Springboard: Launching Your Personal Search for Success

by G. Richard Shell Narrated by Sean Pratt

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.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

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.)

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

“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

Product Details

BN ID:	2940171387044
Publisher:	Ascent Audio
Publication date:	08/13/2013
Edition description:	Unabridged

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