Start Up Hopeful? Here's 5 Lessons I learned from 4 Famous Well-Known Entrepreneurs (And 1 Not-So-Well-Known)

Whether you're looking to be the next start-up darling, progress your career, or just do the best you can with the life you've been given, I think some of the best lessons can be learnt from those who are out there and smashing life. 

I've read a lot about people I look up to, and I thought I'd share some of the most important lessons I've learnt from the lives of some incredible humans...

1. Richard Branson

Brans has gone a little quiet in the last few years, but who cares when he still gets to boast an estimated US$5.2 billion net worth, a multinational conglomerate ‘Virgin Group’ comprising over 400 companies, knighthood, and a casual island.   

  “To me, business isn’t about wearing suits or pleasing stockholders. It’s about being true to yourself, your ideas, and focusing on the essentials.”  

From Richard I learned that shit, business can get real serious real fast, and you can’t base your success around slowly ripping apart your own character until you become nothing but a soulless bot for the greedy big boys (or worse – you become one of those big boys).    

We all want some version of our own idea of success, but what Richard taught me is that as soon as it becomes all about that success, you’re doing something wrong. Stay true to your values, respect the people you work with, and above all, do the right thing by the lovely people you’re offering your business. Branson’s life, Virgin’s story, and the whole company was built entirely around the core value of looking after people. And he’s not the only one – you’ll find all the amazing entrepreneurs and magnates mentioned here have fortunes originating from this very idea.   

 

If you’re going to make money, what better way to do it than by making others happy (and enjoying yourself along the way).  

2. Steve Jobs

Steve is remembered in conflicting ways – he was not nice; he had a very capricious demeanour; he lied to himself and to others a lot – but it’s undeniable that he stood at the forefront of absolute market disruption and revolution in the industries of personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing.   

That man really did put a ‘dent’ in our universe. And the biggest thing he taught me was that if I wanted, I could put a dent in it too.   

The lifelong lesson that Steve taught me was that if I want to change the world, and I mean really change the world, I can.  

If you haven’t watched this speech already, watch it. If you have, watch it again, and remind yourself that honestly, if you want to do the BIG stuff, there’s nothing stopping you.  

3. Elon Musk

Okay, I love Elon. You love Elon. We all love Elon. I could write a 10,000 word essay on why Elon is killing the game, but I’ll save that for another day. For today, we’ll just say that Elon is so great he has his lesson broken up into two:  

• Lesson uno: Have a greater mission.
  • Okay, so this is part of the reason we all love Elon. It’s that he’s had this amazing long-term vision for the world since he was a wee freshman at college.  
  • Elon has always been thinking about the future, and since the very beginning has been purposefully ploughing away to move towards this vision of a sustainable environment here on Earth, and becoming a multiplanetary species on Mars.  
• Lesson due: Sometimes you need to trailblaze, even if it don't look pretty.
  • As of 2016, there are now countless companies (car-focused and otherwise) investing serious dollars into electric cars.  
  • But the technology behind electric cars has been there for a long time. Until Elon came forward with Tesla and really started to scare all these lazy, established companies, nobody bothered to go there.   
  • How tragic that these companies, with all their resources and financial backing, just could not make that leap toward a desperately needed product that we now view as not only the most obvious, but the sexiest next move in car transportation.   
  • And the same is now happening in household energy consumption with his takeover of SolarCity and his recently revealed Gigafactory. Again, Musk has taken on the pioneering role of pushing forward an industry – that has really been struggling to get off its feet for some time now – in a stirring fashion.  

So the take-home messages for me from Musk definitely revolve around first this idea of having a greater vision and purpose, and sticking to this.  

Following on from that – do something new, or improve something old. You don’t have to go out and start up a new high-tech airbus company that is going to produce self-flying, commercial battery-powered airplanes, but you should think about what greater value you’re adding to this world through your company. We have a lot of environmental, consumption-based, greed-induced problems in this world, many caused by companies looking to maximize short-term profits and consumers not caring about the effect their buying habits are having on the world. And honestly, it’s frustrating seeing so many companies created purely to carbon-copy another firm that has had some recent success.    

Do something new, or improve something old.   

4. Oprah Winfrey

Awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2013, Winfrey is estimated to have a net worth of US $3.1 billion, and has come a looong way from poverty-stricken beginnings in rural Mississippi.    

I’ll admit I’ve never been a massive Oprah fan, and have only watched bits and pieces of her show and other journalist stints, but this video really spoke to me:  

Like my own goddess watching from above, Oprah made me understand that there really are no mistakes.  

5. Ruben Gonzalez

You may know of Ruben Gonzalez, you may not. Ruben Gonzalez is a four-time Olympian, an author, and a motivational speaker. Ruben Gonzalez, to me, represents an industry I have very mixed feelings about – the self-help industry.    

I don’t have anything against Gonzalez, but when I saw his book, “The Inner Game of Success – How to Condition Your Mind to Win More in Everything You Do”, sitting on my mum’s desk as probably the 4,532nd self-help book she’s read, I felt a little disappointed by a situation I’ve seen all too often with people I know.   

Without sounding too harsh, I really just couldn’t get my head wrapped around why my mum feels that she needs to be told ‘how to condition her mind to win more’ by some no-name Olympian that managed to attend the Winter Olympics four times without coming close to placing.    

All I’ll say is that for anyone looking to start up a business, progress in their job, or help themselves in any area of life, do not get sucked into the self-help web of avoidance, contradiction, and selling.    

If something like self-help reading works for you, that’s great.
But be very aware that oftentimes, self-help authors are just trying to market to you their abstract ideas that haven’t really been backed up by the sciences, or even by their own personal experiences. Just be careful what you spend your time reading, and give yourself a benchmark of who’s advice you really want to listen to (i.e. do you want to learn how to win at things by someone who didn’t win four times in a row at their one so-called area of expertise?).

That's it for me today, folks. Hope you enjoyed and found something in here to help your journey!

Alexa xx