Harvard Business School

Transcript

Ugh! Defining success is the $64,000 question!

First of all, you know, one of the ways I define success was having the ability to think about the question, and answering it with multiple answers. Because, you know, one, people say survival. You know, you survive. The second thing is, you know, keeping score—always money was an easy way to keep score. Did you make enough money? And as a kid who had to grow up with no money, one of my first objectives was to get enough financial independence that I could do what I want to do. And so I had money as part of the definition of success to give me independence.

But having come from nothing, once you've made enough money, then you have to have different definitions, because you're really kind of playing with the house money, at that point.

And so the typical definitions I saw here was you have a lot of people that talk about money or power. And I've never been that interested in power. I was interested in money. And that was the first thing. So once you get to that, the whole world for defining success opens up.

And so I felt like defining success was really, in my mind, being able to influence, build a business that would be a lasting business, you know, and that would go well beyond you when you left it. And that you could almost build an institutional business in a very entrepreneurial way. And then also really develop and mentor a lot of people that could also take that, and they could do many, many things. So your effect would be multiplied by the business that you helped build, and by the team of people you left. And I don't know that when you're coming out of here, you think like that. So I defined it a lot like I see people I hired or I trained have gone on to start hedge funds, they've done this, they're running this. I get tremendous satisfaction out of that. And just like I think some of the people helped me, instead of being jealous of someone's success, they enjoyed it. They felt that they had an impact on that person's success. So I view success now as helping other people be successful.

The other thing is the whole thing about giving back once you've got yourself to a point where you feel like you've got a basic level of economic security in the way you live. And I don't live, you know, I don't need the economics to live like that. You get into things like family, you know, which in our world is very tough to balance the demands of work and family. My wife's a Harvard Business School graduate, you know. We debated. We've got three kids, three boys. You know, our house is hectic, we're frenetic, we've got—she works. She's a partner at Goldman Sachs. So, you know, so far I always tell my kids, I say, "It's a 15 round fight they should have called in the 6th round because I'm not doing too well in the fight!" [Laughs]

So I define now success how my kids are going to, you know, pick up the value system that I think, and she thinks are important. How are they going to go out into the world and make a contribution? I never thought about that 20 years ago, but now I have three other things to think about.

And the last thing is, I now spend more time thinking about how to give back to the community, and do things for people, whether it's charitable, or with my time. And doing that well is a full–time job, too. In other words, just doing that haphazardly is not very enjoyable. So it's almost like it never stops. You continually have this expanding universe of how you define success.

And I think I define success totally different than I would have 25 years ago. Because I've got to worry about family and, you know, how am I doing in that? And, you know, that's a challenge. I have to define how am I doing with my wife, and I say, "Hopefully, her expectations are low, so I can exceed them." [Laughs] Then I've got to define how I'm doing in my community. How I'm doing with my people. And, you know, trying to make an impact, it's just a very, very tough thing to do.

So that's probably been the biggest evolution for me, and it's something you never get right. You're continually struggling to get success, I mean, to have success, in my mind.