How to Become CHAMPION Like Ricardo Semler | Top 10 Rules

One day all of this will be yours.

There are the people who are spending their whole time on ego trips. We've configured society in such a way that so many things can be bought.

Well, if you're giving back, you took too much.

And human beings don't do scary things on their own. There's nothing in nature that grows indefinitely except cancer.

How many people do you know that in their deathbed said, "Boy, I wish I had spent more time at the office"?

They say, "This seems to be out of control. Pull the reins." And letting it sit there and not doing it is an important What am I doing this for?

He's the CEO and majority owner of Semco Partners. Under his leadership, the business grew from $4 million to $212 million. His innovative management policies have attracted widespread interest from around the world. He's Ricardo Semler, and here are his top 10 rules for success.

I taught MBAs at MIT for a time, and I ended up one day at the Mount Auburn Cemetery. It was a beautiful cemetery in Cambridge, and I was walking around It was my birthday, and I was thinking. And the first time around, I saw these tombstones and these wonderful people who'd done great things, and I thought, "What do I want to be remembered for?" And I did another stroll around, and the second time, another question came to me which did me better, which was, "Why do I want to be remembered at all?" And that, I think, took me different places. When I was 50, my wife Fernanda and I sat for a whole afternoon. We had a big pit with fire, and I threw everything I had ever done into that fire. This is a book in 38 languages, hundreds and hundreds of articles and DVDs, everything there was.

And that did two things.

One, it freed our five kids from following in the steps of, shadow of— they don't know what I do, which is good. And I'm not going to take them somewhere and say, One day all of this will be yours. So the 5 kids know nothing, which is good.

The—

and the second thing is I freed myself from this anchor of past achievement or whatever it is, and I'm free to start something new every time and to decide things from scratch.

I think that a certain amount of ego and vanity and self-esteem is absolutely necessary. I don't think it's possible for you to to keep a structured personality, with you giving up ego and vanity and everything that's yourself. That is that small percentage of religious people or people, or hermits, or people who are able to go to that extent. As on the other hand, there are the people who are spending their whole time on ego trips and making sure that they show up and their photograph is in the paper, and they go to be seen and be seen. I'm not in any of these situations.

So I'm constantly managing the issue of ego and asking myself, why am I doing this? Am I doing this?

Is it enough of a message? Is it important? Do I do a few very, very selective of these, or do I do it all the time just to make sure that I'm busy, I'm in the news or whatever? So I don't do the second part because the amount of things I refuse per day is enormous. And so I'm trying always to manage that issue. But I think without this force of ego, which is within myself— so when I'm giving, when I feel that I'm giving something anonymously, a school for example, that they will never know that it was me who gave it, it is feeding my ego to feel good about having done that. But it doesn't have my name on it, I don't show up there, so it doesn't have that second part of the ego, which I don't think I need. And I needed more in the past, and then I've started to tame it as the years go by. And so it's a very delicate exercise, but I think the people without that first need to express themselves or to have the ego issue balanced end up doing very little as well, or very little publicly, of course. That's what we're talking about. For me, the idea of success, power, and money together has never been a motto. It was just a a realization that this was so important to people in general. But success, the idea that success is connected to money to me is already a strange combination. There's a very small correlation between success and money in any case. There's a strong correlation between money and power. Because we've configured society in such a way that so many things can be bought. But success fits into another, the other trinity of balance of security, certainly, because it's much more secure in our society to have a bank account than to have none. But it's not by any means that this will enable you in any of the other and any of the other factors. But I think that people that imagine that success, money, power, etc., are useful only believe in this for a while. It's very difficult to imagine that somebody believes in this over the long run because there's so many opportunities and examples to see that there are so many important things that you can't buy with any of this.

I accumulated a lot of money. When I think about it, you— when you think and you say, now is the time to give back, Well, if you're giving back, you took too much. I keep thinking of Warren Buffett waking up one day and finding out that he has $30 billion more than he thought he had, and he looks and he says, "What am I going to do with this?" He said, "Let me give it to somebody who really needs this. I'll give it to Bill Gates." My guy who is my financial advisor in New York, he says, look, you're a silly guy because you would have 4.1 times more money today if you had made money with money instead of sharing as you go. But I like sharing as you go better.

Our past is very determinant. When you think about Europe or the Western Hemisphere in general, we are stuck by issues of the past. It is the past that holds back, you know. And if you said that you were, as I've done in the past, you said, let me burn everything, let me get rid of everything in the past, you, you're free to start thinking about the future. But if you're still collecting the past and looking to the past as a solution, having history as a very strong anchor, you're unable to move forward. Because there are historical reasons why our tribe of humanity is such a slow changer, because change is very, very scary. And human beings don't do scary things on their own. It takes something much bigger to force them into change. What kind of big thing could that be? For every human being, individual, it's the heart attack, the car accident, the something that happened which was much bigger than you, which suddenly you wake up and say, oh my God, I've been spending all my life inside a box just working for someone else. Oh, isn't there a better way? For humanity in general, it is this, that suddenly it stops raining, suddenly everything goes crazy and you can't control the climate. So that's big enough. If the world were hit by a meteorite, it would be enough. It takes enormous things like that. So we are a bit dinosaurs in that sense, that we will roam around and do our thing until we're hit by something much bigger than us. And that's true even for the individual who needs a heart attack to wake up to find out that they've been working too much.

