As soon as you stop wanting something, you get it!

The paradox of entrepreneurship: “As soon as you stop wanting something, you get it”

It used to really annoy me when I started with my first boot-strapped start-up and people with money said “It’s not about the money”. I would think “It’s easy for you to say that, because you’ve already got the money.”

It was only later in life I understood what they really meant. It’s like a footballer saying “It’s not about the ball.” The footballer who is always chasing the ball isn’t welcome on the team - and rarely gets the ball because it moves too fast.

The footballer who thinks “It’s not about the ball”, and knows it’s about positioning himself to be of greatest value to the team, is the one who constantly gets the ball passed to him.

If you’re in business chasing the money, you will rarely get it. If you’re positioning yourself to be of value to your customers, they’ll happily pass you their money.

If you're constantly needing help, you will rarely get it. If you’re positioning yourself to be of value to team members and partners, they’ll happily pass you their time and skills.

So whenever you want something, whether it is support, resources, connections, or money, don’t chase what you want but position yourself to be the natural choice for those who have these things to pass them to you.

Once you receive, pass it on.

“Only by giving are you able to receive more than you already have.” ~ Jim Rohn

If The World Were A Village of 100 People...

Our world population of 7 billion as a village of 100 people:

Here are our mother tongues:

12 speak Chinese
5 speak Spanish
5 speak Hindi or Bengali
5 speak English
73 speak the other 6,000 languages

Here is our wealth:

1 owns 40% of the wealth
6 own half the wealth
51 live on less than $2 a day

Here are our religious beliefs:

33 are Christian
22 are Muslim
14 are Hindu
7 are Buddhists
2 are Atheists
(And 33 believe in witchcraft, ghosts and aliens)

Here are our homes:

51 live in cities and can’t see the Milky Way
25 live in substandard housing or no home at all

And:

7 can’t read or write
10 have no job
11 have a vehicle
13 don’t have safe drinking water
14 are on Facebook
64 don’t have Internet access

If you woke up each day in this village, and knew each of the other 99 villagers personally, what would you do differently?

“I can do things you cannot, you can do things I cannot. Together we can do great things.” ~ Mother Teresa

What’s the price when you fail?

What’s the price when you fail?

This week, Elon Musk watched as his latest attempt at landing his Space X Falcon 9 rocket went wrong, ice froze one of the legs and the entire rocket toppled over and exploded.

That’s another $60 million up in smoke. What was Elon’s reaction?

First, he tweeted “Well, at least the pieces were bigger this time!”

Then, he posted a video of the explosion on Instagram.

And finally, he posted yesterday “My best guess for 2016: ~ 70% landing success rate (so still a few more RUDs to go), then hopefully improving to ~90% in 2017.”

“RUD” stands for “Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly” which is another way of saying “it blew up”…

What can we learn from Elon happily blowing up his rockets?

Most people would see this as an expensive failure, but Elon is a master of learning by failing, and he expects to fail epically and often.

It doesn’t cost Elon to fail as he builds it into his business model. Each Falcon rocket is expected to be lost anyway if he wasn’t testing how to land them. This one had already done its job of delivering an ocean monitoring satellite in orbit, which had already paid for the rocket.

This year, there are another 10 to 20 falcon rockets scheduled for take-off, each already paid for by the companies and governments paying Elon to send their cargos to space. With revenue secure, he focuses his time on how to test new innovations (like landing the rockets back safely).

We’ve moved from the industrial age where product development and testing took place BEFORE delivery, to the technological age where product development and testing takes place DURING delivery.

How can you increase the testing you can do? When in front of customers? When serving your customers? When delivering an existing product to develop the next product?

In the old paradigm, it was easy to dismiss testing as being too costly.
In the new paradigm, it’s NOT testing that’s far more expensive.

When Elon finally works out how to return his rockets each time, he’ll be saving himself over a billion dollars of lost rockets each year - and he’ll be able to cost his trips to be far ahead of the competition.

You don’t need to be a billionaire like Elon to test like him.
But you do need to test like Elon to be a billionaire like him.

Failing isn’t where the price is. Failing is where the profit is.

“If things aren’t failing, you are not innovating enough.” ~ Elon Musk

Think Big - Dream Big - Earn Big

John Pemberton invented Coca-Cola when he was 55 years old.

Ray Kroc bought McDonald’s when he was 59 years old.

Colonel Sanders began franchising KFC at 62 years old.

Tim & Nina Zagat were 51 yr old lawyers when they wrote the 1st Zagat guide.

Charles Darwin was 50 years old before he wrote “On the Origin of Species”.

Julia Child was also 50 years olf when she wrote her first cookbook.

Henry Ford was 45 years old when he created the Model T car.

Microfinance pioneer, Muhammad Yunus, launched the Grameen Bank at 43 years old.

Samuel L. Jackson was 43 years old before he had his first hit film, “Jungle Fever”.

It’s never too late to succeed.
It’s always too early to quit.

