Richard Branson [Branson - The Virgin Way: Everything I Know About Leadership

Dont enjoy it? Dont do it!

From my very first commercial venture at age sixteen with Student magazine, right up to todays far loftier adventures with such things as Virgin Galactic and space tourism, I have always had one paramount philosophy: if a new project or business opportunity doesnt excite me and get my entrepreneurial and innovative juices flowing, if its not something with which I sense I can make a difference while having a lot of seriously creative fun, then Id far rather pass on it and move right along to something else that does excite me.

This same line of thought flows into my attitude towards writing books: if I dont enjoy writing them, then the chances are pretty good that nobody is going to be too happy reading them. The simple fact is that if you dont enjoy what youre doing and the people with whom youre doing it, then there is no possible way that you are ever going to do it as well as something that you do enjoy. As some wise person once said, Life is not a dress rehearsal . This is it! So unless you plan to give it a better shot in your next life assuming you are lucky enough to get a second chance then why risk wasting any of your limited time on this earth doing stuff that doesnt light your fire?

I am constantly amazed at how many people appear to live their lives either always looking in the rear-view mirror or talking about how things are going to be different in the future. There is nothing wrong with cherishing and enjoying memories and hopefully learning from past experiences just as planning for the future is something we obviously all have to do as well but what about today? All too frequently now gets lost in the frenetic shuffle to rush ahead to tomorrow. Face it: these are the good old days that youll be looking back on twenty years from now so why not move heaven and earth to enjoy them while youve got them?

Mahatma Gandhi is one of my all-time heroes, and a quote from him that I think I first read in a school history lesson has stuck with me ever since: Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever. This good advice has been popularly abbreviated to, Live every day as if it were your last , which is a wonderful sentiment even if it has frequently become a worldwide rallying cry for never-mind-the-consequences hell-raisers. I remember well the one time (as an apprentice hell-raiser) I tried using the latter version on my mum as an excuse for some mischief or other. But Mum, I implored, I was only doing what Gandhi said I should do. Unimpressed, she gave me a straight-faced reply of, Pull that trick again, Ricky, and today could very well be your last!

Actually the best quote on living every day like its your last belongs to Steve Jobs, who in a commencement speech he made at Stanford University in 2005 said, If you live every day like its your last, someday youll almost certainly be right. It would be funny but for the fact he courageously gave the address just twelve months after he had been diagnosed with the cancer that would kill him six years later.

As fallible human beings we all make our share of mistakes and get ourselves into the kind of predicaments that result from making the wrong choices, but in the vast majority of such situations we all have the ability to pause, take stock and say, Sorry, but Im really not happy with this so Im out of here. I recognise that in a lot of instances particularly when friends and family are involved this may be easier said than done and taking any such drastic action usually calls for a lot of courage. However, as the old adage goes, when you make mistakes at least try to make them quickly.

I have often had people say to me, Well, sure, Richard, all that stuff is easy for you to say when youve built your business and youve pretty much made it in life. To this my response is always along the lines of, Yes, thats true to a degree. But why do you think I have all those companies? They almost certainly wouldnt be there had I not repeatedly dug my heels in and refused to spend my time on things I recognised as just not right for me. One of the earliest examples of a situation in which I felt off-kilter was my time at school. When I shocked my parents as well as friends by dropping out of the prestigious Stowe School at age sixteen, I did it with my young eyes wide open in order to pursue a dream of starting my own magazine publishing business. In my heart of hearts I knew that making Student magazine a success simply didnt necessitate me spending any more of my precious time sitting in stuffy classrooms. The idea of spending another couple of years memorising mind-numbing facts from textbooks, wrestling with the joys of calculus and defining little-known Latin verbs seemed totally irrelevant to my future life and so I had to escape or risk losing my sanity.

Please dont misinterpret this as some kind of burn your books, anti-education tirade quite the opposite. Availing yourself of the best education you can get is an imperative particularly in todays ultra competitive commercial world. When I went to school, however, learning was much more of a memorisation and regurgitation process than it seems to be today. The old way was particularly challenging for someone like me with dyslexia and borderline ADD attention deficit disorder. There were several excellent teachers who did make their subjects come to life, but with my early-stage entrepreneurial juices starting to flow I had mentally moved on already. The paradoxical twist is that ever since I dropped out of school I have spent the balance of my life with a thirst for learning about new things, businesses, people and cultures. The big difference, of course, is that my learning process has involved experiencing all these things first-hand as opposed to reading about them in books or third-hand from someone who frequently had never lived outside of academia.