Richard G. Hewlett

Transcription

MALE SPEAKER: I'm delighted to welcome Professor Richard Shell from the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, which is where I graduated from. And I had the pleasure, privilege, and honor of having professor Shell as my negotiations professor many years back. And back then, at the end of the class, he gave us a little wallet size card for a negotiations framework, and for all these years I've carried the card with me in my wallet every single day and pulled it out multiple times. And I've told them that that framework alone on that card has repaid more than the cost of my MBA education. Now Professor Shell has been teaching at Wharton for 28 years, and he's Professor of Legal Studies, Ethics and Management-- and negotiations is one of the things he's famed for, both as a lecturer, author and teacher. But along these 28 years, he's met many, many students like me-- and there's many of you in the audience-- and he would have career discussions, life discussions with them. And the thing that intrigued him-- especially in the last few years-- is how do each of these people define success? What exactly is success? How do we pursue it? What price are we willing to pay? How do we know when we've attained it, and how will we get there? What is the journey that takes you to success? And that's what led him to research and write this book called "Springboard: Launching Your Personal Search for Success." And the word "your" is key to it, because when you read the book you'll realize ultimately what success is, how you get there is each person's individual journey. And this is what Professor Shell will be talking to us about. With that, please help me welcome Professor Shell. [APPLAUSE] G. RICHARD SHELL: Thank you, [INAUDIBLE]. Thank you very much. Thank you. And thank you for turning out. The subject of success is something that I've been puzzled by, probably since I was in mid-college. And then over the years, as my life evolves, it became a period of crisis to decide what that really meant to me. And then as I joined the faculty of Wharton, a period of time when I could actually reflect on it and do research on it and create a course about it. So I actually have a course now called "The Success Course" that's at Wharton, and it's a semester-long trip that every student gets to take. And they have to write a final paper, when the final paper of that course is my-- and then fill in the year-- 2014, the area of success, and how I plan to achieve it. And my goal for that paper is for people to read it 10 years after they graduate, and look back and think to themselves well, that's interesting. That isn't how it worked at all. But it gives you not so much the destination that you're going to travel as the way-- the beginning of the way-- to think about how you're going to assess that journey. And that's what I want to talk about for a few minutes this afternoon. You've got a little assessment, the "Six Lives Exercise." And that's something that's in chapter one of the book, and it's the exercise we use in the first day of that class to help people begin to think about how they're implicitly measuring success. So I'm going to talk for a bit, and then we're going to get-- and see-- what kind of answers you gave to this assessment, and see if there's some differences or similarities in the way Googlers think about success when asked to measure it across their whole life, not just a single domain. So we did that. And I think the motivating question here is at different stages of your life-- it's always the case, right after you graduate from college, that you have to ask, what's next? But it can also be the case after your MBA program. You have to ask, what's next? Or after you've finished a project at Google and you're given the opportunity to ask, what's next, or decide that it's time to go from Google to someplace else. And then you get to ask, what's next? Or your spouse is relocated, and so you have to make changes. Or something happens in your life that reframes who you are and what you're trying to do, and then you have to confront that question. So it is a question that comes up multiple times in a life. And I think that the way I've tried to organize this book, and the course that I teach, is to go to two subjects. One is, what do you think the meaning of success is for yourself? And then, second, having had some thoughts on that subject, what are the individual capabilities, talents, passions, experiences that you can uniquely bring to achieving that definition for yourself? Because a lot of how to succeed books really say there's one path for everybody-- set goals, network. There's a book for every tool. But I think it's the case that each of you has vastly different aptitudes and capabilities, and the journey inside to discover how best to achieve your goals using your own abilities is every bit as interesting as defining the goal itself. So one motivating question to think about that gives you a sense of when you're missing something-- have you ever tried really hard to achieve something, achieved it, and then fell oddly empty, almost a sense of who was doing that? Why did I do that? I think when you get that sort of sense, you're basically-- it's a message that you've been achieving someone else's goal. It was a goal that you thought you were trying to achieve for your parents. It was a goal you thought you were trying to achieve to show