Before he was an award-winning Wharton professor, Richard Shell was a lost young man. He had defied his father, a U.S. Marine Corps General, by deciding that a life in the military wasn’t for him. It was the Vietnam era and Shell turned in his draft card to become a pacifist. But now he was lost. His life was no longer narrated for him. After a few years wandering from job-to-job, he set out to travel the world with his life savings of $3,000. Traveling from monastery to hostel, in country after country, reading philosophy, doing drugs, and trying to “find himself,” he succeeded only in finding rock bottom. Not everyone can clearly identify the exact moment they hit the bottom, but professor Shell can. It was the day he contracted hepatitis and passed out on the side of a road in Kabul. He says, “Something shifted in my life. I had pushed myself to my psychological and physical limits and had ended up alone, filthy, sick, and no closer to finding my direction than I was a year earlier” (p. 5).
It would take Shell many years to finally find his true productive purpose: teaching. As a senior faculty member at Wharton School of Business, he created the popular course “The Literature of Success: Ethical and Historical Perspectives.” His book, , is a wonderful condensation of this course. It takes the reader through thousands of years of “success literature” (as he identifies the genre) from Plato and Aristotle down to Covey and Gladwell.
Springboard is broken into two parts, both designed to be a guide for the reader. The goal is to answer for oneself two big questions: What is success? How will I achieve it?
I am biased towards one of these perspectives and could easily argue that we are already moving toward the future it depicts, and that the other worldview is critically flawed and built on a systemic rejection of reality, but I won’t go into which is which, as that would actually step on the broader point I want to make here.
In my experience, non-liberal cultural critics spend a lot of time complaining about how few works of art, particularly film & television productions, express ideas that align with their worldviews. And they’re right. Most producers and artists in Hollywood don’t really like many ideas that fall outside the narrow confines of cocktail party-progressivism. Movies with conservative or even libertarian themes don’t get made that often.
I won’t mince words with you: I hate movie theatres, and I hate myself for it. I don’t know how it happens to me, but I become some cynical old curmudgeon when my film-buff of a husband asks if we can go see the latest flick, and it’s quite a visceral response. But it wasn’t always this way. I remember quite often going with friends to the movies and seeing big blockbusters for the first time on the big screen: 
Netflix has turned a movie theater into a large living room with an even larger cover charge. And it’s a real double-edged sword, because I love Netflix. I love knowing that I can access films (a lot of them 
And the film before that? 
But let’s focus on books. That’s what lately.
3 – Are you willing to invest your own money? True, Amazon charges you nothing for putting your book up for sale. But unless you’re also a talented graphic designer who also possesses the rare skill of being able to objectively edit your own work, you’re going to need to engage the professional services of freelancers. Be ready to shell out hundreds of dollars for editing, and at least another hundred (probably more) for a quality cover. And then you’ll probably want to set aside some money for marketing, too.
Then college happens (if such the route is chosen) and we start seeking internships. We strive for Hollywood because that’s where it all happens. The fact that we don’t actually realize what Hollywood is at this point is moot. We just want to be there. We want to get our hands dirty and start building that resume. So we dabble for a summer or a semester in the illusion that is the glamorous Hollywood life. It’s our first time experiencing “the real world,” even though we have no idea what it’s really like when we’re still under the academia’s protection. We return home, telling our friends that we had the time of our lives (because at the wise, intuitive age of 21, we probably did) and that we can’t wait to graduate and go back.
This independent attitude isn’t new, but with so many more young filmmakers entering the industry, I feel like there’s more promotion of the gold rush mentality, rather than the idea that you can carve out your own small segment of the industry and happily operate without constantly trying to get noticed by Hollywood.
