Psychology Question

“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 success—as a way to live rather than a goal to achieve—that 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 find— like one of those special mountaineering guidebooks about a challenging assent that captures the wisdom and experience of generations of climbers. But the Wharton School’s Richard Shell has a very different climb in mind: he wants you to find your way to a successful life based on selfunderstanding, 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 School’s only course on the meaning of success. Having attended the course myself, I’m 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 is—and 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 USA | Canada | UK | Ireland | Australia | New Zealand | India | South Africa | China Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England For more information about the Penguin Group visit penguin.com 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 author’s 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 650.1—dc23 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 #5—Waiting/Nourishment Contents Sales Quotes Title Page Copyright Page Dedication Epigraph INTRODUCTION Two Big Questions PART ONE The First Question: What Is Success? CHAPTER 1 The First Answer: Choose Your Life CHAPTER 2 An Easy Answer: Be Happy CHAPTER 3 Society’s Answer: Seek Status, Fame, and Fortune CHAPTER 4 An Inspired Answer: Find Meaningful Work PART TWO The Second Question: How Will I Achieve It? CHAPTER 5 Discover What You Can Do Better Than Most: Capabilities CHAPTER 6 Set Yourself on Fire: Motivation CHAPTER 7 Learn to Fail: Self-Confidence CHAPTER 8 Focus Your Mind: Passion, Imagination, Intuition, and Reason CHAPTER 9 Influence Others: Credibility and Dialogue CONCLUSION The Right Answers Acknowledgments Notes Topical Bibliography Index | INTRODUCTION | Two Big Questions 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 family’s military traditions were no longer a source of pride. Instead, they became a source of crisis and conflict. Don’t 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 outside—now studying literature and creative writing—I 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 Sociologists have identified a relatively new, distinct stage of life in Western societies—the “Odyssey Years” between twenty and thirty-five (i.e., roughly between college and marriage)—when men and women set out to discover their own values and goals. Odysseys can also begin later in life with an unexpected layoff or divorce, or as people near retirement. The work on an Odyssey is to discover what the next stage of your life will hold —to find out what’s ahead, sometimes in the face of conflicting family, cultural, or economic pressures. Each person’s journey is, by definition, different, and you can never be sure exactly where it will end. My Odyssey started with magic. I sought out self-help seminars where I learned about affirmation, visualization, autohypnosis, and mind control. I progressed from magic to the mantras of Transcendental Meditation, and from mantras to psychotherapy. Between house-painting jobs, I did some acting in local theaters and even toured the country with a ragtag, left-wing theater group: the People’s Revolutionary Road Company. But underneath all the activity, I was living a life of quiet desperation. Painting houses gives you plenty of time to think and I spent much of mine in culturally inspired success fantasies. I became a world-famous poet. Then I was an important member of Congress. Then it would be time to paint the trim on another window sash. One especially vivid daydream dominated all the rest. I had an impressive office on K Street, Washington’s central artery for lobbyists and consultants. In my office, a big, leafy potted plant stood next to an equally imposing window that looked out at the people, buses, and cars rushing by. I felt very important because I had a professional office with a potted plant. It must have been a powerful vision because, in a roundabout way, it eventually came true almost exactly as I had imagined it. Tired of painting houses, I launched a search for a white-collar job by answering newspaper employment ads. One day, my search took me to a suburban office park where I was interviewed for a time-share real estate sales job by a welldressed man who was eager to know what my “five-year plan” was. Of course, I did not have a five-year plan. I did not even have a five-day plan. But he asked me an obvious question I had not thought about before: what could I do better than most people? My college major was in English and I could definitely use words better than many of my classmates. This insight changed my job search. I started calling every number in the Washington, D.C., yellow pages related to a job that might require writing skills: magazines, newspapers, trade association newsletters, public relations firms, fund-raising groups, and so on. I finally hit pay dirt when I talked my way into an interview with a fund-raising consulting firm. They needed someone who knew something about social work (they had a new client in that field), and I passed the writing test. Miraculously, when they ushered me into my new office on my first day at work, I discovered that I had a potted plant and a window looking out on K Street. I learned three important career lessons from this episode. First, fantasies are fun, but taking action is what gets you a job. Second, it helped to be looking for work doing something I did better than most people. That gave me a story to tell. The final and most important lesson came soon after I started that job. I learned that success is not a place. My new job was no better for me than painting houses had been. I got a bigger paycheck and had a recognizable professional “role” to talk about when I met someone at a party. But the potted plant in my office had no answers to the inner questions I was asking. I felt like an impostor—an actor posing as a professional. So in June 1976, I quit and left America altogether, setting off to travel the world with my life savings of $3,000 and a backpack. I did not know if or when I would return. All I knew was that I longed to feel confident again, to have a direction in life I could believe in. I started in Greece, sleeping as often as possible in cheap hostels, hotels, and even public parks. I trekked from the Orthodox monasteries of Mount Athos in northern Greece to the hillsides overlooking the Sea of Galilee, reading the Bible as I went. In that great crossroads between East and West —Istanbul—I learned about a hippie express called the Magic Bus that left every day to go overland to New Delhi, India. For thirty-five dollars, you could get off anywhere along the route, and get back on a day, a week, or even a month later. So I climbed aboard, traveling in stages from Istanbul to Iran and from Iran into Afghanistan. It was in Afghanistan that my Odyssey ran completely off the road. HITTING BOTTOM I vividly recall the particular day my journey changed because I kept a journal of my travels. I had just finished a grueling two-day bus trip, inhaling dust across the entire length of Afghanistan, from Herat to Kandahar to Kabul. Every two hundred kilometers or so, as the bus rumbled along from one warlord’s territory to the next, it stopped for what amounted to a changing of the guard. Everyone got out; the local men, women, and children who were riding on the roof scrambled down; and we all sought shade under a tree or inside a tin-roofed hut to take tea. The rifle-toting militiaman who had been riding next to the driver departed, and, eventually, a new guarantor of a new warlord’s protection showed up. At the driver’s signal, everyone would pile back into and onto the bus and we would rumble off. As we pulled into Kabul, rain had begun to fall. I was dimly aware of feeling dizzy as I stepped off the bus and into the mud that passed for a street. Then I remembered what day it was: Christmas Eve. “Hotel?” I asked the driver, and I followed the arc of the man’s finger to a set of low-slung buildings nearby. With the rain soaking both me and my backpack, I made my way to Kabul’s version of skid row and checked into a cheap hotel, getting the last remaining bed for fifty cents per night. It was a cot in a hallway surrounded by a soiled sheet as a makeshift curtain. I put my gear down and headed back outside to make my way to town, but my dizziness increased with every step. Before I had gone more than fifty yards, I blacked out, collapsing on the side of a street. When I came to, I was lying on my back in some mud and looking up at a ring of dark-complexioned, curious faces forming a tight circle around me. A man in a dirty Afghan army uniform bent over, hands on knees, and peered into my face. A young boy offered his hand to pull me up. I was sure I was going to be sick, but I managed to get to my feet. It isn’t often that you know exactly—to the second—when you have hit the bottom of your life. But I knew that morning as I stumbled back toward my hotel that I was very close to being at the bottom of mine. A few minutes later I learned from some pot-smoking Australian travelers in a nearby room that my dizzy feeling had a name. One of them led me to a mirror and told me to look into my eyes. They were both a dull yellow. “Hep,” he said. Hepatitis. If you had told me that night that I would one day graduate from law school near the top of my class, clerk for a federal appeals court in Boston, and become a professor of law, ethics, and management at the Wharton School, I would have questioned your sanity. But something shifted in my life that day. I had pushed myself to my psychological and physical limits and had ended up alone, filthy, sick, and no closer to finding my direction than I was a year earlier. A sense of deep despair crept over me. Sometimes it is only when the status quo becomes intolerable that change happens. As I lay in my hallway cot that night, the status quo of my life on the road became intolerable. I did not know what sort of change was coming, but I knew that continuing to travel aimlessly around the globe was not going to solve my problem. And, as fate would have it, I turned a corner before the night was out. It started with a midnight visit from two European teenagers who belonged to a religious group called the Children of God. They poked their heads around my curtain and bore a brown paper bag with the words “Merry Christmas” written on it in crayon. Inside were two fresh-baked cookies and a tangerine. They left this gift along with some literature by their prophet, a man named Moses David. They also left behind, I wrote later that night in my journal, a vivid impression of what life looks like when it is motivated by a sense of purpose rooted in deeply held beliefs. The apocalyptic religious teachings of Moses David did not win me over. But the power of these two young people’s beliefs—no matter what the content was—set me thinking. They had traveled the same roads as I to the same backstreet hotel in Kabul where I had landed. We had shared something on a Christmas Eve. Only I was in a pit of despair while they were cheerful, energetic, and generous. What was I missing? These two “angels” (I could not help but think of them this way) had caught me just as I was falling into a very dark place. And they lit a small spark of hope, kindling a desire to look inside myself and see if I could discover a point of view I could call my own. I was still sick, but I woke up the next day with the sense that