Billionaire life wisdom ♥
Love | Principles | Commitment
Last week, we talked about Paying Ourselves First and our money stories. This week, I would like to offer the perspective of three people who have an abundance of money as billionaires: Steve Jobs, Ray Dalio, and Elon Musk.
I don't know about you but if someone has succeeded beyond belief, I cast an eye on what they wrote or an ear on what they say...
Inspiring and famous — Ray Dalio maybe less so — those three names inspire respect for their achievements and today will share some important life lessons.
Back in June 2005, Steve Jobs’ addressed the Stanford graduation ceremony. A YouTube video watched 38 million times, I will below synthesize only a few of Steve Jobs’ words for your benefit and I would certainly invite you to watch the video in full.
Jobs told three stories from his life.
1. Connecting the dots
His biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, who wanted him to be adopted by parents who had graduated from college. Learning that the adoptive parents had never been to college, it is only reluctantly that Steve Jobs’ biological mother accepted to sign the document with the promise that he would someday go to college.
17 years later, he did go to college. After six months spending his working-class parents’ savings on tuition, he decided to drop out as he couldn’t see the value in it. He had no idea yet of what he wanted to do but trusted that it would all work out OK.
As he dropped out he could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest him, and begin taking those that looked interesting. He didn’t have a dorm room, so he slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, he returned Coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and he would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. And much of what he stumbled into by following his curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on.
Like, for example, the calligraphy course he took that taught him about fonts, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. None of this had even a hope of any practical application until 10 years later when he designed the first Macintosh computer. It all came back. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If he had never dropped in on that course in college, personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do.
You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. 10 years later for him. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You must trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let him down, and it has made all the difference.
2. Love and loss
Steve found what he loved early. At 20 he started Apple in his parents’ garage. He worked hard, to make Apple a $2 billion company with over 4,000 employees in 10 years. But as Apple released the Macintosh and he turned 30, he got fired. Fired from the company he started! What had been the focus of his entire adult life was gone. Devastating.
Not knowing what to do for a while he thought of running away from Silicon Valley but he still loved what he did. He decided to start over.
Turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to him. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. Steve Job entered one of the most creative periods of my life.
During the next five years, he started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar. NeXT was bought by Apple and is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. Pixar went on to create the world’s first computer-animated feature film, Toy Story, and became the most successful animation studio in the world.
None of this would have happened if he hadn’t been fired from Apple. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. The only thing that kept him going was that he loved what he did. You have got to find what you love. Work fills a large part of our life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.
3.Death
“If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” This quote made an impression on him when he was 17, and since then for 33 years, he asked himself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” A “No” for too many days in a row implies a need for change.
Remembering that he would be dead soon was the most important tool he ever encountered to help him make the big choices. Everything falls away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. So, there is no reason not to follow your heart.
A year prior to the speech Steve Jobs was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. His doctor told him he had no longer than three to six months to live and advised him to go home, “get his affairs in order”. In other words, say his goodbyes.
It turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that was curable with surgery. It saved him (only for a time as 6 years later he died from it)
No one wants to die but no one has ever escaped it. That is as it should be, as Death is the single best invention of Life in the form of an agent of change. It clears out the old to make way for the new.
Our time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.
As he concluded:
“Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.”
QUESTION…
If today were the last day of your life, would you want to do what you are about to do today?