![]() I think the biggest myth about success is that money makes you happy. And I think that's been kind of a pleasant surprise for me. Now I do, and so, from that, you really can get a better sense of what, of where you fit in this world. I would say when I was 25 years old, I hardly knew myself. And I think knowing yourself has been a very pleasant surprise for me. And you know what you can do well, and what you can't. And you know where you fit in, and you know where you don't fit in. And you know what you like and you know what you don't like. As you grow older, as you grow more advanced, you just become much more comfortable in your skin, at least I have. So, when you're in your twenties you're, you're struggling, you're grappling with everything it can seem like a very scary place. One of the biggest surprises just about growing older and growing more advanced in your career is how much more confident you become. In your career you might have only three or four men- true, three or four true mentors. So, it's not about collecting a bunch of mentors, it's not about how the more you have, the better you'll be, it's about having some deep, deep connections. You have to have a very deep connection with someone. I give that person as much as they give me or maybe they give me more, but I give them something as well. But mentoring is really about having that organic connection, and being able to feed off of each other. They were just different people who were able to give me advice at the right times, and who I've become friends with for 10, 20 years or so. They weren't other journalists, they weren't editors. And some of them, some of the people weren't even related in my field. I could probably count on one hand the number of true mentors I've really had. I think mentorship is more about finding an organic connection with a few people who will help you tremendously in your career. I think there's a big misnomer about mentoring which is that you have to have a lot of mentors in order to have a successful career. So that to me is emblematic of what I hear a lot from CEOs which is, either they failed or they nearly failed, and they turned that into a life life lesson for themselves, and they changed the way they looked at things, and grew their next level to success. So, he took that near failure, that mistake, and he reorganized his whole company, reorganized his whole business model, turned the model into everyday low pricing which is what Men's Warehouse became known for, and grew that company into two and a half billion dollars in sales. And he said that whole experience which was just mindblowingly painful to him, he said that whole experience taught him that his business model wasn't working. So he went around the country looking for more money, was looking to fundraise, only needed half a million dollars to raise money, or to save his company, and he almost got that money from another retail executive but that retail executive pulled out at the last moment, and so, finally, the person who bailed him out was his mother who had borrowed that money from someone else. There was an oil crisis in the 1980s, and his company, which had been running for 10 years, and was profitable was suddenly on the verge of bankruptcy. There was a big economic crisis in the state that he was, that his company was based in, it was in Texas. We did an interview one time with George Zimmer, the former CEO of Men's Warehouse, and he told me that, about a time when he was running his company. So, I think the most heartening things that I've heard are stories from very successful people telling me about the mistakes that they made or what happened when they were fired. So, I find actually some comfort in that because the worst thing is to know that, that the only way to be successful is to be successful all the time. ![]() ![]() How many of them failed, how many of them made mistakes, how many of them were fired, how many of them were unhappy in their jobs. One of the most heartening things that I find when I talk to really successful people is how many of them had no idea what they were doing in their careers.
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