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What Should I Do Next with My Life?
Wharton
professor G. Richard Shell's on new ways to define success
Wharton professor G. Richard Shell's new book,
Springboard: Launching Your Personal Search for Success, encourages readers
to embrace major transitions in life, from college to a first job, from one
career to the next or from work to retirement. Based on a popular course
Shell teaches at Wharton, the book departs from the conventional "how
to succeed" formula by challenging readers to define success for
themselves. An edited version of the transcript appears below.
Many people in our culture are chasing success goals of fame and
fortune, yet in your book you say that they can be traps. What do you mean
by that, and how does your book help readers define success for themselves?
One of the points I make in the book is that whether we like it or not,
our surrounding culture is going to create a lot of expectations for us.
When we filter that culture through the prism of a family and how we grew
up, where we grew up and the peer group we grew up around, it's going to
have almost a hypnotic effect on what people think they ought to be
pursuing. With our media and celebrity-heavy culture, it's very, very
common to see people unconsciously adopt a frame of reference that if
they're not famous, they're not successful. If they're not wealthy, they're
not successful. Even when they know better, they continue to behave in ways
that give them this underlying sense of dissatisfaction if they're not
famous enough or rich enough.
In the book and in my teaching, I try to give
people a chance to gain a little perspective.
This means looking at the sources of those early messages that they may
have internalized. I want to encourage them to make a few more choices
about whether that impulse toward getting recognition or making another
$100,000 - when they have options about using their time in other ways -
[is the right approach] and whether they can gain more control over that
choice.
Part of what I do is try to substitute new goals
for the more automatic ones that our culture provides. So instead of fame,
I try to get people to start thinking about gaining respect - earning it
from people you know and who know you, as opposed to getting recognition
from people you don't know. When it comes to money, I try to emphasize
needs that are related to financial security for you and your family rather
than a status scorecard that counts up the zeros at the end of your net worth.
So I think part of it is helping people wake up and
realize that they're being unconsciously influenced. The other part is
providing them with a more thoughtful alternative which, when they think
about it, actually is something they would much rather pursue.
In your book, you describe an experience where you went to a conference
about happiness, and a "wise angel" arrived. He said that
"happiness is just three things: good health, meaningful work and
love. You have that; you're happy." Was he missing anything relative
to success as you would define it?
The person I call the wise angel was really just a senior citizen who
wandered into a Wharton seminar that the faculty were giving on the
relationship between income and the emotion of happiness. I called him the
wise angel because he was dressed in workingman's clothes. He really didn't
belong in the setting. And the [statement he made] to the presenter was
about as un-academic a concept of happiness as you can find, but very
deeply felt and in many ways very wise.
Good health is certainly a very important component
of well being. And meaningful work is something I talk at great length
about in the book, because it's something I think is well worth
understanding and pursuing. And love, of course, is the foundation for
everyone's personal life…. So he had captured a lot with that [statement].
But one of the things he missed that most people [consider] when they think
of success is some sort of notable achievement. I think people get a lot of
satisfaction from achieving something significant…. Whether or not it's
recognized, that's a sort of cherry on top. Your sense of satisfaction
comes from doing things well that are important to you. When they're
recognized, that's an extra benefit. But I think achievement is something
that most people would consider pretty important when you get to the
concept of success compared with just the concept of happiness.
You also mention in your book the tradeoffs between success and
happiness. We now live in a world that asks, "Can't we have
both?"
We each only get to live roughly 32,850 days [assuming] a lifetime of
90 years. How you choose to spend that most precious asset, time, does
involve tradeoffs. I think if you're going to be pursuing momentary
happiness, for example, then you probably are not going to be working …
toward an important achievement that many associate with success.
By the same token, there are moments when - if
we're doing the right kind of work - we can have both a very strong sense
of achievement and a very powerful and fulfilling sense of satisfaction.
There are some things we do where we hit a sweet spot - where we can feel
both very positive emotions and also accomplish a great deal. But I think
the other half of that is you have to choose how to spend your time. Some
people overdo the achievement side and don't remember that their own
intellectual and emotional well being, and that of their families, needs to
be nurtured. Other people focus on their personal lives and at the end of
the day may feel some frustration that they didn't achieve as much as they
would have liked.
