Entrepreneur Advice: Should you JUMP? (Michael Bloomberg #AND Elliott Hulse)

My advice to young people is you never want to do something on the spur of the moment. You don't want to jump too quickly. That doesn't mean you should sit around and waste your whole life and never realize when something's not going to happen or when the opportunity is not going to be presented. But every time I thought about leaving Salomon, I stopped, stopped and said, you know, I'm learning a lot, and even though I might have been able to make more money elsewhere, it was a great firm. They were scrupulously honest, phenomenally competent, worked very hard, very nice to me, and I always decided to stay. I don't think I ever seriously, other than maybe a little Walter Mitty dream now and then, I don't think I ever seriously ever thought of leaving. And it turned out to be great. I can say nothing but good things about them, even when them firing me was the right thing.

When you jump off that cliff and your only intention is to fly before you hit the fricking bottom, you're gonna animate all your vital resources to learn how to fly on the way down. And that's why you have to jump. You know, there's a different type of response to that cliff that a lot of people, most people experience. And that is they stare down that cliff their entire lives until they're like 40 45, 50, and they call this midlife crisis. This is when you've committed to all of the trappings. Notice that word trappings, trappings. Traps of the world. Now you got a family, you've got a business, you got a career, you got a boss, you got taxes. Now you can't jump, dude, because you're too trapped by the trappings of the world. Now in my book, I say you still jump. But anyway, the point is that if you stand there and you just keep looking down that into that chasm, and it begins, you know, you reach the edge of that cliff when you're 25 years old, guess what you're going to live with for the next 25 years? Distress that kills you because you didn't jump. There's that part of you that's always tapping you. Hey dude, I told you to jump 20 years ago. You still didn't jump, did you? How do you feel about yourself? Well, I've got $100,000 in my bank account. Man, who gives a shit? My wife's hot. Who gives a shit? I got children to take I don't care, who gives a shit? You should have jumped when I told you to jump and now you gotta live with it.

My intention with this video was to spread understanding, not fighting. I want you to see that it's not one point of view or the other, you can pull and learn from both, especially the one that you don't immediately resonate with. Embrace the genius of the AND.