Books

Richard is the author of eleven books, including three best sellers, and his books have sold over one million copies. Repacking Your Bags and The Power of Purpose are considered classics in the personal growth field.

Who Do You Want to Be When You Grow Old?

When we were young, adults had to ask us, “What do you want to be when your grow up?”

Now that we’re all grown up, we have to ask ourselves, “Who do you want to be when you grow old?”

That’s the question Who Do You Want to Be When You Grow Old? helps answer. Because everyone is getting old, but not everyone is growing old.

Focusing on growing whole though developing a sense of purpose in later life, Who Do You Want to Be When You Grow Old? explores how purposeful aging is a path to resilience and fulfillment.

The book celebrates the experience of aging through inspiring stories, real-world practices, and provocative questions designed to help readers navigate the path from adulthood to elderhood with choice, curiosity, and courage.

The path of purposeful aging is not a luxury for the few; but, accessible to all and fundamental to health, healing, happiness, and longevity.

Framed by a long conversation between two old friends, Who Do You Want to Be When You Grow Old reconceives aging as a liberating experience, one that enables us to become more authentically the person we always meant to be with each passing year.

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The Power of Purpose, 3rd Edition

To get a life, you need a purpose in life!  Purpose is fundamental to health, healing, and happiness.  Purpose gives us the will not just to live but to live long and well.  The good news is, purpose isn’t a luxury reserved for a gifted few but something each one of us already possesses.  In this new edition of his bestselling classic, legendary personal coach Richard Leider offers brand-new tools and techniques for discovering it.

The third edition has been completely revised and updated – in addition to new stories and examples, it features four new chapters.  “Purpose across the Ages” looks at the three stages purpose can move through during our lives.  “The 24-Hour Purpose Retreat” includes seven mind-opening questions to help you unlock your purpose (and there’s a “default purpose” you can go to if you’re struggling).  “The Purpose Checkup” offers a new tool for periodically evaluating the status of your purpose, just like you do with your finances or your health.

And in “Can Science Explain Purpose?” we learn what researchers are discovering about how an increased sense of purpose can improve our health, healing, happiness, and longevity.

Our purpose is an active expression of the deepest dimension within us.  Leider details a graceful, practical, and ultimately spiritual process for making it central to your life.  This revitalized guide will help you find your reason to get up in the morning and integrate it into everything you do.

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Repacking Your Bags, 3rd Edition

This classic book has shown readers how to develop their own unique vision of the good life – which Leider and Shapiro define as “living in the place you belong, with the people you love, doing the rightwork, on purpose” – and take practical steps to achieve it. Inspired by a spirit of travel and adventure, it uses packing and repacking your bags as a metaphor for deciding what you really need in your journey through life. Why a new edition? Because the world has changed. Technological advances, major economic shifts, longer life spans, and changing social roles are revolutionizing the way we live and work. Today people repeatedly unpack and repack as the inevitable shifts and surprises life has to offer continually unfold. With each step along the way, you must reexamine what has brought you here and continue asking yourself if the choices that have sustained you so far are continuing to do so – or if they’re just weighing you down. Thoroughly revised and reimagined with this lifelong focus in mind, the new edition contains new stories and practices for repacking your four critical “bags” – place, relationship, work, and purpose – as well as a new Repacking Journal for planning your “trip.” Repacking Your Bags reminds all of us to regularly ask why we carry what we do and try to lighten our loads, because the good life is worth striving for at every age.

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Life Reimagined

Are you at a point in your life where you’re asking, “What’s next?” You’ve finished one chapter and you’ve yet to write the next. For many, it happens at midlife, but it can happen at any point. It’s a time for real possibilities and it defines a new phase of life. It’s called Life Reimagined. Life Reimagined, the new book by Richard J. Leider, Founder and Chairman of Inventure, and Alan M. Webber, cofounding editor of Fast Company and former editorial director and managing editor of Harvard Business Review, helps you navigate this next phase of life with choice, curiosity and courage. Life Reimagined helps you: discover your new life possibilities, connect with your sounding board, and take the first step toward change! Are you ready for your Life Reimagined moment? If you’re facing this next phase of life, order the book now or read an excerpt of Life Reimagined here.

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Work Reimagined

It’s the end of work as we know it.  Career paths look nothing like they did in the days before phones got smart.  We work more hours at more jobs for more years than ever.  So it’s vital that we know how to find work that allows us to remain true to our deepest sense of who we are and that connects us to something larger than ourselves – in short, our “calling.”  We all have one, and bestselling authors Richard Leider and David Shapiro can help you uncover it.

Through a unique Calling Card exercise that features a guided exploration of fifty-two “natural preferences” (such as Advancing Ideas, Doing the Numbers, Building Relationships, and Performing Events), Leider and Shapiro give us a new way to uncover our gifts, passions, and values and find work that expresses them.  Along the way they mix in dozens of inspiring stories featuring people who have found, or are in the process of finding, their own callings.

To live the life you imagine, you must continually reimagine the work that makes such a life possible.  Uncovering your calling best enables you to experience fulfillment in all phases of your life.  And here’s the even better news: you’ll never have to work again.  When you choose to do what you are called to do – and you can – then you’re always doing what you want to do.  Work Reimagined offers an enlightening, effective, and entertaining approach to discovering what you were born to do, no matter what age or stage of life you’re in.

** This book received the 2015 Silver Nautilus Award – See the full list of 2015 winners here

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Claiming Your Place at the Fire

If you’re in, or about to enter, “the second half of life,” this practical guide will show you how to claim your rightful place among the “new elders”–men and women who “use the second half of life as an empty canvas, a blank page, a hunk of clay to be crafted on purpose.” Through inspiring stories and thought-provoking exercises, you’ll learn to ask, and answer, four key questions: Who am I? Where do I belong? What do I care about? and What is my purpose? This book provides a new model for vital aging. It shows you how to age successfully by living on purpose.

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Something to Live For

Drawing on ancient and contemporary wisdom, as well as modern research, Richard Leider and David Shapiro provide insightful ways of thinking and being that help us find meaning and purpose in the second half of life. This deeply reflective book uses a safari (referencing a trip the authors took to Africa in 2006) as a metaphor to show how the second half of life can be a journey of discovery. In what may be their most personal book to date, Leider and Shapiro share dozens of moving stories, from both their own experiences and those of their safari companions, that offer sometimes surprising examples of lives well-lived, lives that exemplify the qualities of authenticity and wholeheartedness that they believe are essential to finding meaning and purpose in the second half of life.

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