Springboard: Launching Your Personal Search for Success

G. Richard Shell: Yes, I have some colleagues here at the Wharton School who probably knew that they wanted to be economists from the day that they first started adding up numbers, so it's not that that can't happen but I think it's very exceptional that someone has this sort of one clear idea that they have a single purpose in life and it's like an Easter egg hunt, once they go looking for it, they look under the tree and find the egg that has the right colors and then their life problem is solved and after that it's just go do it.

I think life for most people is much more improvisational, I think you do what you think is the best next thing to do, you see where you are, you match up your skills and your passions and interests with what your opportunities are and then do the next best thing that seems to be a good idea, and I think if you scratch the surface of most of what you would call successful people, I think you'd find that only rarely did they set out to do what they happened to be doing and that there's a pretty windy path that got them there.

Rachel Salaman: I'm sure that will be reassuring for people to hear. In your class at the Wharton School you help people reach their own definition of success, and you use an exercise which is based on six different lives and you ask your students to gauge which they think are the most successful. Now we haven't really got time to go into exactly what that exercise is but could you talk a little bit about that and how it works.

G. Richard Shell: Sure, it works with every audience that I address from senior executives down to undergraduates and it's in the book in the first chapter. What I do is I lay out six short little vignettes of people, there's a teacher, a private equity investor, a professional tennis pro, a stonemason, a banker, a nonprofit executive, and tell a little bit about what they're doing for work, what their home life situation is and how they got where they are. And then I ask people to rank them from most to least successful, so number one is most successful life as you see it, number six is the least. And it's a little bit like a workshop test because by ranking that combination of factors that each life has captured you begin revealing to yourself what are some of the values, the aspirations, the balance between work and family that seem appealing to you, that seem like that's a successful life.

So most people if you just say what does success mean, they'll come up with something, as you said earlier mostly people just say well to be happy, but when you dig into it a little bit further it gets more interestingly complex and these little lives help do that. What I find that's most interesting is all of these people in the exercise except one has what you might call a professional career, now whether it's a professional athlete or professional investor, but the one is a stonemason who basically is a guy who just builds houses out of stone and goes to work every day and works for himself and pays probably primarily his attention to his family, and over half the people in almost every audience immediately ranked the stonemason as the number one life, and I find that fascinating because that is the life that is furthest from what a business school student is pursuing, what an executive at a senior executive seminar has been doing, and I think it's interesting that when you get people to be thoughtful about success, they suddenly start focusing on the inner aspects of it, the family part, the craftsmanship, of being able to control and shape your work, the chance to do something that's superior and excellent even if no one else notices it.

So I think there's a longing in a way in the culture that we've created for something a little simpler in the way that success is defined, but I also give them one more challenge which sometimes changes their minds, I say it's very well for you, now pretend you have an only child and you have to pick one of these lives for that only child to live, and which one would you pick now, and interestingly enough when you frame it that way about a third of the people shift from the stonemason to something else. So I think it kind of tells you why parents want their children to succeed and they don't want them to succeed necessarily as stonemasons, so the pressure of cultural norms of success, professional status, networks, ability to take long and wonderful vacations seem to reassert itself and I think that's really the point of the exercise, it's not just what an ideal life would be, it's what's a successful life that you would really lead and I think that's really what I'm trying to help people think about.

Rachel Salaman: And you talk about the fact that inner achievements are competing with outer achievements in our quest for success. You've touched on that.

G. Richard Shell: The six lives really combine those two, so whenever you begin scratching the surface of the word success it turns out you are really meaning two different things that have to somehow go together, and one is accomplishment and achievement that's an external recognition piece and the other is an internal fulfillment satisfaction sense of happiness, and those two things have to be in some balance or you have to make some decisions about how to put them together.

Rachel Salaman: You say in the book that there are different kinds of happiness; could you just talk a bit about that?

