Musings at Altitude

I’m going back and forth between the Oklahoma State – Texas and the Georgia – LSU games.  I switched over to the Texas game just at the beginning of an on the field interview with a billionaire that is a big contributor to Oklahoma State.  The announcer asked, “I’m sure folks want to know what it’s like to lose a billion dollars.”  Without a moments hesitation, he said, “it’s happened before”.

I remember back in the late 90’s working with an Irish businessman who told me, “I’ve had 27 companies and only one of them has really made money – that one made me a billion.”  Two years later, the global company that gave him all that money for his company when they bought it from him went bankrupt.  I’m sure he lost hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars in the telecom and Internet meltdown at that time.

The statements from both of these individuals do not surprise me.  In fact, most of the very successful business people I’ve had the privilege to work for or work with take huge losses in stride.  In some cases, they are forced to start over after experiencing enormous success.  Through it all, they have this incredible sense of calm, seemingly knowing that what they did before can obviously be done again and fully expecting that if it will be done again, it will be done by them.

Equally as important, each very successful business leader I’ve known has worked through several significant failures before achieving any significant success.  They credit those failures with sharpening their business skills and giving them a thirst for success even greater with each failure.  And none of them judge success based on their personal financial situation; in fact, several folks have told me that their greatest successes may not have made them much money at all.  Others have said their greatest failures actually made them some significant money.

It’s rare if ever that any successful business leader experiences only positive events in their business or personal financial situations.  Reality is that setbacks occur.  Reality is that significant financial loss occurs much more often than we typically think about it or want to admit.  For many of us who have trusted our money and our life savings to the stock market, we’re certainly getting hammered right now, and many of us are experiencing some significant financial losses.  Hopefully we too will recover and have the same confidence of getting it all back as these very wealthy business leaders seem to have.

But I love the line, “it’s happened before”.  There’s nothing like that kind of calm perspective in the midst of significant losses.  Maybe one day all of us will get the chance to know what it’s like to lose that much money and then get the chance on national TV to answer the question “what’s it like to lose a billion dollars?”

OK…back to reality!