your brother or your sister who is the best. It was a goal that you wanted to achieve to be someone in your high school class or be someone in your neighborhood. And so it's very important to realize, a lot of the goals that we implicitly are motivated by come from outside ourselves. They are culturally induced, media induced, family induced. And one chance to check on how you're doing, whether you're moving more from the outside in or more from the inside out, is how much genuine satisfaction are you getting when you actually get something, achieve something, do something that you've been striving to achieve and exerting some effort on, to the extent that the satisfaction is there? And it's not just the satisfaction that someone said oh, good job, but the inner satisfaction. That's a sign that you're on a path that you've defined for yourself. So in a sense you're looking for other people to congratulate you on it. And when you just are home at night after achieving it, you're lying in bed and you don't really feel it, then you're-- got a little work to do would be my advice at that point. So this subject came to be very important to me personally early on. As I mentioned, my early 20s was a kind of period of crisis for me, and that gave me a sense of how important this can be for someone in their 20s. I was raised in a military family. My dad was a general in the Marines. His father was a career military officer. My mother's father was a career military officer. My sister married a career military officer. And so there was almost no doubt when I went to college what I was going to do. And I was going to be a career military officer. And I never even gave it much thought. It was just the path. So I went to college on a full military scholarship. I was all set to go. Six years after graduation I'd be either a Marine or a naval officer. That was my only real choice. And everything was going on great until the sophomore year in college when, without asking for it, I suddenly had to confront that wake-up call. And for me, it was an escalation of the Vietnam War. My college years were right in the middle of the Vietnam War. The Tet Offensive had occurred during my sophomore year. Campuses all over the United States exploded-- tremendous rethinking of what that war was about, what our role in the world was. And for me, really for the first time in my life, I was called to answer the question what would I be doing as a military officer after graduation? And that answer came back pretty quickly that I would be going to kill Vietnamese people, with whom I had no quarrel. And that set me on a different path to thinking who I was and what I ought to be doing. It took a couple of years to get on the journey that I ended up on. It was difficult, because I had to make a phone call to my father and tell him that I was dropping the military scholarship and I was going to become a war resistor and a pacifist. That was a night that I remember. I had written a little speech to tell him what I planned to do, and his response was very interesting. After I had read my little speech, there was a bit of a silence, and then he said, are you sure? Which was not what I expected him to say. And I was of course completely unsure. I had no idea that I was doing the right thing. You can't walk away from everything your family has stood for generations in a couple of months and be sure that you're doing the right thing. But I had to be sure with him that night, and so I said yes, I'm sure. So that moment, basically, was the wake-up call for me, because up to that point I'd been on a journey that other people had created for me, and after that point I had to create my own. And I had to create it from scratch. I don't recommend that, because when you go that far away from your family values, your culture, what you've been raised in, making it all up from scratch is a very difficult thing. And in my case, it took probably about 12 years of time between that moment and then the final coming home again and reuniting with my family and embracing them. We reconciled. But there were periods when I wasn't speaking with them. The introduction of the book tells a longer story about a journey I took around the world to try to sort things out. And suffice it to say that when you give yourself a one-way ticket to someplace far away, and you make a pledge to yourself that you're not going to come back until you figure it out, it's a different kind of trip than one that you're taking to go see if you can find the Taj Majal. For me it was an inward journey. I spent a lot of time in monasteries in Sri Lanka and in South Korea. I was even invited to become a monk in South Korea at a Zen monastery, which caused me to divide the decision. It was either meditation hall or home. And by that time I'd actually come together with myself enough to realize that I was ready to go home. And so then I did go home, and ended up living in my parents' basement for a while at ages older than many of you. So if you're still not completely sure what you want to do, hang in there. There's hope. And if you end up living in your parents' basement, that's OK, too. So I sorted it out. I went to law school-- started at Wharton in 1986, and I've been there ever since. And I think the reason that this subject gives me such passion is because I realize that a lot of people are unsure about what they want to do. But the culture that we're in, especially the