How to Transform Your Mind| Success Beyond Monetary Goals in Business

I've never ever been motivated by money.

It's not about money for me.

The goal really was not so much to make a lot of money.

We created the company not because I wanted to be some successful entrepreneur and make a bunch of money.

Didn't make money.

You have to be willing to not make money at it.

Jay and I never talked about how much money we made or how much money we wanted to make.

Nothing I did where the only reason for doing it was the money was It's ever worth it.

Business doesn't have to be always money-centered.

Hello, Believe Nation! Today we're talking about how you shouldn't do it for the money. And as always, guys, if you hear something that really resonates with you, please leave it down in the comments below, put quotes around it so other people can be inspired, and when you write it down yourself, it's much more likely to stick with you as well. Enjoy!

You make more money than any actor in the world.

This too shall pass. By the way, I don't even know if that's true. I can tell you I pay more taxes than anybody I've ever met. Truth be told is I've never ever been motivated by money.

I gotta give it to you, man, because you just seem like such a normal guy. How are you able to—

That is my superpower.

Talk to my wife.

Exactly, that's what it is. Make people believe you're normal. Yeah, absolutely.

For me, I never did anything for money, right? So it was never about money. My experience has been when people do things for money, you make bad choices. Find what you love, and then you'll learn how to make money doing what you love. When I changed careers, I was never changing to something for money. I was changing to something I loved more, right? And that, to me, that's really the only way to keep the passion. If you have two choices, you're And one is playing the piano and another one is—

how would you feel though?

Bowling.

And you can make more money bowling, but you love playing the piano more. You gotta play the piano. It's like you'll tear yourself apart if you're not doing the thing that you love most in life. And you know what it is right now. Right now there's something that you love more than everything. Whatever it is that you love crazy has to be the thing that you dedicate your life to.

Are you gonna get paid up front from this from Lloyd?

Is Lloyd gonna cut you a check?

Am I getting paid up front for this?

You didn't get your check?

I don't know, but it's not about money for me. Like, it's not. I wanted to do, I wanted my own network. I wanted to put, I wanted to do something cool. And it's always about just me doing something that I think is awesome. And the money will come. I'm not worried about that. That'll come when the universe decides for it to come.

Our goal was to get— we started with 4 employees, and our goal was to get to 50 employees. And the goal really was not so much to make a lot of money. I might— I wanted— to me, a lot of money in those days was I want to own a house, I want to have a nice car, and I wanted to work with interesting people and do interesting things. And I thought if I could control my own environment, have a small consulting company— and Oracle started out as a software consulting company. We worked for Tandem Computer, if anyone remembers those guys. We worked for IBM. We worked for a lot a lot of different tech companies in Silicon Valley doing contract programming, fixed-price contract programming, and we did pretty well, actually. And again, the idea was just to have a small software contract, software company. A bunch of, you know, we thought we were hotshot programmers, and we thought we could make a decent living doing just that. And quite by accident, we built a product.

Airbnb, we created the company not because I wanted to be some successful entrepreneur, and make a bunch of money. If I was gonna do that, I would not have started air beds for conferences around the country. That was not gonna be a good idea. In fact, I had a mentor, I told him about the idea of Airbnb, and he told me, I hope that's not the only idea you're working on. And my mom, growing up, all she ever wanted, 'cause I went to art school, she said, just make sure you get a job that has health insurance. And so when we created Airbnb, she said, I guess you never got that job with health insurance. This is what happens, you start having to let strangers in your homes.

I come from a country where you, didn't make money because you made movies. You lost money because you made movies. And all of my life, when I approach a new project— and I'm 50, 50 years old, and I've done now I don't know how many movies as producer, director, blah blah blah— and I still have the same emotion when I go into a project. I go, how much am I willing to lose to do that image? And there's always one or two images in every project that you would mortgage your house, sell your car, give everything you have to make sure that image comes to safe. To safe.

Yeah, I've heard you talk about like Pacific Rim.

It was the girl with the red shoes.

Absolutely.

You like had to make that movie just to see that.

It doesn't matter what you go through. It doesn't matter if they give you X amount of time, blah, blah, blah. You need to always protect the images that are crucial.

So you've sort of arrived at these different approaches to writing. What was the first, to your mind, like the first writing piece that you did that kind of put you on the map? Where not like I've arrived, but you're like, okay, I actually could make this work. I could actually really be good at this. Or wow, I just got recognition for this piece. I mean, were there any sort of defining moments in your career as a writer?

