What Should I Do Next with My Life? New Ways to Define Success

Often, when we think about success we tend to equate it with gaining wealth, promotions, and prestige. But, of course, there’s so much more to life than the pursuit of material goals. In this fascinating transcript of an interview Wharton professor G. Richard Shell, he discusses a new approach to defining success that asks each person to thoughtfully define success for themselves, and to consider what success looks like for them personally. It’s a great read, and will make you think carefully about the goals you’re setting yourself and how you would like your life to be. – FD

Richard ShellWharton 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.

Knowledge@Wharton_logoKnowledge@Wharton: You are well known for your work in negotiation and persuasion, so why write a book about success?

Shell: It’s been a long journey. The materials on success actually preceded the materials on negotiation and persuasion. I’ve been interested in success since I was in my 20s, and it also feeds into a passion I have in my teaching to help students and executives bring more self-awareness to their career choices, whatever they are. The subject of success allows me to do that directly.

Knowledge@Wharton: Here at Wharton, you teach three very different audiences about the topic of success — Wharton undergrads, MBAs and senior executives in the advanced management program — and you challenge them to think about what success is. What do you see as the differences in the ways that each audience reacts to the question?

Shell: They’re at very different stages of life, and so each one of those groups has a different question in their head when you ask them, “What do you mean by success?” For undergrads, they are standing right on the edge of adulthood, very anxiously awaiting the real world after being in school for 16 years. It’s the first time they are seriously addressing the issue of what their life goals might be. They begin thinking about family, about career, about how to balance those things. In asking them about success, I’m able in some ways to set their minds at ease that they don’t have to answer this question all at once, that their lives are more like an [ongoing] experiment than a test.

The MBAs are a little bit further down the road. They have a more career-directed focus to that question. They’re all thinking very directly about the kind of professional niche [they want] and what kind of success that may hold for them.

And then for the executives, it’s much, much different. The senior executives are more mindful of issues like family, work/life balance and the kind of mentoring that they can do for younger people, helping them think about what a meaningful career might look like or how they can carve out a life that will make sense to them. So at some level, I’m teaching the executives how to be coaches as much as I am opening up a new subject for them.

Knowledge@Wharton: 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?

Shell: 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.

Knowledge@Wharton: In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson penned the words that we have the inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Should he have edited those words to say the pursuit of personal success?

Shell: I don’t know that the founding fathers had the word “success” in their normal vocabulary. Happiness was, though. I think it’s interesting if you look back at that event in our history, because the original text said “life, liberty and the pursuit of property.” Jefferson edited out “property” and wrote the word “happiness” over it. A lot of cultural commentators [would contend] that this single editing changed the course of American culture because the word “happiness” is very ambiguous. I think it meant one thing to Jefferson, a stoic philosopher who followed a very strict regimen in his life and found joy in gardening and intellectual pursuits.

We’ve interpreted it, I think, to mean longer times at casinos and more elaborate vacations. So one of the things I try to do in the book is give people a chance to think more deeply about what happiness actually means. It turns out it means three different things, the research shows.

First, it’s a kind of momentary emotion, a good feeling that people experience. Second, it’s a kind of positive evaluation when you look back on a period of time and consider whether your efforts have been rewarded with some kind of achievement. Finally, it is a satisfaction that comes with almost a spiritual dimension — of awe, of appreciation of nature, of a sense of connection to the world, and it may even be [connection to] a deity. Those kinds of happiness feelings I think are the deepest of all. When you speak of pursuit of happiness it’s probably some mix of all those three things….

Knowledge@Wharton: 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?

Shell: 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.

Knowledge@Wharton: 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?”

Shell: 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.

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