confidence culture-- whether it's at school or at an organization-- everybody seems to think they've got it figured out. And they look at other people and they go, well, they've all got it figured out. So my doubts must be sort of abnormal, and so I'll just sort of keep them a secret. And I wrote the book to help people break the secret. It's OK not to know. It's OK to be uncertain. In fact, that uncertainty is probably the source and the seed of the best things that you will ever do. And so each chapter has got assessments in it like the one we just did, and gives you a chance to think deeply about your family, your culture, the place you want to go, the places that you have gone and maybe didn't quite understand why you went there. So that's why the book. I think it's fair to say that elite education does very little to help people with this question. A lot of academic work is basically analytical. Even if it's about the humanities, it's analytical. And I like to quote Ralph Waldo Emerson. He had a conversation with his friend Henry David Thoreau. Emerson said, Harvard teaches most of the branches of learning. And his friend Thoreau said yes, indeed-- all the branches and none of the roots. And I think my work has been to try to-- let's get back to some of the roots. Let's get back to some of the primary ideas, and let's get back to help students find their own voice. A lot of writing in college is designed to basically teach you write in the third person-- some objective reality out there. But I think it's very important for people to learn to write in the first person and find their voice, speak from the heart, In The Iliad, the two teams-- the Trojans and the Greeks-- have leaders, and every now and then there's a great moment where one of the leaders gives a speech to their troops to rally them to the next battle. And there's a trope in the way that Homer wrote it. And every time one of the speakers begins a speech to his own people he says, hear me, Achaeans. Hear what my heart has to say. And I think that notion that when you speak you should speak what your heart has to say, is something that isn't that easy. And it's something that is well worth working on. So the book is really designed to help people. And the programs we've been working on at Wharton-- we have about half the MBA students now are engaged in a voluntary, eight-week program where they learn to talk about their own goals, they use the book and other readings to motivate themselves, to think about the future and themselves in a more open-minded way. And we've found that it's been very, very helpful and very powerful for them. One quick matrix, if you think about your career-- just narrowly, not all of life, but just your career-- this is an interesting diagnostic test you can take periodically. If you had achievement on one side and satisfaction on the other, and you had to put a dot in one of these nine cells, where would you put it? Now I've done this exercise with people who are senior executives in our five-week advanced management program who are in their 40s and 50s, and you'd be amazed at people-- even the most accomplished people, apparently, in business life-- how often, when you get them to be honest, the dots end up pretty high on the achievement side-- not too many people picking low achievement at the Advanced Management program at Wharton-- but medium to low sometimes on the satisfaction side. And we create a good enough learning community so that people can be honest about that. I'll just share two quick stories with you. There was one fellow who was in a program that we were teaching a couple-- about two years ago now, and he put his little dot up there where low satisfaction and high achievement. He said he was the head of the North American division of a major Fortune 500 company, and had achieved, as he saw it, far beyond any level of status that he ever could have dreamed of for himself. So he put himself in the high achievement cell. And I said why low satisfaction? And he said well, for the last three promotions that I've gotten, each one has taken me further and further away from what I love to do the most. And that's a trap in corporate life. You get promoted and then you stop doing the thing that you really love to do, and get to do the things that they'll pay more to do and give you a better title to do, but isn't anything that's feeds your soul. So his particular passion was logistics, which I thought was interesting. He loved to get factories to run on time. He loved to get efficiency done. And so as he got promoted, he was more and more engaged with corporate politics and the kind of issues that attack you when you're at the top of some large bureaucracy. So he had a couple of weeks to think about how he could re-craft his job and get himself back closer to what he really loved to do. The other person-- there was two of them-- who put his dot in that cell was 35 years old. He just won an award for best lawyer in Argentina. He was a top lawyer in Argentina for his group of lawyers. And I said, well, that's great-- that was obviously high achievement. Why low satisfaction? He said, well, I hate law. And so, good to realize that at 35. I think his future is bright. Once you recognize that you're basically been getting paid to do something you do well but have no excitement with. And that's another trap. People will pay you a lot of money to do something you're good at, but that may