Andrew Wilkinson Quotes

As G. K. Chesterton put it: “To be clever enough to get all that money, one must be stupid enough to want it.

Most successful people are just an anxiety disorder harnessed for productivity.

What caused this, I later learned, is something called mimetic desire. The idea that whatever those around you model as being valuable and important, you unconsciously find yourself caring about and wanting, too. Whether it’s as simple as a fashion choice, like a wristwatch, or as complex as a meaningless professional title that you could spend decades trying to achieve. For example, for most academics, there is nothing more important than getting published in prestigious journals. They live or die depending on where they get published, and how many times their paper is cited by others. Their refrain: “Publish or perish.” To the rest of the world this means absolutely nothing. It denotes absolutely zero status to 99.9 percent of the world. But in the world of academia, it’s everything. The same is true of writers trying to hit the bestseller list, or actors and musicians trying to win awards, or even something as simple as a corporate job title or a corner office. We all seek external gratification based on what our peers tell us we should want. What’s sad about this mimetic phenomenon is that it convinces people to sacrifice their own happiness to achieve whatever goal their peers have assigned value to, even when it’s not an authentic desire of theirs. It seems to be everywhere, and it begins early, preying on the most insecure: look at any high school hallway, all kids trying to look the same, talk the same. Look at influencers on social media, implicitly dictating how the rest of us should behave.

Mark began eavesdropping on client calls. He heard me deal with complaints, send bills, make sales calls, and work through the design process. Like so many aspects of business, these aren’t discrete skills; they are instead often qualitative skills you can’t teach in a class. It’s all tacit knowledge, training your instincts, learning how to deal with the quirks and foibles of other human beings.

Don’t you miss it?” I asked. “Miss what?” “Business. Having a yardstick to measure yourself by. Money. Status,” I replied. “I have enough money, and I’ve proven myself to the world once. I don’t know why I need to do it again. Does anyone roll their eyes at the guy who won Olympic gold once, wondering, ‘Why didn’t they do it twice?’ No. The yardstick is no longer useful. Think about it: Why do you love business so much?” he asked.

making. I was embracing what I came to call Lazy Leadership: the idea that a CEO’s job is not to do all the work, but more importantly to design the machine and systems. Not a player on the field. Not the coach. But the owner, sitting up in a little box at the top of the arena, passively observing until the next critical fifty-thousand-foot decision had to be made.

Most successful people,’ as the entrepreneur and investor Andrew Wilkinson has observed, ‘are just a walking anxiety disorder, harnessed for productivity.

Father Wilfred had told us time and time again that it was our duty as Christians to see what our faith had taught us to see. And consequently Mummer used to come home from the shop with all kinds of stories about how God had seen fit to reward the good and justly punish the wicked. The lady who worked at the bookmakers had developed warts on her fingers from handling dirty money all day long. The Wilkinson girl, who had visited the clinic on the Finchley Road that the women at Saint Jude’s talked about in hushed tones, had been knocked down by a car not a week later and had her pelvis snapped beyond repair. Conversely, an elderly lady who came into the shop every week for prayer cards and had spent much of the previous decade raising money for Cafod, won a trip to Fatima.

Okay, imagine that you love chopping wood in your backyard,” I said. “You do it for fun. To relax. To enter a flow state. Then, one day, your neighbor pops his head over the fence and asks you if you could chop him some wood, too. He offers you $20. Suddenly, the thing you love doing becomes a business. Before you know it, you’re chopping wood for all your neighbors. You buy a truck and start selling door-to-door. It’s just you and a bunch of buddies, side by side, chopping wood and working outside. The business grows. And grows. And grows. And a decade later you wake up. You’re in a little glass office, perched atop one of many sawmills. You look down at the hundreds of workers beneath you, operating the industrial equipment on the factory floor. Huge logs getting fed into machines that slice the wood. Totally automated. “And there you are. Isolated in your little office, wearing a suit, the air-conditioning blowing a chill down your back. No axe. No fresh air. No friendly coworkers. Just you sitting in your office, doing some paperwork—alone. That is what it feels like to build a business this big.” He looked dejected and I wondered if I should have just shut my mouth and told him it was awesome. He could learn the truth on his own. Every founder dreams about getting to the end—the part where they’ve created the billion-dollar behemoth—but ironically, once there, we all fantasize about going back to the beginning. After all, the beginning is the best part, and most of us probably wouldn’t have kept going if we knew about all the speed bumps. The journey is the reward.

moment

I remembered a line that stopped me cold during a Francis Ford Coppola interview I’d watched recently: “You can always understand the son by the story of his father. The story of the father is embedded in the son.

You don’t know who’s swimming naked until the tide goes out.

money bonfires.

It’s a decision that many entrepreneurs fear making. I was embracing what I came to call Lazy Leadership: the idea that a CEO’s job is not to do all the work, but more importantly to design the machine and systems. Not a player on the field. Not the coach. But the owner, sitting up in a little box at the top of the arena, passively observing until the next critical fifty-thousand-foot decision had to be made.

There’s a famous Upton Sinclair quote: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

Then came that saying: that you can figure out what you do want to do in life by first figuring out what you don’t want.

Every fuckup now began to pay me back in spades.

Never wrestle a pig. You’ll both get dirty, but the pig will enjoy it.’ You

anxiety mellow. He recognized that the fight was over. His kids were launched. We all had our own happy work lives. Nobody was counting on him anymore. I had been able to build the thing he struggled with for decades: a stable, diversified business. The baton was passed, and along with it I was able to take away the financial strain on our family. Around that time, I asked my

John D. Rockefeller: “I know of nothing more despicable and pathetic than a man who devotes all the hours of the waking day to the making of money for money’s sake.

Either it’s ‘hell yeah!’ or it’s ‘no.’ Life is too short for ‘nos.’ This is the ultimate freedom.

To think about what you hate, then work backward to optimize your life to avoid the things you disliked being a part of it.

that we distinctly disliked selling companies and—even when big numbers got thrown out—there was rarely a right time to sell a great business.