Springboard: Launching Your Personal Search for Success

by G. Richard Shell

Overview

Everyone knows that you are supposed to “follow your dream.”  But where is the road map to help you discover what that dream is?
 
You have just found it. In Springboard, award-winning author and teacher G. Richard Shell helps you find your future. His advice: Take an honest look inside and then answer two questions:
 
What, for me, is success?
 
How will I achieve it?
 
You will begin by assessing your current beliefs about success, including the hidden influences of family, media, and culture. These are where the pressures to live “someone else’s life” come from. Once you gain perspective on these outside forces, you will be ready to look inside at your unique combination of passions and capabilities. The goal: to focus more on what gives meaning and excitement to your life and less on what you are “supposed” to want.
 
Drawing on his decades of research, Shell offers personalized assessments to help you probe your past, imagine your future, and measure your strengths. He then combines these with the latest scientific insights on everything from self-confidence and happiness to relationships and careers.
Throughout, he shares inspiring examples of people who found what they were meant to do by embracing their own true measure of success.

• Eric Adler: one of Shell’s former students who walked away from a conventional business career to help launch a revolutionary new concept in public education that has placed hundreds of inner-city high school students in top colleges.
• Kurt Timken: a Harvard-educated son of a Fortune 500 CEO who found his true calling as a hard-charging police officer fighting drug lords in southern California.
• Cynthia Stafford: an office worker who became one of her community’s leading promoters of theater and the arts.

Get ready for the journey of a lifetime—one that will help you reevaluate your future and envision success on your own terms. Students and executives say that Richard Shell’s courses have changed their lives. Let this book change yours.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781101601464
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	08/15/2013
Sold by:	Penguin Group
Format:	eBook
Pages:	320
Sales rank:	604,881
File size:	1 MB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

G. RICHARD SHELL is the Thomas Gerrity Professor of Legal Studies, Business Ethics, and Management at the Wharton School. The creator of Wharton’s popular “Success Course ,” his previous books include the award-winning Bargaining for Advantage: Negotiation Strategies for Reasonable People and, with Mario Moussa, The Art of Woo: Using Strategic Persuasion to Sell Your Ideas. He lives with his family near Philadelphia.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Two Big Questions 1

Part 1 The First Question: What Is Success? 17

Chapter 1 The First Answer: Choose Your Life 19

Chapter 2 An Easy Answer: Be Happy 34

Chapter 3 Society's Answer: Seek Status, Fame, and Fortune 57

Chapter 4 An Inspired Answer: Find Meaningful Work 81

Part 2 The Second Question: How Will I Achieve It? 109

Chapter 5 Assess Your Capabilities: Discover What You Can Do Better Than Most 111

Chapter 6 Renew Your Self-Confidence: Learn to Fail 137

Chapter 7 Set an Inspiring, Long-term Goal: Focus Your Mind 162

Chapter 8 Summon Your Energies: Find Sustainable Motivation 186

Chapter 9 Influence Others: Develop Credibility 205

Conclusion: The Right Answers 226

Appendix 239

Acknowledgments 249

Notes 253

Topical Bibliography 279

Index 289

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Springboard is our pick for Business Book of the Year, the one we believe best helps those in business define success and achieve it. [It is] an even handed, well researched, and thoroughly humanistic book [that] needs to find a home on the shelves—and in the hearts and minds—of anyone who wants to be more successful.” 
—800CEOREAD, Winner of the 2013 Best Business Book of the Year

“A new way to look at success that can transform your life.”
—Daniel Pink, author of Drive

“His outstanding book on achieving success has exactly what this kind of examination needs, common sense and encouragement.”
—Booklist

Editorial Reviews

Shell (Bargaining for Advantage) offers a guide to a more fruitful life based on his popular “Success Course” at the Wharton School of Business. In the first part of the book, the reader learns about developing his or her own definition of success—a process that includes determining the ideal life to lead and redefining happiness as something beyond family, friends, and fortune. Citing research on happiness and wealth, as well as anecdotes and spiritual wisdom, Shell concludes that meaningful work—i.e., work that uses your talents, “ignites you emotionally,” and is financially rewarding, in addition to building health and strong relationships—is the true measure of success. The latter half of the book illustrates the most viable way to pursue this new concept of prosperity: expand your social circle, increase your self-confidence, and focus on your unique skill set. Along the way, Shell incorporates worksheets and exercises, and he shares stories about people at different points in their careers, from Ivy League business school students to would-be retirees, who reinvented themselves to become happy, well-rounded individuals whose work inspires them and benefits larger communities. Shell’s nine steps to success are simple enough to follow, and readers may come away believing that a more prosperous life is attainable with a few tweaks and a little soul searching. Agent: Michael Snell, Michael Snell Literary Agency. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

Springboard is our pick for Business Book of the Year, the one we believe best helps those in business define success and achieve it. [It is] an even handed, well researched, and thoroughly humanistic book [that] needs to find a home on the shelves—and in the hearts and minds—of anyone who wants to be more successful.”
– 800CEOREAD, Winner of the 2013 Best Business Book of the Year

“In addition to [Shell’s] obvious expertise in the specialties of negotiation, persuasion, and interpersonal influence, his outstanding book on achieving success has exactly what this kind of examination needs, common sense and encouragement.”
—Booklist (STARRED review)
 
“Shell’s nine steps to success are simple enough to follow, and readers may come away believing that a more prosperous life is attainable with a few tweaks and a little soul searching.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Written with expert cadence, this book manages to be an 'easy read' without skimping on quality. Shell provides ample research findings, anecdotes, and the expert guidance he’s gleaned from his work in the field.”
—800CEOREAD’s “Books to Watch: August 2013

From the Publisher