not be the thing that you love to do. And I think you have to have those three things going together if you want to really begin to get down on some real inner satisfaction, and that is something other people recognize enough to pay you for, something you're good at, and something that you're excited about. So those three things together I think are a pretty good sweet spot. So when you look at success you end up with two dimensions-- outer dimension, achievement, inner dimension, happiness. If you ask most people what success is and they haven't thought about it much, they'll answer, well, it's happiness. I want to be happy. That's successful. But I want to push that notion just a bit, because it turns out to be a little more complicated than that. Achievement-- the problem with measuring success and achievement is it's always relative. I don't care what college you went to. There was probably someone who got a higher award, a better GPA or whatever it was that you were striving for, and so you always felt that sense of pushing yourself a little bit. One of my favorite quotes in the book is from H.L. Mencken: Wealth is any income that is more than the income of one's wife's sister's husband. So if you're measuring success in money, pretty clearly you're going to find people who have more of it. And I think that's a trap that people get into. Hungry ghost-- anybody here ever studied Buddhism? Know what a hungry ghost is? [INAUDIBLE] of course has. A hungry ghost is a spiritual being who was very greedy and avaricious in their regular life. They're reborn as a being with a body the size of an elephant and a head the size of a pin. And they spend the afterlife of eternity eating, eating, eating, eating and never feeling the least bit satisfied because they can never fill that giant body with that tiny mouth. Now hungry ghosts are all around us. There are hungry ghosts for attention who can never get enough attention. There are hungry ghosts for status who can never get enough power. There are hungry ghosts for wealth who can never get enough money. And every day they wake up, and their little cup is half empty again, and they have to spend all day getting attention, wealth, status, whatever it is that they feel they're lacking. And of course that's sort of a trap. If you live your life that way it's a pretty sad circumstance, but there are people like that. Sometimes you need to pick the right pond if you're going to have a life that you consider relatively achieved. If you pick only the biggest ponds with the most competitive environment, it's pretty easy to find yourself discouraged and depressed after a little while. We do that to our students, of course. Those of you who went to Penn-- there are a whole group up here-- you probably remember this. When you are admitted to a top college, they bring you in on the first day or two, and they have everybody there and they celebrate how wonderful you are and how much you've achieved. But then they do a terrible thing. They say, OK, how many of you were valedictorians of your high school class? Raise your hand. And all these hands go up. And how many of you got 800 on your SATs? Hands go up. There's one in the back right there. Yeah. And as soon as you look around and realize that what got you there won't get you to the next place, it's an upsetting thought, because what are you going to measure success as now? And if you haven't done the work from the inside out, if you've only been measuring it relative to everybody around you, then you're going to feel a little lost. And I think it's fair to say quite a few students check out after that first semester. They realize that there's something wrong, that they can't be the high school student they were. Then you find them skating and not really giving it that much effort or self-handicapping their own performance. So that could be a trap. The OK plateau is an interesting place to be-- not my term, another author, but-- that's sort of a place where everything's working OK. The problem with the OK plateau is you have to take a risk to move in any direction, and people sometimes get comfortable on the OK plateau and so they stop taking risks. And once you're on the OK plateau and you stop taking risks, where do you stay? Right there on the OK plateau. So you need to keep that quality of energy, excitement, willingness to take risks if you're going to really let the achievement thing work. And then I think there's a real trap that I think everybody needs to address on the achievement side, and that is what's your metaphor? There's a lot of metaphors around for success. The most common one is this-- success is a ladder. And of course, the problem with a latter is that you get to the top and then what? You have to have what-- have another letter, I guess. But it's a pretty limiting metaphor. It's all about status. It's only about career. It doesn't really give you much inner energy. One that I like is this-- an image of success might be the ripples coming out from an impact on a pond. And the question there is how many people have you influenced in a positive way? And you measure success that way, rather than according to some place you are on a set of rungs. But whether you like either one of those, my challenge to you do is if you want to understand success for yourself, you have to understand your own metaphor. And so that's a little homework. How would you conceptualize success for yourself? What