Can you make a difference? Listen to John Mackey and his advice on starting a business. Hopefully there'll be a lot of young people in the YouTube generation who see this. hopefully someone, maybe you maybe me, maybe others, will inspire them to start a business. Any advice for them, as they think about whether to do that or not, what kind of business to start, >> Well my first advice that I always give to young people as I, I do talk at a lot of business schools and I often time would ask, how many people here, someday, plan to open their own business. And surprisingly I get half. >> You get a lot of hands obviously, yeah. >> I get a lot of hands, half to three quarters. >> Yeah. >> But my follow up question is, how many of you plan to start a business immediately after school? Very few. >> Why, why, why is that do you think, first of all? >> I think most of them owe a lot of money. >> A lot, yeah. >> Yeah, they gotta pay it back. But they have a fantasy about doing their own business, but they're not quite ready to do it. And my first piece of advice is that: young people don't realize this, but life is, actually goes by pretty fast. And it's too short to do anything less than following you passions to follow your heart. Things that you deeply care about or the things that you should involve your life energies in. you shouldn't be preparing in a sense to follow your passions later because you may end up getting trapped in a job or a career that you, that doesn't really engage your, your deepest passions. The things you care most about. and you do it simply to make money. And, again, there's nothing wrong with making money. I think that's a very good thing. But for people to want to start their own businesses. Most entrepreneurs just go out and do it. I mean, if you look at the great entrepreneurs of this, of my generation. People like Bill Gates and, and Michael Dell and Steven Jobs. they, they were on fire and they just went out and did their businesses. And they, it's, it's so follow your passions. Follow your heart. Follow your bliss. However you want to call it, I think is a key strategy for not only business but for life. >> I think you can make a difference as an entrepreneur, as a customer, as an employee, as a citizen, and a community member. I know not everyone wants to start a business but everyone can make a difference. You have the tools now to think differently about a business, first as an entrepreneur. And you can start something that matters. Maybe it starts with a pain point in your life. Maybe it starts with something like Tom's Shoes. But the idea behind being an entrepreneur is often times you don't think about risk. I remember a time in which my son and I were talking about Red Goat Records and an MBA student asked us, asked him as a young guy, how did he think about the risk of doing this to his career? And he had an interesting answer. He said, I never thought about the risk until you just raised the question. You feel the passion to do something and the risk is in not doing it. As a customer, you can pay attention to the companies you do business with. You give them your hard earned dollars. You can pay attention to how their products are made. You can pay attention to the conditions under which those products are made and sold. You can pay attention to what those companies are dong, how they're making society better, how they're making your life better. As an employee, you can engage. So many people in the world today go to work every day, and they are not engaged in what their companies are doing. Now I'm not arguing it's always their fault. But sometimes you can push, you can try to make your company purpose oriented. This is hard to do and again I don't want to be Pollyanna about this but you can think about one or two things you can do maybe within the work group that you're in, to make your company a better place. You can think about as a citizen, as a community member, about being active, about the companies that are in your community. What are they doing? Are they community destroyers? Are they community builders? Are they good citizens? There's a lot that needs to be changed in the world. Business has to be a part of that change, and we need to be able to do it for ourselves, as well as our companies. I'd like you to think about the issues we've talked about for the past several weeks, and discuss them in the discussion forum. Focus on what are the two or three important ideas from your perspective. Why are they important? And what are you going to do with them?