In each block of time, your company has grown, your profits have grown, your own personal wealth has grown. A company that might have had a few hundred now has 5,000. What is it in all of that that still motivates you? Is it about the growth? Is it about being bigger and feeling good about yourself because you've grown something like that?

No, as a matter of fact, now we've had a few opportunities to sell to partners our part completely, and I'm very happy to do that. And 1,000 people, 2,000 people will go at a stretch. No, I think I've gotten over that. There's something in the beginning of a career where you find that important. But then you realize that there's nothing in nature that grows indefinitely except cancer. Everything else— and you have the tall poppy syndrome rationale here in Australia. The tree that grows most is the one that's first struck by lightning. The idea that you grow more, you have more money, and you become better is a very, very silly idea. And so what takes me, let's say, from business to education or to dealing with 2-year-olds is that I'm interested in human nature and why we do some of the silly things we do if there's not a better way to do this.

I always come back to variations of the question that my son asked me when he was 3. We're sitting in a jacuzzi and he said, "Dad, why do we exist?" There is no other question. Nobody has any other question. You have variations of this one question from 3 onwards. And so when you spend time in a company, in a bureaucracy, in an organization, and you're saying, "Boy," how many people do you know that in their deathbed said, "Boy, I wish I had spent more time at the office." So there's a whole thing of, Having the courage now, not in a week, not in 2 months, not when you find out you have something to say, no, what am I doing this for? Stop everything. Let me do something else.

And it'll be okay.

It'll be much better than what you're doing if you're stuck in a process.

So when you think about the fact that we allocate the same amount of hours, what is it that we need to do or we can do? It's very easy today to set up organizations. That's the way we're set up. Where we don't want to know how many people work. We don't want to know exactly how many hours each person works. We're going to negotiate with a group or with a person for a certain result. If the person is able to do it in 3 hours or 4 hours or 7 hours, we don't want to know. We don't want that control anymore. We want to be able to say, look, if you can distribute your life differently in terms of where you are or the amount of hours you work or between idleness and leisure and the rest of the things you want to do. The framework that's available today already permits that. It's just companies that are not letting go because they think they need control. They want to know if the person showed up, et cetera, because otherwise it's unfair for the other one who worked more hours. And that's an obsolete rationale. It's an obsolete system. And so it's perfectly possible. And that's how we work is to say, give me this by such and such a date. And then if it's more hours, less hours, or where you do it is none of our concern. And that solves the issue of allocating too many hours when today we don't need that many in order to produce the same thing. In a time in which things seem to be lost in terms of control and direction, the first reaction is the same one as you have with a horse. When you're riding a horse and the horse is going downhill and it starts speeding up and losing control, you pull the reins, which is the very worst thing you could ever do, because then the horse has to pull up their head and try to go down with you pulling the rein there because you're afraid. This is the same thing that happens in these organizations, been happening in the companies. They say, this seems to be out of control, pull the reins together and let's get control of this thing that we're losing. And the fact is, the more you do that, the more you have an entity, an organism, an organization that doesn't know what to do and is frightened. And so this fear, this malaise that's there in society today needs a completely different organization, needs a completely different architecture than this one of more and more and more control and more slaves building up something for you. It needs something that says give up the reins and realize that once the the horse has control and the head is free, that you're able then to use the best qualities of knowing where to step and the things that came naturally and that came tribally already within us, many of which are much wiser than the smart decision of control. Control is smart, but it's not wise. Yeah, control always seems smart, it seems intelligent to say, ah, so you tell me where you were, you tell me this, you tell me how much you spent, you come here, You all come from everywhere around, from 50 kilometers away, and you take subways and you take buses and you spend 3 hours a day in traffic. But once you come here, I can control you. I know whether you're here. I know whether you came on time. I have a boarding school mentality, really, of control. So if I send my kids over there and I know that they're going to wake up and they're going to go to mathematics and then biology, they're going to be great. It seems smart. But it's very unwise. You have kids who then leave that and who thought they've wasted half their life there, and then they want to do away with all of this organization that was in place before. Well, you know, I had a— I had this unsuccessful career as a rock guitarist, which was wonderful. I mean, it was a wonderful period of my life, but it was very interesting because it showed where the limitations are, and why sometimes you want to do something because you want to, but the combination of talent and time is not right, and letting it sit there and not doing it is an important part.

We've all learned how to go on Sunday night to go to the email and work from home, but very few of us have learned how to go to the movies on Monday afternoon. And if we're looking for wisdom, we need to learn to do that as well. And so, basically, what we've done all of these years is very simple. We use a little tool, which is ask 3 whys in a row. Because the first why, you always have a good answer for. The second why starts getting difficult. By the third why, you don't really know why you're doing what you're doing. And so, what I want to leave you with is the seed and the thought that maybe if you do this, you will come to the question, What for? What am I doing this for? And hopefully, as a result of that, and over time, I hope that with this, and that's what I'm wishing you, you'll have a much wiser future. Thank you very much.

Thank you so much for watching. I made this video because Marco Aurelio asked me to. So if there's a famous entrepreneur that you want me to profile next, leave it in the comments below and I'll see what I can do. I'd also love to know which of Ricardo Semler's top 10 rules meant the most to you, had the biggest impact. Leave it in the comments and I'll join in the discussion. Thank you so much for watching. Continue to believe, and I'll see you soon.