image would work for you? All right-- happiness. If you're going to say that success is happiness, then you'd better define happiness. And many people-- when you actually scratch them on that-- don't have a whole lot of definition. And I think the danger is if you just say it's happiness, and you don't have a definition for happiness, then what have you done? You just shifted an uncertain word over to another uncertain word, and you really haven't gained a whole lot of insight. The research on happiness-- and Penn is a great center for research on happiness. We have the Positive Psychology Center, and they've done a lot of work on this. Basically, there are three ways that people look at happiness. One is a lot of positive mood states. The problem with that is we know from research that most people have a genetic set point, and they're not going to go too much higher than a standard deviation above that or below that no matter what happens. And it seems unfair to define success by just whether you got a good happiness gene or not. And then, of course, there's the problem Dan Gilbert at Harvard discovered, which is we're terrible predictors of what's going to put us in a positive mood state. You can say, well, I'll be happy when I get married. But you have the wedding, and the wedding doesn't make you happy. Now what? You could say, I'd be miserable if I lost my job. But then you lose your job, and actually that's the door that opens that gets you to exactly the thing you needed to do, and you're not at all unhappy about it. So running your life based on predictions about what's going to make you happy or unhappy turns out to be a pretty flawed compass. Retrospective accounts of your life-- you're dying, you're on your death bed, someone says were you happy? Is that what it's all about? You say yes, it was a successful life. You say no, it was an unsuccessful life. So what if you get run over by a car. You don't have time for anybody to ask. Does that mean you didn't really-- doesn't count? The problem with retrospective accounts is, I could give you your favorite flavored cookie and you would retrospectively say you were happier. I can give you a bitter pill and retrospectively you say, not so happy. So we can manipulate your moods about the past just like we can manipulate your moods in the present. There is a form of happiness that I think is really powerful, and I would definitely associate with the word success. There are a lot of different words for this. Aristotle called it eudaimonia-- flourishing, thriving, joy. There's a Hebrew term, simcha, which normally means happiness, like you're happy with your friends. But a rabbi that one of my students discovered defined it this way-- simcha, he said, is the feeling that comes when you're doing what you should be doing. The feeling that comes when you're doing what you should be doing. Now that might not be doing something that's just a positive mood state thing. That could be sitting with someone who's ill or visiting someone in the hospital or going out of your way to perform a favor for a friend that's actually requires some sacrifice. So this simcha idea-- very, very powerful, but hard to predict when you're going to get it-- could come as you're walking across the Googleplex just at sunset and something strikes you about nature; could come when you're just about to drift off to sleep and you have a memory of your mother or your father that was a wonderful time. It's a gift. Hawthorne once said that happiness of this kind is like a butterfly. If you try to catch it, it's hard. But if you sit still, sometimes they'll come and rest on your shoulder. So this kind of happiness is worthy, but it may not be the kind of thing you can pursue the way Jefferson said we should pursue it. So it's not so simple, this happiness thing. I'll give you one definition and then we'll look at your Six Lives Exercise. I was at a Wharton seminar on happiness, as it turns out. And it was a global study of economic incomes and well being. And there were about 12 of us there, and they were doing a regression analysis across all these different countries and all these surveys. And as the seminar began, this guy walked into the classroom who was obviously a member of the public. He was dressed in a flannel shirt and a very working man looking guy, probably working on a crew outside. And we welcome the public to our seminars, but we always wonder what they'll say. So we sort of hold our breath sometimes when someone comes in from the outside to an academic setting. So he came down and sat next to me at the end of the table, and I noticed his hands were working man's hands-- very interesting looking guy. And he listened very politely to the whole presentation, and then there was a call for questions. And somebody asked about the butane dataset, and then he raised his hand. He said, excuse me, and the presenter said, well, yes sir. He said, I'm just a member of the public and I'm not really an expert like you are, but you're talking about happiness and you're talking about money. He said, I don't see really what those two things have to do with each other. He said, as far as I can tell, happiness is just three things-- good health, meaningful work, and love. You have that, you're happy. And there was this dead silence. And the presenter said thank you. And then someone else asked another question about another dataset, and the conversation went along, and