No one can argue with the fact that Richard Branson has made his life a success.
He’s danced between the line of huge successes and huge failures, and luckily for him, success won the battle hands down… but I don’t believe it was luck that guaranteed him success. There are a few key reasons why I believe he is as successful as he is today, and I’ll share them with you in the hope that you can take away some of this wisdom and apply it to your own life.
The first is that Branson had a pretty unique upbringing that encouraged entrepreneurial thinking: when he was a child, his mother would drop him off in a field, far away from home with nothing but a compass—his challenge was to find his own way home. You may think this was a pretty extreme approach, but his mother’s positive attitude and blind faith in her son’s ability to find his own way home nurtured the entrepreneurial skills that I believe have lead Branson from success to success.
Secondly, one of the things I love the most about Branson is that he doesn’t take life too seriously. He never looks stressed, grumpy or uptight. In fact, he’s usually grinning from ear to ear as he’s about to jump out of a plane or into a rocket to who knows where! It’s this lust for life and positive attitude that have allowed him to lead and motivate huge teams of people to be inspired by his vision for the Virgin empire. He says:
“You can only live once. And I just don’t want to waste a minute of my life.”
Lastly, Branson is not afraid of failure. His mantra is to “be bold” and to “challenge yourself“: traits that are not viable if you’re worried about failure. He believes that to succeed, you need to be ready to fall over a few times first.
“You don’t learn to walk by following the rules. You learn by doing, and falling over.”
And so, to celebrate the man that is Richard Branson, I’d like to share with you a collection of things that he has said that I believe give a good understanding into the man that he is today. I hope these quotes inspire you to think, act, walk or maybe even talk like a man who has lived life with an incredible amount of gusto, courage and success.
