Springboard: Launching Your Personal Search for Success - Hardcover

Shell, G. Richard

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1591845475 ISBN 13: 9781591845478

Publisher: Portfolio, 2013

Synopsis

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.

About this title

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.

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.)

*Starred Review* Shell teaches at the Wharton School of Business, and in addition to his 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. The author’s honesty is established early on as he posits the basic premise of his presentation, “There is no foolproof system that always leads to success.” That said—that admitted to—he nevertheless goes on to unfold a wise program that rests on two factors: one must clarify one’s goals (which means, of course, that a personal definition of success must be arrived at), and the resources and initiatives you need to achieve success should be identified. In well-ordered chapters, Shell develops the stages of his program for success, one important feature of which is determining what you do better than most people. Another aspect of his program that raises this book above others of its ilk is his exploration of the “science of impression management,” which boils down to this: social skills affect success. For all library patrons, not simply those who browse the business shelves. --Brad Hooper

Edition details

• Publisher: Portfolio
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1591845475
• ISBN 13: 9781591845478
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 320