“You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.”
~ C.S. Lewis

15 year old Canadian student, William Gadoury, hit the news for discovering an entire ancient Mayan City - by looking at the stars

Can you see order in chaos? Can you hear the signal in the noise?

Today 15 year old Canadian student, William Gadoury, hit the news for discovering an entire ancient Mayan City - by looking at the stars.

3 years ago, William got interested in Mayan cities when he learned about the end of the Mayan Calendar in 2012. As he began learning he said “I didn’t understand why the Maya built their cities far away from rivers, in remote areas, or in the mountain.”

So he began studying the patterns of the cities, and then studied the patterns of 22 Mayan star constellations. He saw the links, and when he superimposed the constellations on a map of the Yucatan Peninsula on Google Earth, they linked perfectly with 117 ancient Mayan cities.

He also found the brightest stars linked to the largest cities.

Despite being only 15 years old, William is the first person to make the correlation.

William then looked at a 23rd constellation of three stars, and found only two cities. So he guessed there must be a city in the third spot.

What do you do if you think you’ve found a city? He contacted the Canadian Space Agency, who then got satellites from NASA and JAXA, the Japanese space agency.

Scientists were blown away when they found evidence of a previously un-discovered large, 86m high pyramid and thirty buildings exactly where William predicted.

Not only was it a new city, based on its size some experts predict that it could be one of the five largest.

As Canadian Space Agency’s Daniel de Lisle says, “Linking the positions of the stars to the location of a lost city along with the use of satellite images on a tiny territory to identify the remains buried under dense vegetation is quite exceptional.”

William’s discovery is now being published in a scientific journal and he will present his findings at Brazil’s International Science Fair next year.

Also, Mexican archaeologists have promised William he can join their expedition to the area to verify the find. William says “It would be the culmination of three years of work and the dream of a lifetime.”

If 15 year old William can discover an entire city, what could you find by looking more closely?

When I met Richard Branson on Necker Island last year, a friend asked him “Do you analyse data or use your gut when making decisions.” Richard replied, “It’s not really one or the other. I see patterns. If things fit, I do it.”

Science, exploration, art, music, sport - and entrepreneurship - all share a common theme: Patterns.

When, like William, you see the patterns, you can fill in the gap - Whether it’s your next step, a new innovation, or a new, ancient city.

“Learn how to see. Realize that everything is connected to everything else.” ~ Leonardo Da Vinci

Winners never quit and quitters never win

In my 20's I would ask mentors what they thought the most important key to success was. They all had different opinions. Then one gave me the very best answer. He said "All the most successful people have many differences, but they only have one thing in common. They never gave up. The ones who gave up you don't see. You only see the ones who never gave up. So as long as you never give up, no matter what, you'll be fine."

"Winners never quit and quitters never win." - Vince Lombardi

One Step To History - By Winston Churchill

What one small step you take today could lead to a multi-million dollar chain reaction? That’s what happened to Susan Wojcicki when she was 30 years old: “I had just got out of business school and bought a house. So I needed to get some renters in order to help pay the mortgage...”

So she rented our her garage to two Stanford students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who used it to start up their new company, Google.

Susan remembers the first year, with many “late nights together in the garage eating pizza and M&Ms, where (Larry and Sergey) talked to me about how their technology could change the world."

They finally convinced her to join as Employee No.18 and their first marketing manager, when she was four months pregnant. First job? Relocate them all to a proper office.

Called the “Mom at Google”, Susan was the first in the team to have a baby, and her “family first” philosophy led to Google topping the ‘Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For’ list.

The “family” grew, literally, with Sergey Brin marrying Susan’s sister, Anne, and having two kids. Susan herself had five kids. All while growing the marketing side of Google.

In charge of products, it was Susan who came up with the idea of Adsense, which grew to become 97% of Google’s revenue within the next 10 years. That earned Susan the nickname “The Money.”

She then focused at video, only to find a new start-up, Youtube, was growing much faster than Google video.

While working out what to do to compete, Susan stumbled on a Youtube video of two boys in China lip-syncing to the Backstreet Boys. She recalls “That was the video that made me realize that 'Wow, people all over the world can create content, and they don’t need to be in a studio.”

Instead of trying to compete, Susan convinced Larry and Sergey to buy Youtube, and six months later Google bought Youtube for $1.65 billion.

In February 2014, Susan became the CEO of Youtube, and today she is worth $300 million.

What began with a simple decision to rent out her garage has led Susan on a journey that has included being named No.1 on the Adweek 50 list in 2013, being called “The most important person in advertising” and “The most powerful woman on the Internet” by TIME in 2015.

And for Susan, the journey is still just beginning. As she says, “Google is fascinating, and the book isn't finished. I'm creating, living, building, and writing those chapters.”

Now it’s your turn. If Susan can do it (while raising five kids) you can too.

Take a step forward today.

Any step.

There’s no guarantee it will lead to the same magical journey that Susan has been on.

But there’s no guarantee it won’t, either.