The problem here is that many of us are taught to achieve rather than to learn. We are taught to aim at getting somewhere but we are not really taught how to get there. As children, many of us get the idea that achieving small things doesn’t matter at all. What matters is that we’d get something for our effort, no matter how small the effort. The idea of greed perhaps won’t be there yet. We just need to perform to the best of our ability and that’s it. It’s really no big deal. Many of us didn’t like that idea, of course, even if we couldn’t articulate our objection at the time. We just didn’t have the words for it yet. I think this is where the power of the alphabet comes in. It gives us the power to create something for ourselves. After we learned our ABCs, we could wondrously put them together so we can write or speak a word, two words, three words, four words, and so on.