Springboard: launching your personal search for success

The First Question: What Is Success? The first answer: choose your life -- An easy answer: be happy -- Society's answer: seek status, fame, and fortune -- An inspired answer: find meaningful work. -- The Second Question: How Will I Achieve It? Discover what you can do better than most: capabilities -- Set yourself on fire: motivation -- Learn to fail: self-confidence -- Focus your mind: passion, imagination, intuition, and reason -- Influence others: credibility and dialogue -- The right answers.;Shell teaches at the Wharton School of Business, and in addition to his obvious expertise in the specialties of negotiation, persuasion, and interpersonal influence, his outstanding book on achieving success has exactly what this kind of examination needs, common sense and encouragement. The author's honesty is established early on as he posits the basic premise of his presentation :There is no foolproof system that always leads to success. That said, he nevertheless goes on to unfold a wise program that rests on two factors: Goal clarification (which means, of course, that a personal definition of success must be arrived at), and resources and initiatives needed to achieve success. In well-ordered chapters, Shell develops the stages of his program for success, one important feature of which is determining what you do better than most people.