Win the Inside Game: How to Move from Surviving to Thriving, and Free Yourself Up to Perform

by Steve Magness

In 1931, historian James Truslow Adams coined the term “American dream.” But he did so not to give the US a pat on the back but to show how we’d gone astray. Adams warned that the original noble ideal had transformed from focusing on well-being, moral character, and opportunity to a “dream of material plenty.” The definition of a good life had changed: moving from the internal to the external. Adams used the phrase in response to an America that had gotten lost during the opulence-filled Gilded Age and ended up in a calamitous Great Depression. As historian Sarah Churchwell explains, “The original ‘American Dream’ was not a dream of individual wealth; it was a dream of equality, justice and democracy for the nation.” It was a hopeful, unifying message, one that had been transformed into an individualistic commercialized one. We’ve stuck with the materialistic version—two cars, a house in the suburbs, and lots of stuff—rather than the original version.

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