Welcome to Nobody Told Me. I'm Laura Owens and I'm Jan Black. Would you like to be more successful? Can you define what success really means to you? And do you have a plan to

achieve it? For some help with those questions, we talk with our guest, Wharton Professor

G. Richard Schell, who's an award-winning author and the creator of a very popular Wharton School

course on the meaning of success. He's also developed a course on success for Coursera, the world's leading

online learning platform. Professor, thank you so much for joining us. My pleasure. Thank you for

inviting me. You wrote a very popular book called Springboard, launching your personal search for success.

Why has the search for success fascinated you? Well, that's a great question. Myself, I think,

you know, are trying to help people with questions that I ask in a very deep way and a very

persistent way earlier in my life when I was in my 20s and early 30s. Of course, I'm still asking

them, but it was more of a crisis back then.

And I think that a lot of people experience, especially in the years sort of between college and marriage,

the sort of Odyssey years in the 20s and early 30s, a kind of nagging thought that they have to get their lives right and that if they are not right, there's something wrong with them. And it tends to cause a fair amount of angst and sometimes

even depression and a real sense of, am I in the right place? Who am I? What am I doing? And since I went through that myself,

I really feel like it's an opportunity for me at this stage of the game, I'm a little further down the

road, to reach back and help people answer those questions. You know, most success books are by

people who think they're successful,

and then they say, do it the way I did it. My book is really how do you define success,

how would you achieve it with your unique capabilities and your unique perspectives on life?

So it's more of a way of helping people ask and answer the question that it is kind of telling them how to do it. We'd love to hear more about your background because you have

such an interesting and inspiring story. Sure. Well, I was raised in a military family. So my dad

was a general in the Marines. My grandfathers were both in the military. My sister married, a military officer. I was destined to be a military career. And really the only question that I was asking when I was in high school was, should I go to West Point or Naval Academy? But then as I got a little closer to the college sort of decision, I began

realizing that I might want to go to a actual college, not an academy. But they gave me a chance

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