The book opens with some really short, punchy paragraphs. I'd love to quote the whole thing here, but in an attempt to honor the authors, let me just summarize by saying that it highlights the importance of having a clear objective, goal, standard, mission, ideal, and path to follow. Personally, I'd add vision to that too. It also highlights the dangers of living a life without those things. One of the risks that particularly sticks out to me is highlighted by this quote, "potential is wasted. Our own potential, squandered." Suffice it to say that for some very personal reasons, striving to live up to my potential is extremely important to me. I dont want to get to the end of my life believing I had so much potential for getting out and helping/serving others, only to look back and find that I didn't do that. No, I've embedded the belief in myself that I have a great capacity for service and doing good among the people around me, and I want to see that capacity to serve and uplift fully realized. That's where the next part of this book gets me excited. It encourages individuals to chase their ideal. "An ideal that we must define. An ideal we must codify in no uncertain terms so we know what we are striving for." So, in an attempt to put this principle into practice of "[having] a code to follow" I plan to develop my code here."