he shifted out the back. So I was sitting there and I was thinking, my gosh. Wharton has just been visited by a wise angel who told us the meaning of life and nobody listened. Very interesting. But the challenge I would have for you is this: the wise angel-- I ended up calling him the wise angel. I talk about him in the book. But the wise angel had to find happiness for himself. I don't know that that's the right definition of happiness. I think you can still be happy and your health couldn't may be not the best. You can be happy and have work that you get a paycheck, and you're living your meaningful life outside of work. You can have-- love can come and go, and I think there are moments when you can be happy as you're searching for love, even if you haven't found it. But he had an idea for his own life of what that word meant, and my challenge to you is while you're looking for the metaphor for achievement, find a definition of happiness that really sums it up for you. And don't just imagine that there's some intuitive thing out there. There's some concrete things that bring you happiness, whatever you mean by it, and I think it's important to think about those as you think about success. All right. So now I just want to quickly give you a chance to reveal your own concepts of success. We did this little Six Lives Exercise. There are six different people that were profiled very briefly in the story. I know that we've got a remote audience. I hope they got a chance to do this on the website. But I just want to survey the number one and number six choices for each of these. And let's just see what came up for people. And do we have-- is someone, you've got a mic? Excellent. So you might have a chance to comment. So how many people ranked the wealthy investor as number one, the number one life? One, two, three, four. OK. How many people number six for the wealthy investor? All right, another four. So maybe you could give this gentleman the mic here. You picked the wealthy investor number one. What was your thought as you ranked him number one? AUDIENCE: I think the idea that he's taking bets that are big and going after them, and he's having an impact on the world that he defines in a way that's positive. He's got a lot of people he's interacting with, and he's-- seems like he has the chance to get his opinion out there and make an impact that others respect and are listening to. G. RICHARD SHELL: [INAUDIBLE] appealing. So he seems to be having a lot of impact and he seems to have a lot of options, a lot of variety in that life, and be very appealing for that. Who ranked that number six? This gentleman here. You could pass the mic over to him. Why last? AUDIENCE: He sold his business and became a libertarian. He's given everything away. He doesn't empathize with people. He doesn't-- there's no one there anymore. He's just got money. G. RICHARD SHELL: So there is a sense of everything's alone. There's no marriage partner. There's no significant other. He's hang gliding, he's doing all these individual things, but not-- and impacting the world in a political way, but in a political way that's consistent with 100% autonomy. So that doesn't appeal to you. A lot of people don't pick that one because there's really no family story behind that one, and there is for most of the others. OK-- banker. Who ranked the banker number one? Banker for number one. Anybody? OK. I Hold your thought for just a second. Banker for number six. Banker for number six. OK. What appealed to you about the banker? AUDIENCE: I think it seemed like she has a nice work-life balance, so she's pretty successful in her work life, but she also has a family-- or a daughter that she can dedicate herself to. And she's not married, but she seems pretty OK with that, because she puts her energy into her daughter. G. RICHARD SHELL: OK. So it's a lot of loyalty, a lot of commitment, and definitely another person in her life that's very, very important. One of the things that people often find appealing about that life is that she's defending her value of success, and her friends are saying you should abandon it. We don't think your life is meaningful. But her point of view is, yes it is. It's the life I've chosen. AUDIENCE: Decision. G. RICHARD SHELL: Yeah. And there's a lot of courage behind that. OK. Number six? AUDIENCE: I think for me family is extremely important-- or, sorry, banker. The idea of just having love in your life is important, and having a daughter is awesome. But I think dating other people or finding love, and having someone else define love for you is something that really tears me apart, and that really is something that's terrorizing Jane. She doesn't date a lot of different people. And I think the other part of it is that she has a daughter who she's devoted her entire life to. But I'm basically assuming that this daughter may or may not appreciate everything that she does, and appreciation is also huge for me. And so I feel like when you devote yourself to someone else, there's never this-- G. RICHARD SHELL: An echo. AUDIENCE: Yeah. An echo, essentially. G. RICHARD SHELL: OK. AUDIENCE: So those are my two points. G. RICHARD SHELL: Yeah, yeah. So the fact that there's no intimate partner in that life can very definitely affect people's sense of happiness for that one. And then-- it's a child with a severe disability. If you don't happen to have experience of such a child in your own world, that feels