G. Richard Shell: Yes, as I said earlier I'm sort of a crazy guy in this way, I tend to ask almost everybody I meet what do you think the word success means, so I have this sort of informal poll of ordinary people telling me what they think, so I'll be standing in line at a convenience store and the clerk can't find the change, so the line is getting long and I might just strike up a conversation with the person next to me and I'll work it into the conversation, and nine times out of ten, ordinary people when you say what do you mean by success will just say happiness, and that's great but the problem is what comes next, so I often follow that up and I say well that sounds right, what exactly do you mean by happiness.

Then all of a sudden they get very thoughtful looking and it's now a conversation we can't have in the convenience store line, so the word happiness, and I've done a lot of research with this, at the University of Pennsylvania we have the Positive Psychology Center which is the home of Marty Seligman who is an acquaintance of mine and who has written a book called "Authentic Happiness," so there are a lot of people studying happiness here.

There are really three different things that people are saying when they use that word, one is a momentary sense of positive emotion, it's the first bite of a soft ice cream with a little chocolate crushed on it when you're at the beach, that's a moment of happiness, that's a momentary emotion, it goes, it comes and it's certainly something that makes a day feel better, to have more of that rather than less. But I think that what happens is some people think well that's what life is about, it's about maximizing that, so my goal is to do whatever it takes to get to the beach and lie down on a towel, and the problem with pursuing that kind of happiness is okay, you get to the beach, you lie on the towel, how long can you lie there before you start feeling dissatisfied, there's nothing much to do, you've already felt good, now what, and a lot of people wake up having pursued a life of emotional happiness and realized that it's sort of not a very good bet because emotional happiness comes and goes.

So that leads us to the second kind of happiness, and the second kind of happiness is a momentary reflection on how you feel about the past in some aggregate, so you might say were you happy when you went to college and people will have a sort of perception about whether they were or not. So that reflective form of happiness is another thing which is momentary, your attitude about it might change two or three years later, and also a little bit self-deceptive, it's hard to summarize that much time with a single emotional label.

So that leads me to the third one which I think is the deepest one and I think it's what most people are thinking about when they use the word success and they combine it with the word happiness, the third kind of success is something deeper, it's what I call in the book wisdom experiences but that's just an attempt to describe something that is hard to describe. So as an example, the difference between biting into an ice cream kind of happiness and the feeling you have when you have the first child in your family, the day that your first child is born, that's something different than just a momentary happiness but it's also happiness, so it usually comes as a complex emotion, it maybe even associated with some pain, childbirth is very painful for women, it can be very stressful for everyone around it but nevertheless very joyful when it's completed, and a lot of achievements, a lot of big moments in life are combinations of a lot of emotions and a lot of evaluations, but they kind of come out with meaning something very important to you, so they mark a moment in life that you don't forget, it's very rich and clear, and that's the kind of happiness that I think people associate with genuine success.

Rachel Salaman: That's fascinating and a very nuanced definition of happiness, what should people do with that information, should they stop thinking about trying to achieve happiness because it is so complex?

G. Richard Shell: Honestly I think you're absolutely right, although it's pretty hard advice to give, in the American constitution Thomas Jefferson wrote that we are all supposed to pursue happiness, that's life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, that's what it's all about, but it's interesting that Thomas Jefferson himself didn't spend his life pursuing momentary happiness, he was a stoic, he was someone who was very self-disciplined, he ran a farm, he spent a lot of time thinking and writing. Here's a perspective on it, Nathaniel Harper, a great American writer from the early days of our history once said that it's very hard to catch a butterfly but if you go someplace where there are butterflies and you just sit down and be still, a butterfly will very likely come and sit on your shoulder. And I think happiness is like that, if you spend your life chasing it, it's pretty hard to catch, but if you go to places where there's a good chance that your talents, your emotions, your relationships will be in resonance with that situation and just sit there, the chances are pretty good the happiness will find you.

Expectations have a lot to do with happiness, everybody goes oh well if I were married I would be happier, if I had a child I would be happier, if I found this job I'd be happier, and then within about a few years or even days sometimes after you've gotten whatever you thought was going to make you happy you realize whoops, not happy, or at least not happy the way I thought, so there's no harm in having goals and thinking they might make you happy but I think it's important to strive for something that's a little more effortful than that in terms of self-realization, in terms of trying to do the things that bring out your best, that stretch your talents, that keep you learning and that really involve work, an Olympic athlete isn't happy all the time but they may be happy for a few minutes if they win a medal but there is a lot of work involved and a lot of satisfaction that comes from trying and striving and doing something that you have an intrinsic satisfaction in doing.

