Barbara Sher Biography Quotes 17 Report mistakes

Overview

Barbara Sher (1935, 2020) was an American author, speaker, and career coach whose practical, community-centered approach helped millions clarify dreams and turn them into concrete projects. Best known for her classic book Wishcraft and for the idea that isolation is the dream-killer, she turned self-help into a collaborative craft, replacing vague affirmations with step-by-step plans, peer support, and accountability. Over five decades, she built a global network of workshops, public television specials, Success Teams, and online communities that made her methods accessible to people at every age and stage of life.

Early Life and Influences

Born in 1935 in the United States, Sher came of age in an era that prized linear careers and narrow specialization. She kept noticing the opposite in people around her: abundant interests, unfinished projects brimming with potential, and a hunger for practical help rather than pep talks. Those observations shaped her conviction that most obstacles are logistical and social, not personal failings. Family was a steady anchor in her life; she often spoke of how responsibilities to loved ones coexist with the need to pursue one's own ambitions, and she carried that balance into her work while raising her two sons.

Breakthrough With Wishcraft

Sher's breakthrough came with Wishcraft: How to Get What You Really Want, created in collaboration with writer Annie Gottlieb. The book became a touchstone because it offered a map from desire to delivery: naming a wish, envisioning a result, reverse-engineering the steps, and enlisting allies. Where many advice books urged readers to change their attitudes, Sher insisted that most people already cared enough; what they needed was structure, resources, and company. Wishcraft launched her as a public figure and gave language and tools to readers who had long lacked both.

Success Teams and the Idea Party

To turn reading into results, Sher invented Success Teams, small groups that meet regularly to help members define goals, break them into actions, and trade favors, contacts, and encouragement. She also popularized the Idea Party, a lively problem-solving format in which one person states a dream and an obstacle, and everyone else brainstorms ways around it, starting with the words I could help by.... These formats were built on her core insight: nobody succeeds alone. The teams spread internationally and were stewarded by a loose network of facilitators, clients, and devoted readers who credit the method with changing careers and lives.

Books and Key Ideas

After Wishcraft, Sher published a series of influential books that explored different stages of personal change. I Could Do Anything If I Only Knew What It Was helped readers locate the right dream before committing to it. Live the Life You Love offered ten practical lessons for building daily structures that support long-term goals. It's Only Too Late If You Don't Start Now reframed midlife as a second edition of adulthood, rich with experimentation. Refuse to Choose! introduced her concept of Scanners, people with many passions who resist choosing one path. She argued that Scanners are not unfocused; they are multi-aptitude creators who need modular careers, rotating projects, and permission to design lives that fit the way their minds work.

Teaching, Media, and Public Presence

Sher's workshops mixed humor, warm candor, and precise assignments. She brought her methods to wider audiences through public television specials and later through a widely shared TEDx talk built around the line, Isolation is the dream-killer, not your attitude. Her programs attracted people at crossroads: recent graduates, mid-career professionals, artists, entrepreneurs, and those returning to the workforce. Alongside editors and producers who helped carry her work to print and screen, she relied on a close circle of colleagues who organized retreats, ran Success Teams, moderated forums, and kept her emphasis on community alive. Her sons were an enduring presence in her private life, and she often acknowledged the practical, emotional, and logistical support of family and longtime collaborators who kept her schedule and projects moving.

Method and Practice

Sher's method favored small, repeatable actions over grand reinventions. She taught readers to state a wish in plain language, translate it into a target, identify the next two or three steps, and create deadlines and allies. Her checklists included everything from lists of potential helpers to scripts for asking for assistance. She normalized fear by treating it as an inevitable companion to growth and countered perfectionism by celebrating tiny wins. She believed that gifts are revealed in what people cannot stop doing, and that well-structured help turns those gifts into outcomes. This philosophy made her work unusually empathetic to caregivers, immigrants, second-career professionals, and the self-taught, who often needed strategies more than sermons.

Community and the People Around Her

Sher's world was populated by readers who became students, students who became facilitators, and facilitators who became partners in spreading the work. Annie Gottlieb's early collaboration helped frame the clear, conversational voice that made Wishcraft so durable. Over the years, producers, editors, and event organizers joined her circle, shaping televised specials and large-scale workshops. Most of all, participants in Success Teams and Idea Parties formed a living archive of her approach, exchanging leads and favors across cities and countries. Family remained central; she often referenced the joys and pressures of parenting and the ways that real life shapes a dream's timeline. That mixture of kin, colleagues, and community gave her philosophy both credibility and reach.

Later Years and Passing

Sher continued to write, teach, and mentor into her later years, adapting her programs to retreats and online courses so that distance was no barrier to participation. She remained a vivid presence: witty, plainspoken, and allergic to mystification. She died in 2020 at the age of 84. Tributes from former clients, friends, and collaborators emphasized the same themes: she saw possibilities where others saw excuses; she made introductions that unlocked careers; and she left people with tools they could use the next morning.

Legacy

Barbara Sher's legacy lives in her books, in the vocabulary she gave to Scanners and late bloomers, and in the lasting infrastructure of Success Teams that continue without her. Her central insight endures: ambition thrives in company. By treating dreams as projects and people as each other's best resources, she closed the gap between hope and habit for countless readers. The most important people in her story remain the ones she assembled around every table and screen: family who steadied her, collaborators like Annie Gottlieb who sharpened her work, and the vast community of allies who proved, again and again, that help is a strategy, not a weakness.