Book excerpt: Outside Influences takes a refreshing stance on life’s journey to address the dynamic forces swirling around outside that affect the direction and ultimate meaning of people’s lives. Life’s journeys are a mosaic of experiences, encounters, interactions, and ideas. What happens on those journeys makes up the stuff of life and determines the outcome of the adventure. But most of what has been written about the journey, life, and success deals only with internal factors people can influence. In Outside Influences, serial entrepreneur Adam Ginsberg finally acknowledges and includes the myriad of outside factors that also contribute to the meaning of people’s lives. Adam shows that the elegant, complex choreography of inside and outside forces is not something to be feared, but something to be acknowledged and understood, with more than sixty catalytic concepts to stimulate thinking, stretch readers’ minds, and help people calibrate the healthy tension between where they are and where they want to be. Not just about gaining plain old success, Outside Influences guides readers to coming to peace with the contradictions so apparent in life. Readers learn to understand what is happening when the idiosyncrasies of the system manifest themselves and appreciate the bounty or cope with the challenges and, ultimately, achieve new levels of success.