So the book is really about how to help people find that, where is the sweet spot where you aren't happy all the time but you are exerting effort and you think it's in the right direction, it may be in the direction of a better relationship, it may be in the direction of a more satisfying type of work or a more satisfying kind of experience learning, but that's more closely associated with success than happiness.

Rachel Salaman: If we can talk now about what meaningful work means because again you give quite a nuanced definition in your book and you point out that people can have different kinds of meaning in their work, and some that they may not have even have thought of before. Could you explain that idea and perhaps mention the example of the janitor on the cancer ward?

G. Richard Shell: Sure, as you mentioned earlier a lot of people have this notion that they picked up somewhere, that they have a one true purpose in life and their goal is to find it and they are miserable because they couldn't find it. I try to dispel that myth and replace it with what I think is a much more realistic and very satisfying notion of meaningful work, work that has some meaning for you, where you get the meaning is the interesting question and that's very individual. So I have three circles that intersect and there's a sweet spot in the middle that I define as meaningful work, so let me quickly touch on the three circles and then I'll give you the example that you mentioned.

So the three circles are work that someone will reward you for doing, so that's either you get a pay check or if it's a volunteer job you get some sort of recognition or you get a little status for being in a social group and having a role to play, so work that someone will reward you for doing is the first circle. Second circle is work that uses your strengths and talents, so this is work that will enable you to get even better at the things that your aptitude suggests you are already able to be pretty good at, so that means you're going to be more likely to excel at whatever it is because it's using your strengths and talents.

Now most people, if they go to the business school here, that's where they stop, they have strengths and talents, they maybe have strong aptitudes in math or in analytic ability or something that allows them to be good in business, and then they go find a job that's going to pay them a lot, so there they are getting paid a lot to do something they do reasonably well. And there's nothing wrong with that except if they hate the work, I don't think that's meaningful work and a lot of people wake up a few years down the road and go you know I really don't like this even though I'm good at it.

So the third circle is work that ignites your excitement and you can define that as you really like to get up in the morning to go to work, it's not a chore, and the example I give in the book of where that can come from, it's not about the work, it's about you. So you can have a hospital where there are two janitors, one end and the other end of the ward, and for one janitor it's a job and they are using their talents and they are getting paid and they hate it and they go to work every day reluctantly and they try to take as many breaks as possible and they look to complain about it.

At the other end of the same hallway there's another janitor and for that janitor that job may be incredibly meaningful. One reason it might be meaningful is because three years ago his own child who had cancer was treated by doctors in that hospital and recovered on that very ward, and for that janitor every day that they are serving and helping the people that are in that ward, this person is feeling a sense of meaning and connection and service, and that's meaningful to them, so they go to work with a whole different attitude than the one at the other end of the hall. So it's not about the work, it's what you bring to it.

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Rachel Salaman: In the second half of the book you look at how people can achieve their own definition of success after they've thought about all of these things, and one question that started you off on your journey is what do you do better than most people, you say this is a good starting point, how should people try to answer that question?

G. Richard Shell: There's a wonderful bestseller book in the United States, and it's been a bestseller for quite a while and I'm a believer in it, called "Now Discover Your Strengths" and it's published by the Gallup Organization and it has an assessment and they provide a lot of consulting and other work and I endorse it. A lot of what people do when they go to a good career counselor or they go to a good book that's going to help them do some self-assessments, is to discover if they are a social person, are they an ideas person, are they someone who gets satisfaction from achieving a whole set of tasks every day, are they someone who can only focus on one goal at a time and they spend two years on it, all of us have genetic aptitudes as well as social aptitudes that we're given because of who raised us and our early social groups, and I think the process of discovering what you do better than most is the discovery process that's an internal journey, it's look to see what it is that you seem to be able to do with less effort but higher excellence.