it would be better than the one before it. The French novelist Marcel Proust once wrote, “The voyage of discovery lies not in seeking new horizons, but in seeing with new eyes.” It was in Kabul that I began to understand what Proust meant. I was no longer interested in the stark, beautiful mountains that surrounded the city. Instead, I was looking inside for a hint as to who, exactly, was looking out at those mountains. A FORK IN THE ROAD It took me a few weeks to get my health back, and after that my journey changed from a road trip to a more focused quest for inner experiences. Making my way through the Khyber Pass to Pakistan and India, I learned contemplation techniques at Hindu ashrams and finally took up residence in the Kanduboda Buddhist monastery in Sri Lanka. Under the patient guidance of a wise monk there, Venerable Seevali Thera, I sat and walked through eighteen-hour days of insight meditation, coming to some direct realizations about perception, the nature of beliefs, change, suffering, and death. I also saw how distressingly easy it was to get caught up in the bustle of day-to-day striving and forget everything I had learned. Slowly, I began to understand myself, my family, and my emotions more clearly—goals I hope I can help you achieve for yourself in this book. Having learned the basics of Buddhist meditation practice, I next sought to learn more about the Buddha’s life. I made pilgrimages to the holy sites in India where he achieved enlightenment (Bodh Gaya) and gave his first sermon on his insights into life and death (Sarnath). Over the ensuing months, I made my way to Nepal, Thailand, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and, eventually, Korea. There, at a beautiful monastery in the southern mountains called Songgwang-sa, I met a Zen master named Ku San Sunim. Master Ku San, as I described him in my journal, was “an energetic little man with dancing eyes and a very direct way about him” who presided over a large community of monks. At first glance, he looked more like a farmer than a Zen master. A French nun named Song-il, who now helps to lead a meditation center in England, served as his translator. Master Ku San invited me to stop traveling and live there at Songgwang-sa, become a monk, and dedicate my life to the search for enlightenment. He advised me to consider carefully because “the most useful life is led by one who is fully awakened and who can share that equally with all. One who attempts to help others without being enlightened,” he said, “cannot do so well as one who is awake.” I stayed in Songgwang-sa for a while to think it over. I faced a fork in the road. One way led to a lifetime investigating the deepest layers of inner truth—a search that I had come to respect and admire. The other led back home, where I would get a chance to test whether the limited understandings I had gained about perception, emotion, and my own inner resources could help to resolve the personal conflicts I had left behind when I began my Odyssey. At length, I decided to take the path that has led me to where I am today rather than the one toward the meditation hall. Three considerations—only one of which is easy to relate in words—tipped me toward home. First, the easy one. My meditation practice had taught me something blindingly obvious about myself (which I was, of course, the last to know): I am basically a practical person. Seeking challenges and solving problems suits me better than sitting in stillness. The second factor had to do with something invisible that I had acquired and that answered the question I had been asking since Christmas Eve in Kabul. The intense, direct experience of my own inner world had fundamentally anchored my sense of identity. I had learned to watch and observe the moment-to-moment parade of impulses, insecurities, memories, plans, fantasies, and fears that made up my mental reality. The “self” inside me that did that observing was something different from—and stronger than —the thoughts, insecurities, and fears themselves. Ironically, a religion that teaches there is no self had helped me to find my identity. I now had a point of view about the world and my place in it—a point of view that supplied for me what the cult-based belief system had supplied for my two midnight visitors in Kabul. Unlike them, however, I was capable of living with uncertainties, mysteries, and doubts without needing to resolve them into a single truth or ideological belief. Finally, I had come to terms with a fundamental, hard-to-face fact of life. I understood that suffering and death are not exceptional conditions that afflict the unfortunate. They are the essential challenges around which every worthy life is built. I knew and accepted how my story would someday end. My task was to write a purposeful narrative using the life I had left in front of me. I went home because the quest that had started in Kabul was over. FROM THE MONASTERY TO THE CLASSROOM The poet T. S. Eliot once wrote that “the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” So it was for me. By the time I returned home, I was in my late twenties and still had no idea what I would do with my life. But I was in the right place with the right people. A prodigal son, I reconciled with my parents and moved into their spare bedroom in Lexington, Virginia—the small rural town where I had grown up after my father retired from the Marine Corps. I got a job selling home insulation door-to-door. As I visited all the familiar haunts of my childhood, I was astonished to find that everything was almost exactly as I had left it years before. Only I was seeing it—as well as my parents, old friends, and grade-school teachers—with a new kind of clarity. As the next year passed, I zeroed in on a vocation by thinking (once again) about what I could do “better than most” and surveying professions that depended on writing skills. I discovered that law was such an occupation and applied to the law school at the University of Virginia, which was just up the road in Charlottesville. I also fell in love all over again with a woman from my college class whom I had dated back when we were students. We married. Then, during a law-school class one day, lightning struck. I was sitting in a classroom with 150 other students, all primed and ready to talk about that day’s legal topic. An especially gifted professor had me riveted to my seat, anticipating what question he would ask next and hoping he would call on me to answer it. The energy and intellectual excitement of that moment sent an emotional charge through me that delivered a realization: I wanted to be the person in the front of that room. I wanted to create that kind of excitement and insight for others. I wanted to be a teacher. The classes that followed confirmed my insight and provided me with a concrete occupational goal. But lots of hard work lay ahead to achieve it. It would take another six years—spent finding role models, finishing law school, clerking for a federal appeals court judge, and working as a lawyer —before my Odyssey Years finally ended at the age of thirty-seven with the beginning of my teaching career at the Wharton School. After joining the faculty in 1986 and advancing from the junior to the senior ranks, I discovered a secret of academic life. Working as a professor allows you to create, not just follow, your passions. I started out teaching law but soon launched the Wharton School’s first class on negotiation and conflict resolution—a course that required me to read deeply in social psychology and that allowed me to help mentor students in the kind of emotional self-awareness I had picked up on my travels. As I spoke with more and more students about their careers and aspirations, I discovered that examining the idea of “success” provided an even more meaningful way to help them reflect on their goals and identities. My academic environment also exposed me to many colleagues who were a lot smarter and more accomplished than I was in subjects I wanted to learn. For example, my study of success led me to Professor Martin Seligman, a world-famous University of Pennsylvania researcher who established the field of positive psychology in the late 1990s. Then, with the help of Marty’s top graduate student, Angela Duckworth (who is now a star scholar in her own right), I established a university-wide success seminar in honor of Benjamin Franklin’s three-hundredth birthday. Franklin’s Autobiography was the first how-to-succeed book in American history, and we invited leading academics in psychology, philosophy, and religion to give talks on the meaning of success today. Needless to say, I was taking a lot of notes. Finally, in 2005, I created and continue to teach a popular course at Wharton called The Literature of Success: Ethical and Historical Perspectives (we will call it “Success” for short in this book)—a course that distills my study of hundreds of how-to books, philosophical works, biographies, and psychological research papers on success, extending from ancient to modern times. Aristotle, Plato, Dale Carnegie, Charles Lindbergh, and Steven Covey share top billing with Benjamin Franklin on the reading list for my Success course. The author of Walden, the philosopher Henry David Thoreau, once commented to his friend and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson that Harvard had taught all the branches of learning but got to “none of the roots.” My goal in Success is to get to some of those roots by allowing students and faculty to talk directly and candidly about life goals and success concepts in a classroom. As my work in this course has become known, I have been invited to give school-wide lectures as well as lead sessions on the meaning of success for top leadership teams and executives. What have I learned teaching this fascinating subject? That Ivy League students and organizational leaders are no different from the millions of other people who look to success guides for counsel. All alike are seeking help to solve some fairly complicated problems: how to get along better with others, get ahead in their careers, and find meaning in their lives. They need just a little help—as I did so many years ago when I painted houses in Washington, D.C., and attended courses in local hotels on mind magic. In the Success course, and now in this book, I hope I can provide a few shortcuts through the maze that popular culture has made of the “quest for success”—and to do so in a uniquely open and interactive way. THERE ARE NO SECRETS How does this book differ from other books about success? First, I am not a hard-charging entrepreneur, media celebrity, or motivational guru who wants to tell you how I have succeeded so you can apply my “system.” The story you just read about my Odyssey is the most you will hear about my life in this book. And I can tell you right up front: there is no foolproof system that always leads to success. Instead, I want to give you the benefit of what I have learned as an avid student of this subject for over four decades. I have set the book up so you can craft your own goals and devise your own success system based on your unique skills and personality. Second, I want to take some of the mystery and anxiety out of success. There is no “secret” you need to discover. And you do not have “one true purpose” for your life that it is your duty to find or die trying. The raw materials for success are tucked away inside you and your next big goal is probably within arm’s reach—if only you have the clarity of mind to see it. Third, I want to offer hope. Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers: The Story of Success stood the world of success studies on its head, arguing persuasively that world-class performance in any field is often a matter of good fortune combined with innate talent, lucky genes, sociological advantage, good timing, and obsessive work. The “story of success,” he concludes, is usually just that—a tall tale we make up after the fact that (falsely) gives the starring role to the individual rather than to luck and circumstance. I agree with Gladwell that the small subset of the population we label “extremely successful” (people such as Gladwell himself) are, almost by definition, unusually talented, very lucky, and blessed with favorable genetic predispositions and relentless personal drive. But I think there is still hope for the rest of us. This book will help you do two things that are firmly within your grasp: clarify your goals and understand better how to make progress achieving them. Outliers explains how Bill Gates, the Beatles, and various Nobel Prize winners scored their remarkable achievements. This book has a different goal. I want to help you start where you are today, regardless of your current advantages or disadvantages. Then you can use this book as a springboard for launching your search to find a truly personal vision of success. From what my students tell me, this work can change your life. TWO BIG QUESTIONS ONLY YOU CAN ANSWER Students and executives frequently ask me how I came to be interested in success when my main fields of interest are persuasion and negotiation. I tell them that my study of success came first. By investigating the meaning of success, you begin the lifelong process of deciding what is worth doing. Your skills at influence, persuasion, and negotiation can then help you to achieve those goals. In this book I will challenge you to answer two questions I ask my students to confront throughout our course. The First Question: What is success? The Second Question: How will I achieve it? To help you address these issues, the book is divided into two parts that take up these questions and provide ideas and exercises to help you answer them. Every now and then I will give you my own opinion about a success topic, but you and only you can answer the two success questions for yourself. Moreover, as your life progresses, you are sure to encounter both predictable and unexpected challenges that will force you to revise the answers you give the first time you read this book. What makes sense at one stage of your life may not make sense later on. As Harry Potter tells his friend Hermione (in the film Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows—Part 2), “When have any of our plans actually worked? We plan, we get there, all hell breaks loose!” Jobs come and go; accidents happen; careers change; retirement looms. The questions raised in this book are useful to consider now—and may be worth revisiting down the road. Throughout the book, I will present a series of exercises and assessments I have created in my work with students and executives. These are based on well-researched psychological principles as well as insights from religion, literature, and philosophy. As you will see, success is never simple. It always involves hidden assumptions and trade-offs. Cultural beliefs, amplified by family expectations, can operate like automatic pilots, steering your intuitions, emotions, and actions even when you are only dimly aware of their influence. WHERE WE GO FROM HERE Here is how the book is organized. Part 1 consists of four chapters to help you answer the First Question: What is success? We will start with a success values survey I use in my training programs. Then we will proceed to look at some of the answers commonly given to the what-is-success question: happiness, family, professional status, fame, fortune, and a “calling”—or what I refer to as meaningful work. Chapter 1 gets you started by allowing you to choose your own life. It features a self-assessment I call the Six Lives Exercise to help you take a snapshot of your current success attitudes. If you had a free choice in the matter, would you live a life devoted to happiness or aim at some significant accomplishment? It is easy to say “both,” but there are always trade-offs. This chapter will probe how you are thinking about those tradeoffs today. Chapter 2 examines the most obvious answer to the success question. Try asking random people you meet during the day what “success” means to them. You will find that most have a simple, immediate answer: “happiness.” But when you ask them what they mean by happiness, they are not so sure. For some it is family; for others it is pleasure; for a few it is doing God’s will. Thanks to Marty Seligman’s positive psychology movement, there has been an explosion of research on happiness in recent decades. We will look at some of those findings, and you will get a chance to figure out for yourself what you mean by this all-important but elusive word. Chapter 3 examines the roles that family and culture play in establishing your ideas about success. Your family may not have demanded that you become a doctor or a lawyer, but you probably got the message that your parents wanted you to “be somebody.” What exactly does that mean? In addition, our celebrity-dominated culture provides two compelling anwsers to the what-is-success question: fame and fortune. We’ll look closely at why so many people in our modern, media-saturated world are drawn to these success measures. Even if these specific goals do not appeal to you, this chapter will help you better understand how the social world surrounding you has influenced your success goals. Chapter 4—“An Inspired Answer: Find Meaningful Work”—focuses squarely on success as it relates to your professional aspirations. There are at least three different ways to think about work: as a job, as a career, or as something that has special meaning beyond either of these. Interestingly, research shows that the meaning in work comes from within you—not from the occupation itself. When I was living in South Korea’s Songgwang-sa monastery, for example, jobs as menial as washing dishes and cleaning toilets were considered meaningful. They gave the monks opportunities to practice mindfulness and attitudes of service to the community. By the same token, you may know people who are nurses, social workers, or teachers— occupations that look, from the outside, to be meaningful. But when you ask them about it, they may see what they do as just paycheck-oriented jobs. With your ideas about what success is in mind, consider the Second Question in the book: How will I achieve it? The five chapters in part 2 are designed to help you figure out the special combination of talent, experience, and drive you are bringing to your success journey. Chapter 5 addresses your unique capabilities and asks you to think about the question that got me my first professional job and launched me on my current career: what do you do “better than most”? We will survey your unique aptitudes, passions, and skills. In addition, I will ask you to complete a personality profiler to determine your personal strengths in terms of social skills, achievement drives, intellectual/creative impulses, and emotional temperament. One of the great ironies in the study of success is that many people believe the secrets to achieving it lie “out there” somewhere—in a far-off, hard-to-find place. The truth is much simpler: the answer lies within yourself. Your task is always to discover (and rediscover) your own innate abilities. Chapter 6 investigates the motivations that power your success engine. We all run on our own favorite fuels. But I have found that people who motivate themselves through a combination of seeking both inner satisfaction and outer rewards can often stay with a single task longer and get a stronger sense of having “succeeded” than those who rely on only one or the other. You may discover that you have some important energy sources you have neglected. Chapter 7 explores a critical success factor: self-confidence. It investigates the role of failure as a factor in your achievement and examines whether you have the kind of “mindset” that allows you to take risks and that researchers have shown can help you to get ahead in life. Norman Vincent Peale’s classic The Power of Positive Thinking (1952) launches with the exhortation “Believe in yourself!” This chapter will help you discover the unique sources for these beliefs in your own life. Chapter 8 looks at one of my favorite subjects in the success field: the powers of mental focus that help you achieve things. There is a lot of hocus-pocus and magic associated with this topic. So we will use the reallife, remarkable story of how Charles Lindbergh made his historic flight across the Atlantic Ocean in his tiny aircraft, the Spirit of St. Louis, to track how the four genuine powers of the mind—passion, imagination, intuition, and reason—can work together to help you accomplish your most important goals. Chapter 9 wraps up the second half of the book by exploring how your social skills affect success. Having written several earlier books about the arts of persuasion and negotiation, I have a theory that what matters most in your social life is your ability to exert influence through credibility and an art we will call “dialogue.” The challenge in social interaction is figuring out how to maintain your sense of personal authenticity at the same time that you make the adjustments needed to work with a variety of other people and personalities. This chapter will give you the chance to look at the science of impression management as well as the practical steps you can take to gain people’s trust and cooperation as you move important projects along. The book’s conclusion, “The Right Answers,” reviews the major themes and lessons that I hope you have taken away from our work together. I will challenge you to list the actions you need to take in your personal as well as your professional life to further your personal concept of success. You will be reading about a lot of people in the pages ahead—some famous and many you have never heard of. Almost all of them will have stories about how they overcame hardships, corrected mistakes, set their sights on what they believed in, and achieved their own version of success. But, ultimately, this book is not about any of them. It is about you. As Apple’s cofounder Steve Jobs said in his famous 2005 commencement address at Stanford University, “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life…. