12 rich, powerful people share their surprising definitions of success

Billionaire Richard Branson believes success is about happiness.

Though Sir Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin Group, is worth some $5 billion, the Virgin founder equates success with personal fulfillment.

"Too many people measure how successful they are by how much money they make or the people that they associate with," he wrote on LinkedIn. "In my opinion, true success should be measured by how happy you are."

Huffington Post co-founder Arianna Huffington says that money and power aren't enough.

Huffington says that while we tend to think of success along two metrics — money and power — we need to add a third.

"To live the lives we truly want and deserve, and not just the lives we settle for, we need a Third Metric," she told Forbes' Dan Schawbel, "a third measure of success that goes beyond the two metrics of money and power, and consists of four pillars: well-being, wisdom, wonder, and giving."

Together, those factors help you to take care of your psychological life and truly be successful, or as the title of her 2014 book, "Thrive," suggests.

Billionaire investor Mark Cuban says you don't need money to be successful.

"Shark Tank" regular Cuban offers a surprisingly simple take on success.

In an interview with Steiner Sports, he said:

"To me, the definition of success is waking up in the morning with a smile on your face, knowing it's going to be a great day. I was happy and felt like I was successful when I was poor, living six guys in a three-bedroom apartment, sleeping on the floor." 

Legendary basketball coach John Wooden said it's a matter of satisfaction.

With 620 victories and 10 national titles, Wooden is the winningest coach in college basketball history.

But his definition of success was more about competing with yourself than the other guy:

"Peace of mind attained only through self-satisfaction in knowing you made the effort to do the best of which you're capable," he said in a 2001 TED Talk. 

Legendary investor Warren Buffett values relationships above all else.

With a net worth of $77.4 billion, Buffett is just about the wealthiest person in the world, second only to Bill Gates. And yet his definition of success has nothing to do with money or fame.

As James Altucher writes, the chairman of Berkshire Hathaway once told shareholders at an annual meeting: "I measure success by how many people love me." 

Acclaimed author Maya Angelou believed success is about enjoying your work.

The late, great poet laureate, who passed away at 86 in 2014, left behind stacks of books and oodles of aphorisms.

Her take on success is among the best: "Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it."

Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates believes it's about making an impact on society.

Gates is the wealthiest person in the world, with a net worth of $86 billion, But to him, success is about relationships and leaving behind a legacy.

In a Reddit AMA, Gates took a tip from Warren Buffett when asked about his definition of success:

"Warren Buffett has always said the measure [of success] is whether the people close to you are happy and love you."

He added: "It is also nice to feel like you made a difference — inventing something or raising kids or helping people in need." 

Spiritual teacher Deepak Chopra believes success is a matter of constant growth.

The physician and author says it's a matter of continual growth.

"Success in life could be defined as the continued expansion of happiness and the progressive realization of worthy goals," Chopra writes in "The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success."

President Barack Obama aims to change people's lives.

Obama once held the highest office in the land — but he doesn't equate power with success.

At the 2012 Democratic National Convention, First Lady Michelle Obama told the audience that her husband "started his career by turning down high-paying jobs and instead working in struggling neighborhoods where a steel plant had shut down."

She went on:

"For Barack, success isn't about how much money you make. It's about the difference you make in people's lives." 

Inventor Thomas Edison recognized that success is a grind.

Edison — holder of over 1,000 patents— had an insane work ethic. He was reported to work 60 consecutive hours on occasion.

So naturally, his definition of success is equally ambitious: "Success is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration."

Popular author Stephen Covey said that the definition of success is deeply individual.

The late Covey became a massive success — and a part of popular culture — with his 1989 book, "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People," which has sold over 25 million copies.

Yet for Covey, success was categorically individual.

"If you carefully consider what you want to be said of you in the funeral experience," he writes in the book, "you will find your definition of success." 

Billionaire John Paul DeJoria sees success as working hard — all the time.

DeJoria co-founded Paul Mitchell hair products and Patron tequila. In an interview with Business Insider, he reflected on the lessons he learned while working at a dry cleaner's as a young man.

Apparently, the head of the store was impressed by how spic and span DeJoria kept the floors, even though no one was watching him clean.

That's why he now believes:

"Success isn't how much money you have. Success is not what your position is. Success is how well you do what you do when nobody else is looking." 

