When I was writing my first book, I came to terms with my own personal brand of craziness to realize that crazy isn’t always such a bad thing. Over the past five years since You Need to Be a Little Crazy (Kaplan Business, 2003) hit the shelves, tens of thousands of people have either read the book or come to hear me speak. They tell me that they don’t think my brand of crazy is all bad. In fact, I get questions all the time about how I learned to make it through the crazy ups and downs of business with such bounce, and can I help others figure out how to do it, too?

So that’s what I set out to accomplish with this book. The product of my 25 years of experience in business, Bounce! is about developing confidence — and not just any sort of confidence. This is a book about developing bounce, a kind of true business confidence that brings its own special brand of resiliency.

But this is not a book about coming back from failure.

Comeback books have been written many times before. The comeback is romanticized in society and totally overrated. This is a book about accepting failure as a normal part of the process, even when there isn’t something to learn. Failure that offers no real learning value jolts the business belief system. It is time for people to start telling their stories about those failures, which visit us all, without the redemption of any subsequent successes.

That’s how quantitative research always begins — with people telling their stories. Then someone starts writing those stories down. Another person begins to collect data to support or rebut; someone else creates a model, and then the body of predictive results begins to build. But it all begins with people talking.

This book is a blend of personal experiences, famous people’s stories, and firsthand interviews with people who aren’t famous yet.

You will read about well - known people, but more importantly, you will share in the experiences and insights of other businesspeople you have never heard of and probably will never meet. (Mini biographies of the not-so-famous are at the back of the book.) These people have entrusted me to retell their tales so that we all may learn from them. People like these live with you and me under the bell- shaped curve where most of life happens for many of us.

This book is about bounce: the process of bounding back, of moving forward, falling back, and shooting ahead again, and through all that, building up and then drawing on personal reserves of energy. I describe ten building bands—beliefs, tools, and processes that every businessperson can use to develop true business confidence built on resiliency and bounce. You grab these things along the way in your business and life experiences. This book will help you consciously recognize the things that can give you bounce.

When we possess bounce, we are able to move forward from any event, situation, or outcome — good or bad — to the next place where a decision can be made based on the choices currently available to us. We develop the best process we can and then make a clear decision. Bounce allows us to be passionately excited and intensely enthusiastic about our businesses and our lives. Above all, bounce gets us ready for adventure. Of all the wild places I have been in the world, from New York to New Zealand, there is never a ride that can compare to the one that business can provide.

Click here to download Barry's workbook for identifying guideposts and understanding what it will take for you to succeed!

Reprinted with Permission

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