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And, most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become.” I hope this book with help you hear your own inner voice more clearly so you can discover what you should do next with your life. Then the fun begins. You get to do it. | PART ONE | The First Question What Is Success? T he first four chapters give you the chance to examine your current assumptions and beliefs about success. Once you begin to think about it, you may be surprised at how many of your ideas about success originate from your culture, family, friends, and exposure to mass media. As you become more aware of these sources for your beliefs, you can decide whether to embrace, reject, or integrate them into new and more creative ways to approach your life. From a distance, success may appear obvious. Put simply, successful people already have whatever it is that you want—fame, wealth, happiness, fulfillment, professional status, or a life of leisure. The closer you get to achieving any or all of these things, however, the more complex and elusive they turn out to be. For this reason, some people end up deciding that success is less about the goals you should strive to achieve and more about the way you should live your life. In this part, you will look at some of the most common answers to the what-is-success question: happiness, fame, fortune, professional status, and meaningful work. It would be great to have it all, but life usually demands trade-offs. Where do you set your priorities? |1| The First Answer: Choose Your Life There is no one who, if he listens to himself, does not discover in himself a pattern all his own, a ruling pattern. —MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE I met Eric Adler when he was in his first year of Wharton’s MBA program taking a required law course I was teaching. Sandy-haired and slightly older than the average student, he was the kind of person every teacher loves—prepared, eager, smart, and full of good questions. One day he dropped by my office to talk about a question he had raised in class. He had never had a course on law before and he was excited by the challenges posed by the material. Before long, however, the conversation turned to deeper, more personal issues. “I’m not sure yet what I want to do,” Eric confided. “I love business school, but I don’t know where it is taking me.” Two kinds of students attend graduate business school. By far the majority are “Quants.” These are the students who studied economics, math, or engineering in college; got their first job in some sort of businessrelated field; and can do complex calculations of net present value in their heads. They know what they want: the excitement of doing big deals, investing big money, or advising the world’s biggest companies as strategy consultants. I respect the passion that many of these students have for the world of global business. They are combining their genuine talents with the excitement of vying for some of the most important and influential jobs in the world economy. But every class also has a group that we call the “Poets”—people from a range of backgrounds that include former professional athletes, military veterans, Peace Corps volunteers, and journalists. For them, business school is a pathway to entirely new opportunities and careers. Classes on statistics and finance can be a little harder for the Poets because they have to compete with the Quants on materials the Quants can master without opening a book. Being the faculty version of a Poet myself, I try to offer them what comfort I can. Eric was skilled in math (he had majored in economics and engineering in college), but he still profiled as a Poet. He was a graduate of one of the best liberal arts colleges in the country, Swarthmore College, and had been a teacher and an administrator at a well-known private high school in Baltimore for eight years. He loved his classroom teaching, but it had become routine. He was looking for something with more of an “edge”— the kind of competitive, every-minute-counts energy that he thought a career in business might provide. He had enrolled in business school hoping the experience would help him discover what he should do next. Now, midway through his first year, he was just beginning that search. “You could always combine what you are learning about business with your knowledge of education,” I suggested. Eric agreed, but he looked dubious. “I don’t want to go back to what I’ve done before,” he said. “I’m looking for a change.” We chatted for a few more minutes before he had to leave for a class. I invited him to check back and talk more anytime he wanted. And over his two years at Wharton he did just that, even taking another course with me—this one on negotiation. To tell the truth, however, I became increasingly worried as Eric moved through the program. Business schools have very distinctive, careeroriented cultures. Everyone agrees on what the high-status jobs are. Pretty soon everybody—even those who privately harbor doubts—gets swept up into the technology-finance-consulting whirlpool funneling students into these prestigious industries. Eric’s situation left him vulnerable to these cultural forces, and it was not long before he was succumbing to them. Soon after the beginning of his second year, Eric stopped by my office to make an announcement: “I’ve figured out what I want to do!” he said excitedly. “I want to become a consultant!” Inwardly, I had my doubts. Outwardly, I congratulated him and wished him luck. A few months later, Eric achieved his goal and landed a consulting job in Washington, D.C. When I saw him just before graduation, however, he was having second thoughts. He had been turned down by his first-choice firm. The position he was taking was not the one he had dreamed about. “I’m pretty sure this company isn’t where I want to spend my career,” he said. “But it is the right thing for me to do now.” For many, that would be the end of the story. I might have caught up with Eric ten or twenty years later at a reunion, and I would have been curious about how it had all worked out. But that is not how Eric’s story ends—and that is why I am telling you about him to start our work together on your success. Less than a year after Eric graduated, I ran into someone from his consulting company at Wharton’s executive conference center, and I asked her how he was doing. She looked uncomfortable. “Eric was not really cut out to be a consultant,” she said. “He is no longer with us.” She had no idea what he was doing. My heart sank. Not long after that, however, I learned that Eric’s story was turning out to be much more interesting than I had expected. He had figured out even faster than his firm that he was not cut out for consulting. One of his first projects involved an elaborate, time-consuming analysis for a large corporate client about how to save money. The project ended in a recommendation that the firm print its customer invoices on two-sided rather than one-sided paper. He had not gone to graduate school so he could do that kind of work. He had to get out immediately. And his dissatisfaction threw him back into searching for his real interests and passions—only now with more urgency. As the French philosopher Michel de Montaigne noted in the quote that opened this chapter, when you stop and listen to yourself, you are likely to discern “a pattern all [your] own, a ruling pattern.” This is exactly what happened to Eric. First, he realized that he wanted to be his own boss, to build something that would be important and that would use his unique combination of talents and knowledge. “What can I start?” he asked himself. His parents had both been entrepreneurs who had launched and sold a successful company—and then started another one. He had grown up in a home where entrepreneurial spirit and risk taking were normal aspects of family life and dinner-table talk. The business-school culture had framed his career problem as a recruiting question: “Where should I work?” When he asked, “What can I start?” his mind immediately started buzzing with ideas about what he knew best: education. In rethinking his experiences as a high-school teacher, he reviewed an old puzzle: why did at-risk teenagers who had been given scholarships to attend his elite private school so often struggle? They were smart enough to do well, but they lacked the social foundations and study habits their betterheeled classmates brought with them from home. To solve this problem, Eric began kicking around a crazy idea to create a first-of-its-kind “public education boarding school” that could provide some of the missing elements these kids needed to thrive. The school would create a safe environment for study, a peer group devoted to academic achievement, adult role models, and a culture of accountability. As he developed the concept, he envisioned a 24/7 high school with a rigorous curriculum and a staff of teachers as committed to excellence as he was. Their common goal: to show the world that these young people, given the right circumstances, could succeed. Before long, Eric was talking about his dream to anyone who would listen. And during his last few weeks at the consulting firm, one of the newer partners suggested he meet a young Princeton graduate named Rajiv Vinnakota. Raj, it seems, had been talking to people at his consulting firm about a very similar concept. Eric and Raj soon met for a life-changing, three-hour dinner at a local fast-food restaurant in Washington, D.C. They decided then and there to join forces. Within two months they had written a full-blown proposal for their model school. And within eighteen months they had raised $2 million, renovated an old building in Washington, and opened their doors to forty sixth graders—all admitted based on a lottery for local children from Washington’s toughest neighborhoods. The first School for Educational Evolution and Development (SEED) was born. It would grow to encompass grades six through twelve—roughly fifty students per grade—with a clear goal of sending as many inner-city students as possible to college. The rest is history. Eric and Raj received a Use Your Life Award from Oprah Winfrey on her television show in 2002. Appearances on ABC’s Nightline and a special segment on CBS’s 60 Minutes followed—and additional SEED schools have opened in other cities. Most important, Eric and Raj have proved that their model can deliver dramatically different educational results by creating the learning and psychological conditions needed for inner-city children to flourish. In 2010, every single one of their SEED graduates—all coming from poor neighborhoods where only 33 percent of students even graduate from high school—was admitted to college, including such schools as Duke, Brown, and the University of Maryland. And the outlook for them there is excellent. Nearly 70 percent of SEED students who start college end up graduating—a graduation rate six times higher than that of the public high schools in the at-risk neighborhoods SEED draws from. Did Eric need to spend two years of his life obtaining a business degree to discover the SEED concept? Probably not. But by asking the question “What can I start?” he found that he had acquired a powerful set of capabilities to apply in answering that question. He was able to combine his business knowledge with his unique educational experience to make SEED a success. When he and Raj needed to raise $14 million through a Bank of America bond offering to complete the SEED School Washington campus, Eric had the knowledge, skills, credibility, and experience to attract investors and close the deal. Just as I had hoped the first day we met in my office, Eric had put it all together and found what I’ll refer to in chapter 4 as “meaningful work”—a sweet spot of success that appealed to his entrepreneurial motivations, made good use of everything he knew, and advanced a goal he believed in. In the process, he and his partner helped establish a new and exciting kind of career: the public education entrepreneur. FINDING SUCCESS: FOUR THEMES Eric’s story illustrates four important theories about success we will explore in this book. Keep these in mind as you dive into the pages to come. First, finding out what success means to you often involves trial and error, not just theoretical contemplation. You have to take risks, try things out, and experiment. As Eric’s example shows, your search may involve flashes of insight such as his “I want to become a consultant!” that will turn out to be false signals. But you must nevertheless summon the courage to try out new roles, admit