Born to Build: How to Build a Thriving Startup, a Winning Team, New Customers and Your Best Life Imaginable

Grounded in global Gallup research, Born to Build offers readers inspiration and motivation as well as practical steps for building an enterprise of any size from scratch.

People will ask you throughout your life, “Where do you work?” and “What do you do?” They never ask you, “What are you building?”

When conversations change to “What are you building?” the world will change.

Written for anyone trying to figure out how to make the most of their lives, Born to Build seeks to inspire entrepreneurs and ambitious, self-motivated people to build something that will change the world. A builder’s venture could be a small business that grows into a mammoth enterprise, a thriving new division in an existing company, a nonprofit, a social enterprise, a church, a school — anything that creates economic growth and makes a lasting impact on society.

Born to Build is written by Gallup Chairman and CEO Jim Clifton and Sangeeta Badal, Ph.D., Principal Scientist for Gallup’s Entrepreneurship and Job Creation initiative, and is grounded in years of research. This book goes beyond the conventional economics-based business training and instead offers a uniquely psychological approach to venture building. It gives readers the tools and techniques they need to understand who they are, what motivates them and what they can build — and how. By following the practical steps in Born to Build, readers will have the tools to build a sustainable and profitable venture of any size from scratch.

Central to the book is a code that allows readers to take Gallup’s Builder Profile 10 (BP10) assessment, which identifies their innate talents and motivations and shows them how to make the most of their talents to build a successful enterprise.

Jim Clifton is Chairman of Gallup and bestselling author of Born to Build, The Coming Jobs War, Wellbeing at Work and the #1 Wall Street Journal bestseller It’s the Manager. He is the creator of The Gallup Path, a metric-based economic model that shows the role human nature plays in business outcomes. This model is used in performance management systems in more than 500 companies worldwide. His most recent innovation, the Gallup World Poll, is designed to give the world’s 7 billion citizens a voice on virtually all key global issues. Under his leadership, Gallup has expanded from a predominantly U.S.-based company to a worldwide organization with 40 offices in 30 countries and regions.