Reading Room

Succeed On Your Own Terms

Many books offering career or personal success advice exist, they’re a popular genre and a mainstay of the business bookshop world.  The quality varies widely, and many of them seem to re-heat the advice of believing in yourself, setting goals, becoming single minded, not letting others knock your confidence and always be looking for new opportunities.

That advice isn’t bad, but it implies that success looks the same for everyone and there’s one true shining path to success.  That’s simply not true.  Different people define success differently, and they go about achieving it in different ways.

Succeed On Your Own Terms understands this concept and explores the differing characteristics in people which have led them to success in the usual suspects of business, sports and politics as well as more unusual examples such as music, civil rights campaigning and survival in extreme circumstances. 

The personal nature of the stories included in the book lends them real pathos, and there’s as much to learn from the Hells Angel, ex-convict anti-smoking campaigner in California as there is from the CEO of Lloyds TSB in Scotland.

The book encourages each reader to think about themselves, what they are good at, what they enjoy, and how they can make the most of those strengths, whilst enjoying their life, an element often ignored in success manuals which focus solely on financial measures of success.

There’s a helpful checklist to get you started on thinking about how you can succeed on your terms and a link to a psychologically robust online assessment that will further enhance your understanding of yourself, your strengths and your drivers.

Succeed On Your Own Terms works well to help people do just that, but it’s also a reminder to employers that people are different, they expect different things, they want different things and have differing contributions to make.  The employer that understands the way the new psychological contract with employees works is more able to hire, motivate and retain great people.

Claudine McClean
T: +44 (0) 1789 734333
E: claudinem@predaptive.com