they do not suit you, and return to the search process. Conventional success stories often feature heroes who know exactly what they want to do and then overcome enormous odds to achieve it. But the story reads this way because it starts only after the heroes have gone through the messy and uncertain process of finding their targets. For most flesh-and-blood people, the harder question is discovering what they want to do. In chapter 7, we will meet a man named Bill Richmond whose life included careers as a fighter pilot, a big-band drummer, and a prizewinning comedy writer in Hollywood. His philosophy expresses the improvisational spirit that many successful people bring to life: “Do it, then learn how.” Second, your goals do not just appear out of thin air. You need to become aware of the success values your culture and family endorsed. That way you can be sure the ideals you are shaping your life around truly reflect your own, freely chosen values. As the eighteenth-century philosopher JeanJacques Rousseau once noted, individuals take their cues about what is “good or desirable” in life from what they think their culture judges to be good and desirable. The Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius noted this truth in his Meditations, nearly two thousand years ago. “I have often wondered,” he wrote, “how it is that every man loves himself more than all the rest of men, yet sets more value on others’ opinions than on his own.” For better or for worse, most of us seek to achieve things that will prompt someone, somewhere to think well of us. An important aspect of getting clear about success, therefore, is breaking free of those assumptions and looking inside to discover what you, yourself, genuinely esteem. Eric Adler came from entrepreneurial parents, but he did not follow in their footsteps blindly. He tried other lines of work before creating his own, highly original version of the entrepreneurial story. Moreover, he won high social acclaim in the best possible way: without seeking it. Others—those who seek success primarily to bask in its limelight—often end up addicted to fame and fortune in much the same way drug addicts need daily fixes. We will see some examples of such people in chapter 3. Buddhists have a name for them: “Hungry Ghosts.” Third, success is a multidimensional concept, not just a work-related one. You may have noticed that my story about Eric emphasized his career. But before this chapter is over, you will see that this book makes no such assumption. I will share some further, more personal information about Eric’s life later on. And shortly, I will give you your own personal success values assessment, called the Six Lives Exercise, to help you begin thinking about the balance you want in your life between inner, emotional aspects of success and the outer, achievement-related ones. This exercise will also give you a chance to begin understanding what motivates you—a topic we will cover in more detail in chapter 6. Fourth and finally, success is not a single, once-and-for-all destination. It is a journey with way stations, stopovers, and campgrounds. You can get to one place, enjoy it, and then move on. Chapter 4, which introduces a concept I call “meaningful work,” will give you a chance to explore this idea in more detail. Eric’s story illustrates how life can provide you with chances to discover different ways of enjoying success at different times in your life. Eric loved teaching high school—until he sensed it was time to move on. He is enjoying his entrepreneurial SEED venture now and has no plans to step away from it. But a time for change may come. What is sweet when you are in your twenties and thirties may lose its savor in your forties and fifties. The same can happen at each stage of your life as you learn, grow, and mature. The good news is that you bring new capabilities to each stage of life—a topic that chapter 5 will expand on. Your changing combination of abilities and experiences will offer new opportunities. New paths to success can then emerge. In the sections below, you will take the first step of your journey by discovering what you think about success today. In the following three chapters, you will get a chance to drill deeper into the ways happiness, family, culture, and work have influenced your success beliefs. This chapter is your alarm clock. It is time to wake up. YOUR SUCCESS VALUES To help you understand your own intuitions about success, I have devised a values assessment called the Six Lives Exercise. This diagnostic will help you investigate where your ideas about success come from and lead you to more detailed reflections on all the topics ahead. Here is how it works. Read through all six of the following biographical sketches. Then go back and think more carefully about them. Finally, rank them in order, from most to least “successful,” giving your top choice the number “1” and your bottom choice the number “6.” No ties are allowed. Try to respond as honestly as you can. Once you have ranked them all, we will see what your choices may reveal about your current success thinking. THE SIX LIVES EXERCISE YOUR RANKING —–Teacher. Patricia Kelly teaches physics and serves as head coach of the women’s lacrosse team at a suburban high school (children ages fourteen through eighteen). Her spouse manages a chain of retail stores his family founded thirty years ago. Pat has led her school’s Science Olympics teams to three regional championships and one national title over the past ten years. Under Pat’s guidance, the high school has placed a number of students in the country’s top scientific universities (places such as MIT and Cal Tech). Pat has two daughters, one of whom earned a Ph.D. in artificial intelligence and is now working for a high-tech company. The other ran into trouble in high school, never graduated, and lives in a distant city. She has rebuffed all attempts by the family to stay in touch with her. —–Banker. Jane Rule has worked for her entire career at a global bank in a large city, where she has risen through the ranks to become a regional vice president for private wealth management, serving high-net-worth customers. Jane is also an accomplished marathon runner and a single parent with a daughter, Julie, who suffers from severe learning and physical disabilities. Friends and family members have encouraged Jane to find an institutional home for Julie so she can “get on with her life,” but Jane responds that “Julie is my life—I would never dream of letting anyone else take over her care.” Indeed, she has been active in raising money for research into learning disabilities. Last year, Jane raised over $25,000 for her cause by running the New York City Marathon while pushing Julie in a specially rigged carriage—a feat that earned her and her cause a segment on an international news television program. She has dated several men over the past few years, but she has never believed in marriage—in part because her own parents were so unhappy together. —–Wealthy Investor. Peter Taylor is a private-equity investor who balances his mostly single life (he married once but divorced four years later) between homes in London, New York, and Bermuda. He made his first fortune guiding a start-up Internet company through its early stages and then selling it to a large competitor. His $240,000 investment turned into a handsome payoff of $50 million. It has been all “upside” since then. A leading business magazine recently published a cover story on Peter, revealing him to be an avowed freethinker, a lover of freedom, and a committed libertarian. In the article, he said, “I love the excitement of placing a big bet and seeing it pay off.” His passions outside the office include parties in far-flung places (“I like to work hard and play hard”) and hang gliding (“being in the air alone gives me a sense of freedom”). He donates generously to conservative political causes and is consulted by influential politicians across the globe for his opinions regarding the world economy. —–Stone Mason. Fred Hampshire is a stone mason who has lived his whole life near a large city. A passionate student of historical architectural design, he has been married to his wife, Mary, for fifty-two years and he has three children (a lawyer, a banker, and a homemaker) and seven grandchildren. “Every piece of stone you pick up is different,” he once told a news reporter. “In my work, I can see what I did the first day I started and watch it grow. And I go back years later and it is still there to see. It’s a good day laying brick or stone. It is hard work, but you get interested in fitting each piece in just its right spot and the day is over before you know it.” Hampshire admits that money has sometimes been a problem, but he proudly points out that he personally helped to build homes for each of his three children. —–Tennis Pro. Janice Chung is a hardworking, professional tennis player who has won four major tournaments in her career and finished in the top fifteen money winners in seven of the past ten years. She started playing tennis with her father at the age of five, and, as a result of the relentless drills her father insisted on, she perfected her game. Tennis has dominated her life since then. A few years ago, she founded the Chung Tennis Institute, a group that provides free tennis instruction and “life skills training” to young women who live in poor urban neighborhoods. She is married to a real estate developer and, unable to have children herself, has adopted three Korean kids, now aged two, six, and seven. “It’s a tough life on the tennis circuit,” she told a tennis magazine recently. “You don’t get as much time with your children as you would like.” —–Nonprofit Executive. Bill Paulson used to be an award-winning investment adviser for wealthy families in a major city, where he was well known for his ability to manage the complex estates of entrepreneurs after they died. He has been married for twenty years to his wife, Terry (a child development counselor), and they have four children. Five years ago, Bill quit his job and took a huge pay cut to become a top administrator at a fast-growing nonprofit service organization founded by a charismatic religious leader from South Africa. “I heard God’s call,” Bill told the local paper, “and I answered.” Bill’s main project has been to carry out the group’s “international mission” helping rural African villages secure clean water supplies. Bill helped to organize a coalition of religious charities to fund this work, and his investment skills have doubled the investment value of the money raised to date. The family is planning to take the next two years off to go live and work in a rural community in an impoverished African country, where they will run one of the coalitionfunded water projects. Bill and Terry’s four kids range in age from eight to sixteen, and all of them are strongly opposed to going to Africa. But Bill and Terry are determined to take the entire family. SIX LIVES: A CLOSER LOOK When I give the Six Lives Exercise in classes and seminars, an interesting pattern emerges. Every life receives some votes as “most successful” and “least successful.” And I am also frequently surprised by how often one life in particular attracts votes for number one or number two in terms of success: the Stone Mason. Why do votes for the Stone Mason surprise me? Because my audiences are often Wall Street executives, doctors, pharmaceutical researchers, business students, and top government officials. These people lead lives considerably more complicated than the Stone Mason’s. The gap between