Shell - Springboard: launching your personal search for success

What is success and how do I achieve it? Plenty of authors have offered answers to those questions. But only Richard Shell has taken a hard look at the questions themselves. In this insightful book, Shell offers a new way to think of successas a way to live rather than a goal to achievethat can transform your own life and the lives of those around you.

DANIEL PINK,

author of To Sell Is Human and Drive

Springboard: Launching Your Personal Search for Success is a rare findlike one of those special mountaineering guidebooks about a challenging assent that captures the wisdom and experience of generations of climbers. But the Wharton Schools Richard Shell has a very different climb in mind: he wants you to find your way to a successful life based on self-understanding, meaningful work, and deeply rooted human relationships. Lace up your boots and get out your ice ax. You will not find a better guide to overcoming the obstacles ahead on this all-important journey.

JOSH LEWIS ,

Founder and Managing Principal, Salmon River Capital

Richard Shell is an award-winning teacher and the well-known creator of the Wharton Schools only course on the meaning of success. Having attended the course myself, Im thrilled that he is now sharing its tremendously valuable insights with readers. Although there are hundreds of books about how to succeed, Richard helps you think through what success actually isand he is one of the most reliable guides I know to help you figure this out for yourself.

ANGELA DUCKWORTH ,

Associate Professor of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania, winner of the Joseph E. Zins Early Career Award, and codeveloper of the GRIT Scale

Richard Shell has written a book that is at once wise and practical, attentive to the scientific literature and full of gripping stories of individual lives. This is a book every college student should read.

BARRY SCHWARTZ ,

Darwin Cartwright Professor, Swarthmore College, author of The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less and Practical Wisdom: The Right Way to Do the Right Thing

Springboard

Launching Your
Personal Search for SUCCESS

G. RICHARD SHELL

PORTFOLIO / PENGUIN

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

New York, New York 10014, USA

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Copyright G. Richard Shell, 2013

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the authors rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Shell, G. Richard, 1949

Springboard: launching your personal search for success / G. Richard Shell.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN: 978-1-101-60146-4

1. Success. 2. Self-realization. 3. Satisfaction. 4. Job satisfaction. I. Title.

BF637.S8S464 2013

650.1dc23

2013017451

Book design by Elyse Strongin

For my students, past, present, and future.

In gratitude

for teaching me so much.

A man saw a ball of gold in the sky;

He climbed for it,

And eventually he achieved it

It was clay.

Now this is the strange part:

When the man went to the earth

And looked again,

Lo, there was the ball of gold.

Now this is the strange part:

It was a ball of gold.

Aye, by the heavens, it was a ball of gold.

STEPHEN CRANE , 1895

It is only when we have the courage to face things exactly as they are, without any self-deception or illusion, that a light will develop out of events, by which the path to success may be recognized.

I Ching Hexagram #5Waiting/Nourishment

| INTRODUCTION |

RALPH WALDO EMERSON: Harvard teaches most of the branches of learning.

HENRY DAVID THOREAU: Yes, indeed. All of the branches and none of the roots.

A s a senior faculty member at the Wharton School of Business, I am best known for my work in negotiation, persuasion, and interpersonal influence. I have written two popular books on these subjects and teach MBA and undergraduate courses. I have also coached everyone from Navy SEALs and FBI hostage negotiators to top executives at Four Seasons Hotels and managers at Google.

Given what I do now, most people are surprised to learn that I did not start my academic career until I was thirty-seven and spent most of my twenties unemployed, much of the time deeply uncertain about who I was and what I wanted to do. But I count those years as the most important in my life. It was during that intense period of living with failure that I gained my first insights into the meaning of success.

Here is what happened.

I was admitted into college on a full military scholarship. In exchange for this completely free ride plus spending money, I agreed to become a naval officer at graduation and to spend at least six years in military service. At the time, this seemed natural because I came from a military family. My father, a retired general in the U.S. Marine Corps, was the leader of a military college, the Virginia Military Institute, and both of my grandfathers had been career military men.

So far, so good.

But it was the Vietnam War era. Troubled by vivid images of the horrors of battle, convinced there was no justification for the war, and surrounded by classmates and teachers who were protesting against it, I surrendered my scholarship and handed my draft card to the university chaplain. I committed to becoming a pacifist. My familys military traditions were no longer a source of pride. Instead, they became a source of crisis and conflict.

Dont let anyone tell you that symbolic actions are unimportant. On the day I turned in my draft card, I severed the narrative thread of my life. While I continued to function on the outsidenow studying literature and creative writingI no longer recognized who I was. I graduated and, instead of putting on the uniform everyone expected, I became a social worker for families living in condemned buildings without heat, water, or electricity in Washington, D.C. My new clients taught me how people survive even the most desperate living conditions, but they could not tell me what I was supposed to do with my life. Unable to imagine my future, I quit and became a part-time housepainter. I stopped speaking with my parents, refusing to go home even for Christmas. My life as an achiever was shattered. I had no idea how to put it together again.

So began the journey that led to this book.

ODYSSEY YEARSM