"As a senior faculty member at the Wharton School of Business, I am best known for my work in negotiation, persuasion, and interpersonal influence. [… ] Given what I do now, most people are surprised to learn that I did not start my my academic career until I was thirty-seven and spent most of my twenties unemployed, much of the time deeply uncertain about who I was and what I wanted to do. But I count those years as the most important of my life. It was during that intense period of living with failure that I gained my first insights into the true meaning of success."