the Stone Mason’s life and the lives they are actually living is striking. I often challenge them with a question: if the Stone Mason represents success to you, what steps might you take right now to move your life closer to that ideal? For example, perhaps you need to focus more time on your family or loved ones. Or perhaps you should recraft your workday to emphasize activities you control so you can take more genuine pride in your results. The same question applies no matter which life you picked as number one. Take a minute and make a list of what you could start doing today to bring your life more closely into harmony with the one you picked as your top choice. That list of action items alone may be worth the price of this book. Whichever lives you ranked highly, these choices reveal something important about your motives, aspirations, and fears when it comes to making real-life decisions. Let’s take a closer look at the factors that probably weighed in your decisions. THE TWO SIDES OF SUCCESS If you are like most people, you probably measure success in two different ways. The first is the private, “inner” perspectives of fulfillment, satisfaction, and happiness. Each person profiled in the Six Lives Exercise has some claim to inner fulfillment. But most also have something missing. The Wealthy Investor has no family. The Tennis Pro’s work takes her away from her children. One of the Teacher’s children won’t speak to her. The Banker’s disabled child dominates her life, and she seems unable to commit to a long-term relationship. The Nonprofit Executive’s children are in rebellion about leaving their friends for an isolated life in rural Africa. Against these compromised claims to inner harmony, the Stone Mason appears to “have it all.” He has a stable, loving relationship with his wife of fifty-two years. His three accomplished children and seven grandchildren live nearby (a fact suggested by his help building all of their homes). And he takes a sincere, craftsmanlike satisfaction in his work—a job that he controls and which enables him to see the fruits of his labors every day. His work appears to be meaningful to him. As he puts it, “It’s a good day laying brick or stone. It is hard work, but you get interested in fitting each piece in just its right spot and the day is over before you know it.” There is almost a Zen-like, spiritual dimension to the Stone Mason’s life. Thus, people who pick the Stone Mason’s life as number one or number two are usually voting for a life with more of this “inner” dimension of success. There is quite a lot to be said for this point of view. Most of us would be hard put to define anyone as “successful” whose life lacks joy or satisfaction. And extensive research on happiness (more on this in chapter 2) confirms the importance of these inner positive feelings to your ability to function effectively. But there is a second, more public “outer” perspective on success that (like it or not) motivates many of our day-to-day actions and decisions much more than the quest for inner happiness. These are desires for achievement, social recognition, and respect. Seen from this perspective, the Stone Mason’s life is missing something that all the other lives seem to have: a notable accomplishment that has been recognized by his society or his peers. All the other people profiled have achieved something that a broader social group has taken note of, ranging from quasi-celebrity status (the Wealthy Investor and Tennis Pro) to international media attention on behalf of a worthy cause (the Banker), good works on behalf of the poor in Africa (Nonprofit Executive), and professional awards from knowledgeable peers (the Nonprofit Executive and Teacher). The Stone Mason has not even been profiled in Masonry magazine, much less The New York Times. Moreover, he admits that money has sometimes been a problem. People who rank the Stone Mason near the bottom of their Six Lives list may admire the Stone Mason’s devotion to the satisfactions of a craft and a family, but they see overall success in life as including more emphasis on that outer-achievement perspective. After all, it feels good to achieve something notable and be recognized for it. In other words, whatever our professed desire to “feel fulfilled,” most of us are also moderately excited when we receive praise. As we will see in chapter 6, on motivation, the brain releases some very pleasant chemicals into our system when we are rewarded by our social circle. Even within Buddhist monasteries, as I learned firsthand, some less-than-enlightened monks seek the winner’s circle. They want to beat out their colleagues to become a Zen master. So I will ask you to reflect back on your choices one more time and see if you identified the values and goals that actually motivate you when you make real-time decisions about what to do. To help, I have provided an explanatory chart describing some career motivations that may be underlying each life. See if you recognize your own motivations in the rankings you gave. It is also worth noting what parts of your life—your hobbies, career, passions, interests, volunteer work, or family—informed the “inner voice” that spoke to you as you ranked each life. If one of these lives spoke much more clearly to you than the others, that may be telling you something about the direction you want your life to take and what, for you, constitutes the true measure of success. Life Achievement Motivation TEACHER: Organizational Excellence. A life devoted to leading and helping teams achieve at high levels. Success resides in a career built on group accomplishment and recognition. This person also develops the talents and abilities of others and takes satisfaction from their achievements. BANKER: A Life of Loyalty and Commitment. A life characterized by a strong sense of duty, loyalty, and personal commitment to specific people and organizations. These may be close friends, family members, or work partners. Success springs from maintaining and nurturing these loyalties. WEALTHY INVESTOR: Power, Glamour, and Variety. A life that takes on high-stakes, publicly visible challenges. Success comes from winning through the creation of a successful enterprise, the use of individual skills, strategic acumen, and competitive energy. Pleasure, variety, and sensation are high priorities. STONE MASON: Craftsmanship and Family. Recognition, fame, or fortune means little. Intrinsic motivation is sufficient to give you satisfaction. Success is measured by creating your work, completing defined tasks to the best of your ability, and devotion to your family. TENNIS PRO: Individual Excellence. A life of disciplined practice and hard work within a defined career that measures success through recognized, individual achievement. NONPROFIT EXECUTIVE: Answering a Spiritual/Values-Based Calling. A life characterized by work that embodies core beliefs and values. Success comes from using one’s best abilities to serve a higher cause. Before we leave the Six Lives Exercise, I have one final challenge for you. Think about the six profiles again and imagine you had one (and only one) child. Then imagine that you must pick one (and only one) of these lives for that only child to live out. Now—choose which life you would bestow on your only child. Does that put a slightly different spin on your decision? When I offer this choice to executives, as many as one third of them change their vote for number one when they think about their selection this way. Putting the question in this frame may help you assess how you are actually living your own life as opposed to what set of ideals you currently associate with success. You would want only what is best for your children—and your picture of “what is best” tends to be a clearheaded balance between survival needs, life ideals, and what you actually think an interesting, productive life is all about. Thus, whatever you would choose for an only child may be what you are already unconsciously working toward yourself. Are you happy with that choice? Is there something you should do to begin improving on that life? Because there is good news: you are not limited to any of these stories. You have the power to take whatever your life is today and start writing a new story about what it will be tomorrow. BACK TO ERIC ADLER Before we conclude this opening chapter, I want to return to Eric Adler’s story for a moment. First, he is, in fact, very happily married to his wife (a physician) and they have two children and three dogs. So if you wondered how to rate that element of the inner dimension of his success, his family gives you a bit more data. Second, tracking his motivations through the lens of the Six Lives Exercise, I would say his life has exhibited the drives of three of the people featured in that test: the Teacher, the Stone Mason, and the Nonprofit Executive. He has been able, in his choices, to expand his abilities for building organizational excellence while attending in a craftsmanlike way to the details of his social entrepreneurship work—all while answering a values-based calling. But his life has also had its share of challenges. A few years after starting the first SEED school with his partner, Raj, he confronted a worldclass personal crisis. He discovered he had pancreatic cancer—a lethal disease with long-term survival rates below 5 percent. “I stopped work immediately,” Adler said. He then underwent surgery, followed by a grueling regimen of chemotherapy and radiation. He lost fifty-five pounds in the process, though he kept his spirits up with twice-daily doses of the comedy television show Seinfeld. Battling cancer of the pancreas is a you-bet-your-life version of the lottery—there are extremely long odds, but if you win, you get something even better than riches. Eric won. He has been cancer-free for over a decade. And his battle with the disease has given him, he reports, a new and even more profound respect for the preciousness of both life and relationships. The aftereffects of the cancer treatments he received, however, have continued to present him with a full measure of health challenges. These have become and will remain a regular part of his life. I asked him what he might do if, someday, he steps aside from the SEED schools. “Something new and entrepreneurial,” he said. “That’s what I love about what we are doing with SEED.” He also reminded me of the first class I had taught him. He has always been fascinated by the law, he said. He might want to go to law school and find out how that knowledge might help get even more things done. CONCLUSION This chapter has given you a first look at what your success ideas are and where they come from. Culture—even the culture of a single school—can act like a gravitational field on your goals, making it difficult for you to set a truly independent path. In Eric Adler’s story, you got a chance to see how this subtle process can work. He was briefly drawn into work he thought he “should be doing,” but by being honest about his own sense of dissatisfaction, Eric kept himself alert and in motion. Eventually, he was thrown back to considering what he could truly do better than most people. It was then that he remembered the legacies of his entrepreneurial family and his passion for education. He asked the key question: “What can I start?” From there it was a short hop to the idea for the SEED schools—an idea that changed his life and has improved the lives of hundreds of young inner-city students. The Six Lives Exercise gave you a chance to “choose your life”— assessing the balance you are now striking between the inner and outer aspects of success. But in a larger sense, you have also begun the important process of clarifying and choosing the success values you want to embrace for the next stage of your life. It is your life story you are writing, after all. So you get to select the character traits and motivations for the person playing the central role. With this foundation to work with, you are ready to dive deeper. In the next chapter, we will look more carefully at happiness and inner satisfaction as the truest measures of success. And from there, we will work our way to the outer dimensions where the promise of fame, fortune, and professional status beckon to us. The more you study success, the more you will find that cultural forces are at work everywhere you turn. And if you think you are immune from these forces, think again. Even the brainiest research scientists battle each other for their fifteen minutes of fame, and few people would give the money back if they won the lottery. Our first stop explores the most common response to the question “What is success?” Most people’s answer is swift and sure: happiness. But it turns out happiness is just as hard to define as success. Let’s see why. Success Step #1 BALANCE THE TWO SIDES OF SUCCESS Some people think of success primarily in terms of outer achievements. Others think of it as mainly about inner satisfaction and fulfillment. Think about your own balance between the inner and outer dimensions of success. Consider where you are striking that balance today and then answer the following questions. 