very one-sided, and it could feel like you're sort of give, give, give, but not a lot of get. People who know families with children of that type, who have had that kind of challenges, often report to me that that's actually incorrect, and it's not something that you miss at all. It's actually a tremendously warm sense of reciprocity. So a lot of what we do when we pick these lives is interpolate from our experience into something that's filling in the blanks. And so it's incomplete. But I would point this out to you-- your choices are going to be informed by nothing more profound than those implicit assumptions about what will make you happy or not, and so they're worth questioning and looking at carefully. OK. Teacher. Who voted for the teacher number one? Anybody? We got one-- one, one, two. OK. Teacher number six? AUDIENCE: So the teacher to me was the one who seemed like she was creating the most personal human value for other people. She was really helping others grow in a way that would really affect their lives more so than any of the others to me. G. RICHARD SHELL: OK. So that life definitely has a sense of that ripple effect, impacting other people-- and to excellence, to helping them become fulfilled. And that none of the other lives had quite the same degree of intimate connection like that. Why number six? Who had six over here? AUDIENCE: I put her as number six mostly because I think it's great if she can impact all these other lives, but if you can't keep your family together, then-- I feel like the last line there is just indicative of much greater problems happening at home. And so-- G. RICHARD SHELL: The fact that she's lost connection with one of her children, it does affect a lot of people, who see that as a huge black hole in their happiness side, and interpret, maybe, a kind of preoccupation with helping others succeed, but not paying the same attention to her own kids, and there's a price being paid there. I will say this. Again, we interpret these stories within our own life story, and when I ranked the teacher number one-- of course, I am a teacher, but I guess that's-- but I am the child who was alienated, but I came home. And so I know that story ends well, so I don't have as much fear of it. OK, interesting-- both valid points of view. The nonprofit leader-- number one for nonprofit leader? Got one here. OK. Number six for nonprofit leader? OK. AUDIENCE: I like that he's had multiple experiences and has found his way to happiness. So he started off as an investment banker or something and figured out what that lifestyle was and determined for himself that that's not what he meant. I also think there's a financial aspect of that, that means he's financially secure enough to not do that anymore. And third, I guess he has a strong core family, a strong commitment to his family, and is finally getting to something that he's really passionate about. So I feel like he's just taken this path to figure out what he wants to do, is in, I assume, a comfortable enough financial situation to do it, and is teaching his family the same kind of values that he believes in. G. RICHARD SHELL: Interesting. So there's a-- you can just hold that for a second-- so there's a life where, essentially, the person's already in the next chapter. They're taking the skills that they learned in chapter one. They're applying them differently in chapter two. The second chapter has got a little more purpose, at a spiritual dimension or social purpose, than the first chapter does, and that seems to be working for them. Why number six? AUDIENCE: I feel that he was a nonprofit executive, but before that he was an executive, had great success from the outside and realized that. So for me that was a failure for him initially. He realized that that was a good thing, then he came down to doing what he thought he liked. But I think that by forcing his children to go over there, he is again making the same mistake-- that he did the same mistake in his own life of choosing the wrong part, probably because of outside influence, and he is making that influence happen to his kids. G. RICHARD SHELL: Interesting. So it is often the case that people have this feeling that he's dragging these five children to what will be a family disaster in Africa. I mean, the movie begins when they get there and doesn't work out so well. I think-- I had a very interesting experience with someone who voted number six for this life in Boston. I was doing a Boston Club talk for the Wharton School, and a woman ranked this life number six, and I said why, and she said, my parents were evangelical missionaries, and they dragged us everywhere, and they never paid attention to us. And so, for her, that fantasy was realized in not working out. So for me, I'd moved every year when I was a kid. My dad was in the military, and moving around was just sort of normal to me. So I think kids sometimes do adjust. It just depends on how you see it. But I think that inside-outside thing was an interesting comment on that one. So did we get to them all? I guess we have the stone mason. And the what? AUDIENCE: Tennis player? G. RICHARD SHELL: The tennis player. Let's do the tennis player first. Quick-- tennis player number one? OK. If we can get the mic back here to this young lady in the second from the back row? Pass that on back. And tennis player number six? Anybody? Tennis player number six? OK. AUDIENCE: I think tennis player number one