Name: 30 Years of Business Advice in 13 Minutes (from a Billionaire)
Uploaded: 2026-03-19T07:40:58.000Z
Duration: 13 min 5 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Past simple

It took me 30 years to realize what I'm about to tell you in the next few minutes.

Adverbs of frequency

To-infinitive

And that seems like a really odd thing to say.

But I think people frame their life as these objectives.

And the problem with having objectives is that at some point you'll meet enough of them and you'll think, I've made it.

I think what I've learned is that there are no objectives that are worthy enough for you to say it's time to stop.

As I keep going, I'm getting into my 50s, there are all these people that I really used to look up to who've just stopped.

Then you look at somebody like Buffett and he goes and goes and goes, and

he's 95 and he's finally taking a half step back.

There's so many examples of those kinds of people, and really what are they?

They're not committed to a set of objectives, they're committed to learning, putting themselves at risk, surrounding themselves with people that know interesting things.

And I think as I get older, that's really the most important goal.

And if someone had told me that that was a goal, I would have made slightly different decisions.

I would have made some very specific decisions very differently.

I would have taken more risk, even more than I did when I was younger.

If you're going to live a life without objectives and you're actually going to live a life of process, you have to create some really good boundary conditions.

Debt is one of these very simple and practical things that when and if you have it will cause you to stop.

It can cause you to stop learning, it can cause you to stop taking risk, it'll cause you to seek objectives.

And all of those short term optimizations have huge repercussions and consequences for the next 20 and 30 and 40 years of your life.

And being able to have the discipline to not choose the things that cause you to be in debt.

And what's hard, especially for younger generations, is you spend all of this time rotting your brain with worthless social media of all of these people who are essentially lying to you about their fake life.

And too many people get tricked into that life being the actual life that those people have, and

then as a result, the life that you should be living.

All of those things are oriented around money, all of them.

There's never a person that really is celebrated for a lifelong commitment to process.

And unfortunately, he's not with us anymore.

Number two, you need to manage your life with humility.

That's something that took me a really long time to learn as well.

It means that you have to be extremely truthful about the way that things are today because it allows you to see how things are.

It allows you to share the truth with other people.

That allows them to actually find incredible solidarity with you.

Three, you have to surround yourself with people that are younger than you.

The way that they see the world is just completely different.

Their biases are different, their frameworks are different.

And it's hard because a lot of the time I believe that I've learned enough where I don't have to be told I'm wrong.

The more time I'm with younger people, the more I realize that everything I know is stuck in a moment in time.

And while it's relevant, it'll decay in relevance.

And at some point, the way in which I think things should work will be completely and diametrically the opposite of how things will actually work.

And so all these young people end up as an early warning system for the future, which is just another way of learning.

So those are three practical things that somebody can do to not riddle yourself with superficial, dumb objectives that'll bog you down.

I was a director, become a vice president.

I was a vice president, become a senior vice president.

I was a senior vice president, become a principal at a venture firm, then become a general partner.

And these dumb objectives took me away from the core hundred percent version of me.

It made me amplify small facets of myself to represent a much larger part of who I was, not just to myself, but

And I don't think that that's a successful way to live one's life again.

I think the problem with what I'm telling you is it can only be learned over time.

Now you can choose to listen to it because everybody else, when they get to their late 40s, early 50s, will nod their head when they Listen to what I have to say.

Everybody in their 20s and 30s will be like, this is bullshit.

So you have two choices, which is you're gonna get there the easy way or the hard way.

The easy way is just do these couple of simple things.

The most important one is give yourself complete optionality.

I try to preserve optionality in business, I try to preserve optionality when I'm negotiating.

Find the space where there can be win wins.

It's a hugely powerful thing that's helped me.

And what that does and how it manifests is it preserves relationships, it preserves other people's egos, it preserves other people's emotions.

It forces me to be more subdued, to listen more, to talk less.

And it turns out that there are so many opportunities for people to just blow themselves up and self immolate by doing something stupid.

And for me, that framework has helped me minimize that a lot.

And then the second thing is just the more philosophical one, which is just to realize that if we are actually in a simulation, there's a, there's a level of the game which is actually about showing you that these secrets exist and it gives you a chance.

And I feel like I find this now in my late 40s, about to turn 50, that they're exposed to me and I'm like, wow, this is an incredible thing.

I didn't realize this when I was younger and as much as somebody would have tried to tell me when I was younger, I ignored them.

So I only offer it up as, as you know, most of you will ignore too, but

The most important relationship lesson I've learned is that it is really, really crucial to be married to somebody that 100% has your back.

And the only way you get that is by being completely, completely honest.

And that is really hard for a lot of people.

I shared most things, I didn't share all things.

And that was sort of part of how I was taught just living in my family.

But if you don't learn that lesson, it comes back to bite you in the ass.

In relationships, it is so important to have your co founder there beside you.

And you know, having gone through a divorce, which is almost like a death in the family, what I will tell you is what was missing.

What was missing was just complete, raw, unfiltered, unadulterated honesty.