And very often people fail to recognize that because for them it's easy and so they think that it must not count, so the fact that someone can be a good listener for example and they just do it because that's what they do, they're a good listener, they learned how to do it, they get joy from doing it, that's an aptitude, people will pay you to be a good listener in a lot of different professions, you can be of great service to other people if you are a good listener in crisis situations and all sorts of situations, you would make a great hostage negotiator someday if you're a good listener. So I think what I'm trying to do in that chapter is help people honor the things that they do with less effort and do well and then build on them, instead of saying well I can do that well, it must not count, I want to be able to do what John or Mary can do, they can do something I can't do, well maybe you are never going to be able to do that and so spending all your life trying to become good at something that you have no aptitude for is a prescription for frustration, so discovering what you do better than most is step one and getting reinforcement on your aptitudes, talk to your parents, talk to your family, talk to your team mates, talk to people you work with, ask them what do I do better than most and then make a list and then start thinking about what are some activities at my job, the one I already have, or in different lines of work that I might be interested in that would call on me to use these innate talents that I seem to have and develop them.

At the end of the day if you've got four or five different things that you do well and you can put them all together in a single set of activities that are coordinated, you are probably going to end up being one of the best people in the world at it because there are just not that many people with that combination of things that they do well and that can continue to learn and develop and get better, and learn, develop and get better at doing that, plus it doesn't feel like work because it's stuff you already do better than most. So a lot of counseling, a lot of seeking feedback, a lot of internal list making of things that you look back on and say what did I really enjoy about last week and write it down and don't minimize anything.

Rachel Salaman: You also talk about self confidence in this part of the book and you identify two levels of self-confidence, what are they?

G. Richard Shell: Level one self-confidence is your basic sense that you can do it whatever it is, that you have an identity that you are an honorable person, that you have certain basic capabilities that go with just being a human in a social environment, and when you lose level one self-confidence you really end up depressed, you just don't want to get up in the morning, you have no sense of what the future might hold or even if you want to have a future because you don't know who you are and you've lost your sense that you're capable. So level one self-confidence is that basic get up in the morning view.

Level two confidence is the confidence to do something particular and that comes from finding these aptitudes I talked about before and then practice, failing, practice, failing, learning, practice, failing, so level two confidence is that kind of resilience that comes with being willing to fail. Failure meaning not achieving everything you thought you might be achieving in that particular sense, and then picking yourself up and using it as a learning experience and moving on.

There's a psychologist at Stanford named Carol Dweck who has done a lot on this and has written a wonderful book called "Mindset: the New Psychology of Success" and in "Mindset" she describes this level two confidence as what she calls a growth mindset, and that means you are able to learn and grow from your everyday experience at whatever it is you are doing, growth mindset is the kind of thing that an athlete has when they are learning a particular sport or a musician has when they are learning a particular instrument, a piano or clarinet or something. These two things feed together of course, if you pick up say a musical instrument when you're a kid and it's pretty awful to start and you get better at it by practicing and failing and practicing and learning, and the fact that you are able to get better at it can loop back to your level one self-confidence and make you feel like a good person, make you feel like you're capable. So that's the kind of growth mindset that level two self-confidence is built on, so they're two different things, but they are related.

Rachel Salaman: Can people succeed if they don't have any self-confidence?

G. Richard Shell: I don't think so, I think that self-confidence is the source of motivation and with no motivation I think it's pretty hard to succeed on either the inner or the outer dimension. There are people who are manic depressives who have extreme bursts of self-confidence followed by extreme depths of depression and they could be geniuses, there are examples of people who are great composers or great artists who are bipolar, but when they're in their down cycle they're not doing much, they're on medication, they're depressed, it's the up cycles that allow them to be productive.

So I think some degree of self-confidence is what is necessary to keep you in motion and to give you the resilience when things don't work out the way that you expected or wished, to pick yourself up again. I think it's really important that the social part of life is very important in this regard, one of the things that I learned is that you can't do it by yourself, when you're learning the feedback loop from a good coach, even a business coach or a life coach, it's very encouraging, it bolsters your self-confidence, everyone has ups and downs on self-confidence, during a day, during a week, during a month.