As you work across this variety of audiences, beginning with
undergraduate students up through senior executives, what do you see as
their biggest obstacles to figuring out their path to success?
Fear. When I look into the eyes of undergraduates who are facing their
first job after graduation, they are very, very anxious that they make
exactly the right choice the first time out. A lot of what I do when I
speak to them individually is say, "Look, relax. Just do something
that interests you and then use your early working life as an experiment to
learn more about who you are, what might interest you and what skills you
have."
Even senior executives I occasionally run into when
they are at one of these transition points will come up to me during a
break in our course or at lunch and want some extra counseling, some extra
chance to talk. Again, what I see is fear, an anxiety that some very
defined part of their life that they know very well, that they are masters
of, is coming to an end. They look out into the future and see this sort of
black hole in front of them regarding what's going to happen next.
So my effort in the book and in my courses is to
reassure and to provide encouragement to be thoughtful, be a little
fearless, find the courage to put yourself in motion. You know, if you
follow professional ice hockey, which my wife and I occasionally do,
there's a very good strategy if you're trying to score in an ice hockey
game. Basically the advice is, keep shooting and good things happen if
you're in front of the net and you're swinging away trying to get that
goal. I think life is like that. Get out there and just keep shooting and
things happen, people respond, new avenues open up and you get a chance to
find a new path.
Do you think dissatisfaction is the key for change?
Absolutely. I think that's one of the dangers of over-focusing on
happiness. If you think of happiness as the end state - oh, I have to be
happy - you're going to miss a lot, because it's from your dissatisfaction,
from your unhappiness, that you often get the motivation to do something
new, something better, more interesting, more educational. You must be
willing to be unhappy in a relationship in order to find a better one. You
must be unhappy in a current job in order to take the plunge and seek a
better one. I think there's a lot of power in negative emotions - provided
they are not overly negative for too long - that are overlooked in the
modern culture's fascination with the whole idea that success equals
happiness.
What do you see as the biggest 'aha' moment that students have at the
end of the success class?
Different audiences have different ahas. I think the undergraduates
have a big aha because they suddenly realize this is something they get to
define. They have been in the business of checking boxes all through their
lives, going to good high schools, [getting high] SAT scores, getting into
a great college and maybe even being recruited into great firms for their
first job after college.
But I think they really begin feeling empowered
when they realize this is an opportunity, not something they have to fear -
that the future is something they get to shape and craft. So I think that
can be a big aha moment for them.
"You get to define success for yourself. It's
whatever personality you have that will probably affect how you define it.
That's the life you get to live."
I think for the older people, the aha comes with validating
for them that life is a little bit more nuanced and richer than just their
career achievements. I was teaching a course for bankers here on campus
about a month ago … and making a point about how when you achieve someone
else's goal in life, you recognize it because you don't feel any
satisfaction from having achieved it.
This guy in the back raised his hand and said,
"You know, Richard, that's exactly right. I've been trying to get
promoted for the last three years. A month ago I got promoted, but I didn't
feel any satisfaction from it. I'm beginning to realize that the promotion
wasn't really my own goal." So I think older people sometimes suddenly
realize that you have to live your own life, take a little time off to
craft what your own goals are, and not just end up feeling empty when you
achieve something everybody else wanted you to achieve.
Do you see a correlation between certain personalities/styles and
success? In other words, do you need a certain style and personality to be
successful? Or is success really an option for anyone?
Well, back to the premise, you get to define success for yourself. It's
whatever personality you have that will probably affect how you define it.
That's the life you get to live. If you looked at individual aspects of
success, there probably are some correlations. For example, people who
achieve more are probably more conscientious. They're more
self-disciplined. They're more likely to follow through.
On the other hand, people who are happier have more
positive emotions. They have a greater sense of satisfaction. They are a
little bit more emotionally intelligent, more self aware and maybe more
open to novel experiences and are not so interested in controlling
everything about their environment.
Those are personality traits. They probably give
you aptitudes for experiencing some dimension of success. But I think no
matter what your personality is, you get to define the balance that you
will call success for yourself. I think that's the unique aspect of it. You
get to make your own adventure.
Reproduced with permission from Knowledge@Wharton
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