What Constitutes Success?

After a certain threshold, the type of success you have is a choice. On one extreme there is Bill Gates. If he was purely driven by money, he could be the richest human on the earth, but he has donated over $50B to charitable organizations throughout the past 30 years. As a result, Tesla CEO and visionary, Elon Musk, recently passed him in net worth. While no one is questioning Gates’ success, his decision is similar to many who find early success, although at a much smaller scale.

The Movie Night assignment illustrated this concept for me, as I compared founders Joy Mangano and Ray Kroc. Both achieved material success with their ventures, netting them tens of millions of dollars on the low end. However, Joy always put her family first, while Ray prioritized empire building. Neither is the perfect strategy, and both have implications for the rest of a founder’s life. It’s easy to sit in the armchair and decide which is a better path. As (the still boxing!?) Mike Tyson famously said, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” In entrepreneurship, everyone has a plan until they actually reach a certain threshold of success.

To some, success is laying off the gas after becoming cashflow positive, to others it’s an IPO, and to others, it’s serving x number of customers. The more interesting question is how many founders began with one singular moment in their head as when they would have “made it” and actually stopped once they hit that initial mark.

Success is, above all things, relative, after all.