1. Do you need to make some adjustments between the inner and outer dimensions of success to get your balance right? 2. What are two or three specific steps you could take in the short term to make these needed adjustments? 3. Can you identify at least one specific longer-term goal that would help you keep the balance where you think it ought to be? 4. Ask yourself: “What is stopping me from taking action on these steps and goals today?” Balancing the inner and outer sides of success is not always an either-or trade-off. If you pick the right work, for example, you can gain inner satisfaction from the activities that result in outer achievements. And if you seek the right inner satisfactions, work sometimes takes care of itself. But as the rest of the book will show, this is not as easy as it sounds. |2| An Easy Answer: Be Happy Those only are happy who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness. —JOHN STUART MILL A few years ago, an elderly man showed up at a research seminar at the Wharton School about income and happiness. He came in a bit late, when the presentation was already under way, and sat down next to me near the end of a long conference table. I immediately noticed his rough, calloused workingman’s hands. He sat quietly while the presenter clicked through his PowerPoint presentation on how national income levels related to aggregate data on reports of “subjective well-being.” The presenter concluded with a few summary thoughts about the ways his research connected to the overall topic of happiness. When he called for questions, the man raised his hand. “I am just a member of the public,” he said slowly, “and I don’t know much about what you have been discussing here. But you mention the word ‘happiness’ and I am confused. What has that to do with anything you were saying about income? As I see it, happiness is just three things: good health, meaningful work, and love. You have that, you are happy.” The room became dead silent. The heavy shroud of academic life had, for that moment, fallen away under the weight of these few simple words. After a couple of seconds, the presenter thanked the fellow for his comment and went on to answer a question about the methodology of the study. The man eventually slipped out the door. I never saw him again. I sometimes think of this man as a kind of Wise Angel, sent to tell us what is really important. Like many such messages, this one fell on deaf ears. The seminar went on and the discussion went back to average income levels and the measurement of life satisfaction. But his comment left a permanent impression on me. And I told his story that year at the Wharton School graduation ceremony. I like to think one or two people took it to heart. As we shall see in this chapter, money and happiness have complex connections to each other. But I think the Wise Angel was basically correct: although earning a lot of money can be good for your sense of pride and self-esteem, money has very little effect on the amount of day-to-day joy you experience and none whatever on the larger, more spiritual dimensions of happiness that many consider the most important parts of their lives. In my work with students and executives, most realize intellectually that success is more than just a list of achievements. When I press them to say what that something is, they almost always say, “It’s about happiness.” Then I push them to go one step further and define what they mean by happiness. And that is where it starts to get really interesting. In this chapter, I will help you write your own definition of happiness. You may be surprised, once you start to think about it, at how hard happiness is to pin down. In his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, Princeton’s Nobel Prize–winning psychologist Dr. Daniel Kahneman, who has conducted cutting-edge research on this subject, concluded, “During the past ten years we have learned many new facts about happiness, but we have also learned that the word happiness does not have a simple meaning and should not be used as if it did.” As this chapter will show, people use the word “happiness” to describe at least three different things: a momentary, positive emotion, an overall evaluation of the past or hope for the future, and a deep sense of joy, connection, and meaning. Near the end of the chapter, I will ask you to take what you have learned in the sections below on each of these three meanings and come to your own conclusions about what happiness means. After that, you may be in a position to decide what, if anything, it has to do with success. THE HAPPINESS PUZZLE In the Six Lives Exercise in chapter 1, you balanced the inner and the outer dimensions of success to select which life appealed to you most. Now we are ready to explore that inner dimension in more detail. We will start with a couple of questions. First, have you ever had a conversation with your parents or a trusted relative that went something like the dialogue below? You: What do you think I should do next in my life? Parents: We’ll support you no matter what you do. We just want you to be happy. If so, I am sure you appreciated your parents’ support. But what did they mean by your being “happy”? Now, with that conversation in mind, answer the next questions. Read the following sentences, then put the book down and note what comes first into your mind. During the past week or so, you probably had a moment or two when you felt happy. Think of one of those moments now. What were you doing? Where were you? What did it feel like? Here are some examples of answers I have received to this question: I was biting into a soft-serve vanilla ice cream cone that had been dipped in chocolate sauce. I was holding hands with my boyfriend while we sat on a bench on a sunny day. I was playing poker with some friends late at night and I was winning. I was planning a surprise birthday party for a friend. I was out running in the early morning. I went into the “zone” and felt I could go on running forever. I was on the phone with my aunt and she was telling me that the latest tests showed her cancer had disappeared. By comparing what your parents meant when they said “We just want you to be happy” with your answer to the short quiz above, you can understand some of the definitional problems we have with the word “happiness.” When your parents said they just wanted you to “be happy,” they were talking about a special, positive quality that would describe your life as a whole. The word “happiness” referred to a career, good health, finding the right life partner, or having stability in your cultural, religious, or family life. The second, “ice cream cone” concept of happiness, by contrast, has to do with immediate moments of pleasure, satisfaction, love, or fun. This kind of happiness is a momentary, positive emotion. In addition to the two meanings suggested above, happiness has also been thought of as having a larger, almost spiritual quality that goes beyond both momentary feelings and reflective thought. Philosophers have talked about this third kind of happiness in terms of the fulfillment that comes from exerting the right kind of effort on the right kind of task (for you). The Hebrew word “simcha” has been used to capture this sense. There are many translations of this word into English, most of them related to ordinary feelings of happiness associated with celebratory events such as weddings or births. But one of my students told our class about an expanded definition used by Rabbi Akiva Tatz—an Orthodox rabbi from South Africa—that I like a lot. Simcha, Rabbi Tatz said, is “the experience of the soul that comes when you are doing what you should be doing.” Simcha can encompass everything from taking time to comfort a sick friend to the joy of practicing your profession at a high level of skill. Positive psychologists have used words such as “flow,” “flourishing,” and “meaning” to describe this deeper sense of happiness. The Greek word Aristotle used in his work The Nicomachean Ethics to describe this ultimate form of happiness was “eudemonia”—which literally means “spirit of goodness.” So I have bad news and good news for you. The bad news is that defining success as simply “being happy” does not really solve your problem. It merely shifts your investigation of success over to a new mystery. What is the good news? If you can come up with your own definition of happiness that is as eloquent as the Wise Angel’s, you may be well on the way to getting clear about what you mean by the word “success.” In the sections below, I will help you develop your ideas about happiness by exploring (and offering some guidance on how to increase your experience of) the three different types of happiness we identified above. I will also offer a word of caution. The first of the Buddha’s insights when he achieved enlightenment was that life is, by definition, an experience marked by suffering and dissatisfaction. People get sick and die; they are injured; they have physical and psychological pain. For that reason, most of the world’s great art, music, literature, and religious wisdom investigates how we cope with and transcend this situation—not by seeking to escape it into a land where everyone is always “happy” but rather by confronting this reality head-on and learning from experience. In addition, negative emotions such as frustration, righteous anger, disappointment, and sadness often spur us to reexamine ourselves, press for social justice, reach out to others, and make needed changes in our lives. Defining success entirely in terms of “happiness” may therefore leave out most of the things that make life interesting and meaningful. As the chapter concludes, we will take a brief tour of the world’s great religions to see what light they can shed on whether happiness is the right word to use when you describe the inner dimension of success. MOMENTARY HAPPINESS: THE VALUE OF MINDFULNESS We start our tour of happiness with the most direct, pleasant, and sensory form of it. The Roman philosopher Epicurus said, “Everything