And the downs sometimes are useful, if you are trying to do something and you keep not doing it very well and you start getting dissatisfied and depressed about it, maybe that's a sign that you should do something else, go to your social network and say you know I'm having a lot of frustration with this, is this something I should keep doing or is this something that I'd better cut my losses and try a different angle on. You might think you want to be a great artist, you try, try, try, nobody seems to respond, you get more and more frustrated, but you get a little advice, you turn out to be an art dealer and you get to be around art, you love art, you get the satisfaction of being with artists but you yourself can stop having to feel like you're a failure because you couldn't create the art. Finding out what works sometimes comes from dissatisfaction and that sense of I couldn't do it can also be a useful message.

Rachel Salaman: In the book you also say that influencing people is key to success, what are the most effective ways to do this, to influence people?

G. Richard Shell: Well I consider this chapter really important because it's a myth buster chapter, most people think in the literature of success the most famous book is "How to Win Friends and Influence People," and that's a very useful book, it has a single insight that it drives home and the insight is that if you want to make friends you basically learn to ask questions and be interested in other people and make them feel important. There's no harm in that as far as it goes but not everybody has the same capacity or aptitude for being social in that way, and there are plenty of people, many people who are very successful in the sense that they're both fulfilled in what they do and also do it very well, who don't have a whole lot of social influence skills in the "how to win friends" sense.

So what I talk about in that chapter is where influence really comes from, and influence really comes from a concept that I call credibility, people will do what you ask them to do, they will co-operate with you, they will assist you if you ask them to do it and you have credibility, and credibility isn't social smoothness, credibility is other people's perceptions that you are good at what you do, other people's perceptions that you know what you're talking about, other people's perceptions that you have the right authority to be asking them to do it, and most importantly other people's perceptions that you are trustworthy and that you will do what you say you will do, that you are interested in their welfare as well as your own, and you don't have to be socially smooth to have credibility. I use an example of a curmudgeon who was the greatest naval architect in America in the 20th century, a guy named William Francis Gibbs and he was not a social person but he was on the cover of Time Magazine and had a very full life as a person who you would think of as pretty disagreeable, so I like to think that readers can take themselves and accept themselves with whatever level of social skills they may have and realize that influence comes not necessarily from being glad hander and someone who will flatter others, but it comes from what you do, what you do well and your attention to your own character.

Rachel Salaman: Well we've covered a lot of ground in this conversation, what would be your top one or two tips for people starting out on this journey?

G. Richard Shell: I think the most important thing is to stop letting other people define success for you and define it for yourself, the culture defined success for you, your family may define success for you, where you went to school may have given you impressions of what success means that you were striving to achieve. All those may end up being things that you endorse but until you step back and ask yourself the tough question which my book tries to help people think about, and ask yourself what do I mean by success, at one point in the book I give a number, 32,850 and I put that number up in class when I teach my course, that's a really important number to remember, basically the number is the number of days you get to live if you're lucky enough to be 90 years old, 32,850.

So the only really scarce thing you have in your life is time, every day a day goes by, one of those numbers ticks off, so getting down with what do I want to do with my life to make myself a success as I see success is a very important piece of work to do in life, and you learn as you go, it's not like you have to sit in a room some place and make up a definition and spend the rest of your life pursuing it, it's just something you have to keep in mind and do the starter work on it and then start learning and developing that, but if you haven't done that then I think it's very hard, you may be able to go to a cocktail party and other people saying I'm successful, I'm a lawyer, I'm a doctor, but you wake up in the morning and actually you're very dissatisfied, your relationships aren't working, you don't get much joy in what you do, you can say you're a success but in your heart you know you're not and that's what I'm trying to help people think about.

Rachel Salaman: Richard Shell, thanks very much for joining us.

G. Richard Shell: It's my pleasure, thanks very much for having me, take care.

Rachel Salaman: The name of Richard's book again is "Springboard: Launching your Personal Search for Success" and you can find out more about Richard and his work at his website grichardshell.com.

I'll be back in a few weeks with another Expert Interview, until then goodbye.