Origin

Great founders lead with product strategy

In the beginning, it was just you and your founders. In order to raise capital, you had to not just know the problem you were solving intimately but you also had to be deeply passionate about it. You are the expert. You are the solution. You are the vision for the future.

The wonder of this early entrepreneurial environment is that it’s easy to respond to new information and bring expertise to every problem that comes up. But it doesn’t stay this way forever.

If you’re really onto something, you will need to scale fast. Scaling means bringing people onto your team with expertise in other areas. They’re not like you. They don’t know your problem inside and out. Instead, they maintain functional expertise. Your new hires might be God’s gift to DevOps or data science… but they’re not going to be steeped with your passion and background in whatever problem you’re taking on.

And that’s the point of stress. Until this point, you never needed to make your product strategy explicit. You and your cofounders could maintain a level of shared understanding. You could argue about the minutiae of a feature and how it was implemented. You didn’t argue over the general direction of the whole product.

That shared understanding starts to disappear as you start to expand. And I’ve seen this as a make or break moment many times for young teams. For the founders who are able to confer their wisdom, passion, and product strategy onto their team, the sky is the limit. For the founders who struggle to create that common ground, the struggle to keep everyone aligned can be insurmountable.

This might be confusing. After all, you’re the founders. Not everyone on the team needs to have all the pieces of the puzzle. As long as they trust you and you know your stuff, you should be good to go.

Unfortunately not.

Your Role Changes as You Scale

Things change as your business scales. More than anything, you’re not always accessible. Sometimes you have customer meetings and escalations that take precedence. Sometimes you find yourself in endless cycles with board members and investors. Sometimes you simply can’t find enough time in the day to meet with all the members of your team that are interested.

As your business scales, you’re not as accessible. And you have a few options. Your first option is to stay the course; ask your team to rely on your expertise. Now you go from being the rockstar savant on solving your problem to being the single point of failure. You’re the insurmountable bottleneck that is keeping your wonderful business from having the impact it could have on the world. This option sucks.

Your second option is to trust your team to figure it out. You hired great people. You know that they can’t come to you to answer every question. You empower them to make their own decisions. And you let them execute. You’re the type of boss you’d want. One filled with implicit trust. Unfortunately, this option isn’t much better than the first. You can’t win a relay race if everyone is running a different track. It doesn’t matter how fast your sprinters are. Regardless of how smart your team is, unless they have a shared understanding about what they’re trying to accomplish, they won’t be able to make uniform enough decisions to deliver an earth shattering business. This option also sucks.

Your third option is the tough one. You hired great people. But you now understand your job is to lead them towards solving your big, hairy, audacious problem. And that means spending less time doing the problem solving yourself and spending more time educating your team. Every hour you spend getting your team running in the same direction is an hour that you multiply their effectiveness. You save them from having to backtrack. You improve the quality of their conversations. You keep them motivated and empowered. You arm them with the tools to make the right decisions — quickly.

Your best option requires you to put your product strategy on paper, and talk about it regularly.

Your New Job: Chief Strategist

If you’re able to clearly articulate three things, you’ll be forever benefited by it. First, you need to articulate a clear understanding of your customer and how your customer uses your product today. What are the features that they require? What are the features that delight? If they weren’t using your product, what would they be using? This is a humbling exercise. At the beginning of any journey, you can’t do everything. Be open about that. Where are you starting and what problem can you solve today.

Then, you need to offer a clear vision for how your addressable customers and users evolve over time with the addition of new features and capabilities. What is it that you’re going to start building into your product to grow access, usability, and use cases? This articulation should be staged over time. Your product will have to evolve over time — your strategy has to take that evolution into account.

Finally, you need to give your team an understanding of why your solution is differentiated from a field of competitors. With that clear differentiation in tow, your brilliant team will be able to prioritize the features and functions that they want to concentrate on building. They’ll know the things that help drive them towards parity but don’t ultimately fit in with your positioning. And they’ll also know those capabilities that will reinforce the differentiation that you’re aspiring towards.

The way you get leverage as you scale is by codifying your vision and sharing it. As your team grows, you can’t assume that they’ll understand each other and the problem you’re addressing the same way you and your fellow founders did. To get everyone moving in the same direction, your product strategy needs to become your teams holy document — and you need to be its chief evangelist. Without it, you’ll be wasting your time and your team’s brainpower.

[Maxwell Wessel - Investor]
Origin