Editor’s note: This article was first published in March 2011, and its present-tense statements reflect 2011, such as Buffett will donate his fortune and Gates as the businessman he is today.
“Good kids go to heaven. Bad kids go everywhere.”
A new study looks at the mindset that defines the world’s most important millionaires and business leaders today. Being disobedient and having a rebellious character increases your chances of success in life and in business.
The psychological reasoning is very simple. A person who doesn’t follow basic rules tends to do what other people consider riskier. As youngsters, these people wouldn’t let anyone tell them what they could or couldn’t do, and that alone is a trait that can steer you towards entrepreneurship, so that you never have a boss breathing down your neck.
These children are also described as people who don’t settle into established rules and who have a strong tendency to take risks. The downside is that they take risks without thinking about the consequences.
Bill Gates: He broke the rules on his university campus and lacked business ethics. It’s said that he had to be “kept on a short leash” when he negotiated with suppliers or partners. At the same time, he showed very little respect for commercial agreements. What we’d see as a “cheat” is what turned him into the businessman he is today. He was the first to give meaning to the expression “to innovate is to copy and then transform”.
Steve Jobs: He wasn’t a bad son, according to his adoptive parents. He was all heart, but it was a rebellious heart full of passion, which led him to disobey his parents and drop out of university. Of course, according to Steve Jobs himself, if he hadn’t left university he would never have designed the Mac. You can read about Steve Jobs’s early days.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin (Google): They were good kids, by all accounts, although both had very distinctive personalities that didn’t follow rules or protocol. To get an idea, you only need to step into Google’s headquarters, where employees dress however they like and bikes are parked in the middle of the corridors. When the market said no to search engines, they said: “What do you mean, no?” When they were told they were wasting their time with their business idea, they argued that that’s what time is for: to be spent. In the end, it seems things haven’t gone too badly for them.
Warren Buffett: The incorrigible rebel. Buffett is said to have set a record for punishments as a child, since he was never home at the time his parents set, and of course doing business at the age of 7 is something some parents don’t take too well. Rebellious, but a negotiator from a very young age. This has made him not only a millionaire and an investment professional, but also someone who won’t accept the world as it is, which is why he will give away the largest fortune ever donated to philanthropic causes.
Mark Zuckerberg: If you’ve seen the film The Social Network, you’ll have an idea of how rebelliousness can feed into business success.
So if you’re a parent and your child drives you up the wall every minute of the day, don’t look at it in a negative light: the one smashing your dishes could be the next great entrepreneur of the century.
Further reading
Featured image: Joi Ito from Inbamura, Japan, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
.jpg){kind=link}