we need to be happy is easy to obtain.” At the simplest and most immediate level, happiness is one of life’s great positive feelings, an emotional experience of joy, love, warmth, rapture, pleasure, tenderness, intimacy, or exhilaration. If you think that success is about being happy, is this what you are talking about? The cartoonist Charles Schulz, creator of the comic strip Peanuts, gave the world one of its most memorable definitions of Momentary Happiness in his April 25, 1960, comic strip. The crabby, cynical character Lucy, who was usually terrified that the family dog, Snoopy, might give her a kiss, dropped her guard that day and, in an unbridled moment of affection, hugged Snoopy. Lucy’s final words have found their way onto countless posters and coffee mugs: “Happiness is a warm puppy.” According to the blog Escape, Schulz himself believed in this definition: “It’s not sentimental. It’s a statement of truth. Can anyone come up with a better definition of happiness?” When I asked you to think back over the past week and recall a happy moment, I was helping you identify this sort of experience. I call it “Momentary Happiness.” Daniel Kahneman has defined this as the happiness of the “Experiencing Self”—in contrast to the “Remembering Self,” who evaluates how happy you were in your last job or on your vacation last year. Momentary Happiness comes in bursts. It makes gloomy days brighter and sunny days sweet. No matter how you define success, Momentary Happiness ought to play some role in it. In my research, I have come across two simple ideas for increasing your weekly supply of it that might be worth considering: pay more attention to the pleasant aspects of your experience and reframe your expectations for the future. Slow Down and Pay Attention Modern psychologists study Momentary Happiness by giving people beepers and asking them to record their emotions on a “happiness scale” whenever the beeper goes off. They also ask their subjects to do the same on a daily basis, hoping that memory will not distort reality too much over such a short span of time. The ancient sages studied Momentary Happiness through meditation—a practice that can strengthen your powers of attentive mindfulness. Both systems are attempts to help you gain entry to the Experiencing Self so you can identify what is actually happening moment to moment inside your head and heart. Whether you prefer a beeper or a meditation cushion, you can often increase your experience of Momentary Happiness through one simple adjustment in your life: pay more attention to the pleasant aspects of it. A research study showed that French and American women spend about the same amount of time each week eating. But French women pay roughly twice as much attention to their food—and receive a corresponding increase in their daily allotment of Momentary Happiness. The Vietnamese Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh tells a story in his book The Miracle of Mindfulness about a friend who was excitedly talking about his plans for the future. As he spoke, he was popping sections of a juicy tangerine into his mouth. The faster he spoke, the faster he swallowed the tangerine sections. Thich Nhat Hanh gently pointed out what was happening, prompting his friend to notice the sweet taste of the tangerine that had been there all the time. That reminder refocused his friend’s attention and created some tasty units of Momentary Happiness. The award-winning American poet Wallace Stevens was a high-ranking executive for the Hartford Insurance Company in Connecticut. Instead of driving to work every day, he walked. And while he walked, he paid attention to what was going on around him and sometimes thought of words to express his experience. He converted his commute into a poetry workshop. “It seems as though Stevens composed poems in his head, and then wrote them down, often after he arrived at the office,” one of his biographers noted. “As for his commute, he enjoyed it profoundly. It was his only time out of doors, alone, thinking, receptive to the influx of nature into all the senses.” If you go to Hartford, you can actually follow the route of Stevens’s daily commute, the stages of which are marked by thirteen granite stones engraved with the verses of one of his most famous poems: “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” As you consider the role of Momentary Happiness in your concept of success, ask yourself if you could use a little more mindfulness of the kind that Thich Nhat Hanh and Wallace Stevens have demonstrated. You are probably missing a lot of Momentary Happiness in your hurry to “get somewhere.” Reframe Your Expectations As I mentioned earlier, some forms of Momentary Happiness have cultural rather than sensory roots. Evidence for this can be found in the studies that Professor Dan Gilbert at Harvard has done demonstrating how often people are poor predictors of what will make them happy in the future. His book on this subject, Stumbling on Happiness, is one of the best (and funniest) books in the success literature. For example, the Peanuts cartoon I mentioned above played a pivotal role in how one of my students, Kathy, learned a sad truth about Momentary Happiness. She encountered her first, clear, objective definition of happiness as an eight-year-old child when she saw a “Happiness Is a Warm Puppy” poster of Lucy and Snoopy hugging. Unhappy at the time, she latched onto the idea that a puppy would bring happiness and begged her parents to give her one. They did. She was then “crushed” (her word) to learn that, even with a puppy in her life, she was still unhappy. She later told me, “I have come to understand that I’m just not the kind of person who experiences a lot of happy moods. Even today, I am not a particularly upbeat person.” As an adult, she has learned to reset her expectations about how she will respond emotionally to future events. Expecting less, she now has more pleasant surprises in her life—and fewer dashed hopes. Even better: she no longer fantasizes that a single solution can solve all of life’s problems. Gilbert’s research reveals that expectations surrounding events such as weddings, graduations, and birthdays that are grounded in cultural assumptions about what is “supposed” to make us happy often interfere with experiencing Momentary Happiness. When expectations run high, future events seldom measure up. As Carol Ryff, the director of the Institute of Aging at the University of Wisconsin, has commented, obsessive desires for any single aspect of life to bring happiness often backfire, becoming “a psychological burden” to everyone concerned. Another force that can reduce Momentary Happiness is what psychologists call “adaptation.” Something good happens—you get the new job or relationship you wanted—but then you rapidly adjust to your new circumstances, and these become the new baseline for judging how you feel. The glow of the new job or relationship fades, and you start to focus instead on the annoying way your boss talks or how your new romantic partner texts people while you are having dinner together. Just as mindfulness helps you focus more on the pleasant things that are already happening, it can also help cure you of unrealistic expectations and adaptations. As you experience your life more directly, moment to moment, you are less likely to build some future activity into a “happiness dream.” In addition, as you spend more time in the present, you will tend to appreciate the little ways your life is working. You can count your blessings instead of adapting too rapidly to some positive change. Gilbert’s discoveries take us back to the point I made earlier: your dayto-day experience of life consists entirely of what you pay attention to. If you are in an accident and have to use a wheelchair to get around every day, you will eventually stop paying attention to your disability and start paying attention to the other parts of your life, which will contain many moments of happiness. So long as you are paying attention to a tangerine’s taste, it is just as sweet no matter where you are sitting. To sum up: the positive emotions relished by the Experiencing Self are a good place to start your quest to understand how happiness fits into your definition of success. And it is reassuring to know that you can increase your allotment of Momentary Happiness by doing things as simple as slowing down and paying more attention to managing your expectations. The elusive quality of Momentary Happiness, however, suggests it should not be the end of your search. We still have two more forms of happiness to consider. Next stop: something I call “Overall Happiness.” Can you restructure your life to make it “happier” as a whole—not just filled with a few more pleasant experiences? And if so, does this make you more successful? You be the judge. OVERALL HAPPINESS: JUDGING LIFE AS A WHOLE Meet Gretchen Rubin. She’s a mother, wife of a wealthy Wall Street private equity investor, Yale Law School graduate, and former law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. Her husband is the son of the former Goldman Sachs cochairman and U.S. Treasury secretary Robert Rubin. With all this going for her, she would seem to have most of life’s big problems solved. Nevertheless, she was dissatisfied enough to set out, by sheer force of will, to raise her level of Overall Happiness. Her journey has inspired hundreds of thousands of people to start their own happiness quests. Riding a New York City bus one rainy day and feeling a little blue, Rubin had a startling insight. “What do I want from life?” she asked herself. “Well … I want to be happy.” Thus began a yearlong program to make her life happier, an effort she turned into a bestselling book called The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun. She read all the happiness and self-help books she could lay her hands on. Then, inspired by a similar plan for “moral perfection” that Benjamin Franklin had laid out three hundred years ago, she devised an elaborate, lawyerlike “Resolutions Chart” to implement the advice she collected—day by day, week by week, and month by month—for a full year. She found herself paying more attention to everything she did, from exercise to expressing gratitude and from cleaning her house to shopping. At the end of her happiness-project year, she tried to put everything she had learned and practiced together so she could experience one solid month of what she called “Boot Camp Perfect” happy days. She fixed the clutter in her closets, sang cheerful songs in the morning, laughed out loud as often as she could, focused on acknowledging other people’s feelings, practiced more silence, left potentially hurtful things unsaid, wrote every day in her private journal, met more often with her writers’ and children’s literature groups, listened more carefully to hypnosis and relaxation tapes, and ate better food. Did Rubin succeed in her quest to find perfectly happy days? It is hard to say. On the one hand, she never had even one “Boot Camp Perfect” day, much less a month of them. But I think she nudged her level of Overall Happiness up a notch from where it stood the day her project began. I say this because she reports that she made progress on something extremely important that we will explore later in this book—her character. Her biggest “happiness boosters,” she said, came from reining in her habit of criticizing other people and from finding the self-discipline to clean up the clutter that had taken over her home. Both of these items had b…

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