Yeah, I think, I mean, I don't know, yeah, I mean, the things that I remember, I remember like I was, By the way, the best way to get started in anything is to be willing to work for free. Internships, to me, are the path to anything. I mean, I really think being, there's definitely a lot of people who are entitled. Basically, I have so much to say, but anyway. If you wanna live in your passion, whatever your passion is, you have to be willing to not make money at it. You wanna do what you love, you have a choice. You can choose money or you can choose what you love. Joseph Campbell has a great quote. That I always use. I don't know if you guys know this.

Joseph Campbell, so the hero with a thousand faces.

Yeah, the great kind of professor of mythology. But he said the insecure, have you guys heard this? The insecure way is the secure way. You guys have heard that quote? And what it means basically is, you know, my parents, and I'm sure like most people's parents say, get a good job, try and make some money, make a good living. And 'cause they think that's secure if you go and make money. But if you do a job and you make money and lose that job, Yeah. Then you lose the money and you have nothing.

Right, right, right.

What he says is if you choose your passion, it actually doesn't matter whether you make money or you lose money because you're always going to have your passion and be happy, so it doesn't actually matter. And that's your safety net. Right. And, and, but the challenge of that is that it might be 8 years or 4 years before you're actually making a living at it. Yeah. Versus, versus something else.

Well, actually what it finally comes down to in your business and how you run it is you first and me second. Take that home with you. You first and me second. The first thing you wanna do is help your people succeed and then you succeed. Just keep it in the right order. It's not you succeeding and then hopefully they come out okay. It's all about them, not about you. And I think that was the foundation of our business. You know, we never, Jay and I never talked about how much money we made or how much money we wanted to make. We talk about how big we'd like to have our business, but it was never a personal financial goal. But our focus was on how we could enrich the lives of our people and make them better, oftentimes influencing them with our faith as well.

When you start out, you have to deal with the problems of failure. You need to be thick-skinned to learn that not every project will survive. A freelance life, a life in the arts, is sometimes like putting messages in bottles on a desert island and hoping that someone will find one of your bottles and open it and read it and put something in a bottle that will wash its way back to you: appreciation or a commission or money or love. And you have to accept that you may put out hundreds of things for every bottle that winds up coming back. The problems of failure, the problems of discouragement, of hopelessness, of hunger. You want everything to happen and you want it now, and things go wrong. My first book, a piece of journalism I'd done only for the money, and which had already bought me an electric typewriter from the advance, should have been a bestseller. It should have paid me a lot of money if the publisher hadn't gone into involuntary liquidation between the first print run selling out and the second print run never happening, and before any royalties could be paid. It would have done. And I shrugged. And I still had my electric typewriter and enough money to pay the rent for a couple of months, and I decided that I'd do my best in future not to write books just for the money. If you didn't get the money, then you didn't have anything. And if I did work I was proud of and I didn't get the money, At least I'd have the work. Every now and then, I forget that rule. And whenever I do, the universe kicks me hard and reminds me. I don't know that it's an issue for anybody but me, but it's true that nothing I did where the only reason for doing it was the money was ever worth it, except as bitter experience. Usually I didn't wind up getting the money either. The things I did because I was excited and wanted to see them exist in reality have never let me down, and I've never regretted the time I spent on any of them.

Everything that we do in the business world is focused on making money. That's what the indicator that you try to assess how successful we are. In the business world, there's nothing else. So that kind of squeezed out all kinds of social orientation of human life and human activity. And that's not a tenable situation, and that untenable situation is created by the structure that we have. I said business doesn't have to be always money-centered, always self-centered, always, or many times, obsessed with money. Because human beings are not always about money. Human beings are much bigger than just money-making machine. We are not robots. We are human beings. We take care of ourselves individually. At the same time, we We take care of everybody else. We take care of the planet itself. And business world doesn't have that orientation, so, at the moment. We can do that. We can create a different kind of business which is not money-centered.

Thank you guys so much for watching. I hope you enjoyed. I'd love to know what was your favorite clip? What resonated the most with you? What are you gonna take from this video and immediately apply to your life or your business somehow? Please leave it down in the comments. I'm super curious to find out. Thank you guys again for watching. I believe in you. I hope you continue to believe in yourself and whatever your one word is. Much love. I'll see you soon.