I collect people and books. Not just anyone or any book. I love successful people and personally autographed books. I often wondered what success means to me. To most, it means wealth or fame. To me, success lies in the way one goes about achieving goals. I am on a journey to find successful people who make their essence matter for the larger good of the world. I can better explain what I mean through the stories of a few people. One for simplicity, one for perfection and one for contentment.
Gordon Moore is the co-founder of Intel Corp. and the inventor of Moore’s Law, which defined the entire semi-conductor industry. But he always chose to be in the background. He found a brilliant young scientist in Andy Grove and let him become the management guru. Gordon is a celebrity in scientific circles but never pushed to be the centre of attention in the mass media. Till the day he retired, he drove his simple truck to work and parked it in an unmarked spot like any other employee. Together, Gordon Moore, Robert Noyce and Andy Grove built a company that was egalitarian to the core. No executive lunch rooms, no large corner offices, no special parking spots, and everyone was on first-name terms with them.
People who left Intel started many other successful companies and took the values along with them, spawning an entire culture of egalitarianism across firms around the world. Gordon contributed technology insight, business acumen and uncompromising integrity to the world. With his wealth, he set up the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to focus on environmental issues; true to his nature, he found a talented person to run it, taking no credit for any of the implementation. I continue to be a fan of the man who’s one of the stars of my personal collection.
I love movies. And I love actors who have the depth and breadth of performance. Most of all, I love perfection. I had the opportunity to meet Robert De Niro once and, in the hour we spent together, I got to experience why this man is so popular. When I met him, I was at a Silicon Valley high-tech company and we were working with well-known artists to expose them to technology and let them understand it, so they could come up with creative uses of what we usually see as bits and bites.
Mr. De Niro arrived in his blue jeans and crisp white shirt, and I was nervous as hell. After the usual presentation, we got to talking about how clean the facilities needed to be to manufacture computer chips in them. The rest of the group moved on to lunch, but Mr. De Niro spent almost an hour quizzing me. At the end, he asked whether he could send his scriptwriter so he could have a better understanding of the manufacturing process. A few weeks later, the writer came to our office and spent a day with me. It’s been more than 15 years since that interaction, but it made me an even bigger fan. His insatiable curiosity and his passion to learn make him, for me, the most successful man in the film industry.
As we rush toward that bigger house or faster car, we often forget to look at the people who are content with what they have. Tina has been doing my nails since 1995. She escaped in a boat from Vietnam and went to America. She started working in her sister-in-law’s nail salon while taking care of her two children. In the past 15 years, she has put her daughter through dental school and her son through engineering school. She is always cheerful and friendly. Whenever I’m in a foul mood, I think of her journey on that little boat from Vietnam and then I think of her smile, and then all becomes well in my life.
Success is so much more than money, so much more than achieving goals – it’s the way a person goes through the journey. It’s the grace, integrity, poise and passion that makes them successful and places them in my personal collection.
Lakshmi Pratury is the founder and CEO of Ixoraa Media. She is the host of the INK Conference, an annual conference to fuel innovation and foster knowledge across a range of disciplines.
