Who do you think you are?

Are You Here To Be An Entrepreneur? 29

Who do you think you are?

That’s a great question, and if you had asked me at any other point in my
life I probably would have given you a different answer. It’s like when
we pick our major in college. We decide in our freshman year what we
think we want to be when we grow up, and it almost always changes by
the time we become a sophomore. All those things I thought I was dur-
ing the early part of my life have changed. And last year at age fifty-
seven, I finally figured out who I really am, and what I’m really sup-
posed to be doing here on earth.
I have led a very unique life, with some cataclysmic failures and
some wonderful successes. It’s pretty rare to have both of those in the same
individual, and because I posses both, I think that is now my job. I’m sup-
posed to talk to as many people as I can about both my successes and my
failures, and I am very open about them both. Quite frankly, I think there is
more to be learned from our failures than there is from our successes. So,
who I think I am is a spokesman for people who have failed in their lives and
who want to learn how to overcome their failures.

What event or series of events led to your discovery?

It is so much a process of overcoming adversity in life; it’s the adversities
that introduce us to ourselves. Likewise, it was an adversity that introduced
me to the new me, or the “who I think I am now.” I had a business partner
who committed a crime. The crime tanked my company, put the company
into bankruptcy, caused 3,900 people to lose their jobs, caused my wife and
I to lose a three-and-a-half billion-dollar fortune, and ultimately got me in-
dicted on fifty-seven felony counts. During all of this adversity I was able to
get myself acquitted of all fifty-seven of those counts, but in the process I
learned a lot about myself and about the world. It was that adversity that set
me on the path I am on now.

If you could give advice to those who are still searching for their
purpose in life, what would it be?

The best advice I can give anybody, and I give it as often as I can whether
I’m talking to a high school group (I do over a hundred high school
speeches a year) or if I’m talking to adults (I will speak to over 300,000
adults this year), is that the only voice they should listen to is the voice
that comes from within. We are so eager and willing to listen to outsiders.