because she had seemed to achieve success in the three main areas. She had excelled in an art or sport-- something where she became the top of her field and had, along with that work, professional success. She had given back to the community by doing a non-profit and she also had succeeded in having a family. And I feel like the negative thing that was mentioned there in terms of her family and work balance is something that is constantly a struggle for almost everyone. I don't know when you would not have that. So yeah, that's why I ranked her. G. RICHARD SHELL: Great. OK. So a trifecta for the tennis pro. Number six? AUDIENCE: She describes her life as a tough life, and that just sounds so sad to me. For someone to have all of this and then to describe their life as tough is like, wow, you're not doing the thing that you want to do. And then she goes on to say that she doesn't get to spend as much time with her children, and children is incredibly important. The fact that she's adopted and all those kind of things, I feel like she's doing something different than what she actually wants to do. G. RICHARD SHELL: Interesting. So it doesn't sound to you as much like a life she's chosen. A lot of people see that life and they see the father teaching the child tennis at the age of five without a whole lot of options on the child's side. And that she's still executing on the talent that she was taught, but maybe not the talent that she would feel the most agency with. So that's another point of view on it. Now, finally, stone mason. Number one for the stone mason? OK. All right. So hand the mic back to this young lady back here. And number six for the stone mason? OK. We've got one in the front. AUDIENCE: Yeah. I thought the stone mason sounded like he had just found a lot of meaning through what he was pursuing, both from his family and having this hands-on profession. And I think-- at least for me, who works in a very data-driven, totally not hands-on profession-- that is a very romantic idea, to create things with their hands. G. RICHARD SHELL: Very appealing. A lot-- see, the stone mason actually gets to touch everything that he makes and see the result of everything he makes, not part of a machine making a big thing-- someone making the whole thing. So the crafts person-- very, very appealing. And of course the family side of the stone mason story is totally integrated, right? I mean, you've got children. He's building homes for the children, and that feels [INAUDIBLE]. Well, let me give-- number six is going to get a chance here in the front. So that's an appealing life for that reason. Why number six? AUDIENCE: I think it was because he doesn't have a lot of broad impact. So I think he's done stuff for his family, which is awesome, but didn't seem like he had impact in his community or the world at large. G. RICHARD SHELL: He's not even on "Stone Mason Weekly" as a cover story, you know? AUDIENCE: Exactly. Exactly. And that he had trouble with money as well. I think when you have a larger family and having trouble with money, there could be other problems there that maybe just haven't come out yet. G. RICHARD SHELL: Yeah. So financial security is certainly a value, and something that most people think about when they think about happiness together. You had a comment? AUDIENCE: Yeah. I think, even though he didn't make the most amount of money out of everyone on this list, he had the most amount of pride. And I thought that that was the immediate word that jumped up to me after reading this is it's the most authentic story. It reminded me of the wise angel who crashed your meeting. And so that life's about good health, meaningful work, and that's exactly what this guy's legacy was about. G. RICHARD SHELL: Yeah. So meaningful work is an interesting concept. My time is up, so I'm going to wrap it up. But I think it's something-- I have a chapter on meaningful work-- and I think you guys at Google seem to have an elevated value on the notion of meaningful work, and integration between work and life. Looking just-- I've never been here before, but looking around your campus, sensing the different things that people are valuing it's just everywhere in evidence-- but I think it's important to realize that meaningful work is not about the work. Meaningful work is about the meaning you bring to the work. And there are people here, I'm sure, who are not enjoying meaningful work, but who look like they are. And the opposite is also true. There may be people who are on the security force or helping with valet parking or doing things that you think aren't all that meaningful. But they may bring meaning to those jobs in a way that is very, very authentic. I like to say that the people who find meaningful work are a legion of the secretly successful. They are not people that you read about. They're not people that you get stories about. They're people who've found success for themselves in the meaning of what they do, in the relationships they have, in their ability to love and be loved. And it's not so clear that the obvious things that we value bring those. I think it's something that everybody brings to the work they do. So I'll leave you with that happy thought that you are in control of the meaning in your work, which means you can make it more meaningful. But you can also recognize that what you thought was meaningful isn't and make a change. Thanks very much for your attention. [APPLAUSE]