Derek Mills made a massive change in his life after a chance encounter, when someone asked him an apparently throw-away question. That exchange led him to completely reappraise his life, and begin to understand exactly how to bring the things he wanted to it. The Best You uncovers his story.
all alone, and said:"What time did you get in this morning?" Derek answered by telling him the unearthly hour he'd arrived. The security guard looked at him meaningfully for a moment and then walked away. In the ten seconds of silence that
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followed, Derek's whole life changed. "I was unhappy. I was living a miserable life, was hardly seeing my wife or my children and was working incredibly long hours for a fi nancial institution. My quality of life was very low, and I was struggling to keep my head above water fi nancially. That all changed, right then," says Derek. He devised a way to live, drawn straight
from that brief exchange. Derek is clear that life-changing events can occur in seconds, as the title of his book, The 10 Second Philosophy, implies. "Inside each
or Derek Mills, it all happened in an instant. He was working
late at the offi ce (again) when a security guard walked into the room, saw him sitting at his desk,
of us there is a knowing - a truth inside of us. Outside of us there are things: friends, jobs, careers, people, the economy, the rest of it. Occasionally we get to a point where something inside of us is activated by something outside of us. We get a vibration, a tingle, something
that we respond to. It happens just for a few seconds, but those few seconds are what it's about. It awakens the TrueSelf inside of us. A key message is to pay attention
when that happens! And the more you pay attention, the more it happens." Derek did pay attention. He knew he had to do something different in his life. For him, the answer was to apply standards, and stick to them. "That might mean making sure I spend a
minimum amount of time with my family, that I make sure that the clients I have in fi nancial services are the ones I want, or that I work fewer hours. I realised I needed to work out what standards I needed to
have in my life - and start applying them immediately." This fi nal point is an important one.
For Derek, the idea of standards cuts straight to the issue. You can spend time imagining a future you really want, but in the end it's way out there ahead of you. Deciding what you will and won't accept on a daily basis, starting now, will have the profoundest effect on your life. Within a few months of that evening
with the security guard, Derek started to see his life change. He went through his client list deciding who to keep on and who to get rid of. He was seeing more of his family. There were times when it was hard to do, but living up to his own standards made it very achievable. Ten years on from that epiphany, Derek
is hugely successful and is taking the word of his 10-Second Philosophy out to the world. He recently addressed 7,000 delegates at the Million Dollar Round Table in the US, and when The Best You