If AI is going to do more and more work on our behalf, if in 20 years we're going to have fewer jobs, the real design challenge, the innovation challenge our society will face is: how do we recreate the opportunity to define your identity, to connect with other people, and to give meaning to your life if the traditional idea of working, of a job, won't exist anymore?
In reading the book, your book, The Human Side of Innovation, you made me... I've had over a hundred guests on my podcast, and I think of all of them, you've made me think more deeply about the impact of the human side of all of this. So, thank you for that. And I've watched a number of video interviews with you, and one of the things you say is that innovation is an act of love. How did you come to that? And were you always that way? Did this evolve for you?
It's a realization that came after trying to really study what drives humans to innovate. Why do we do that? Why do we need to create new things and evolve? And so if you do what philosophers do, what scientists do, what kids, children do, you ask yourself why, and then again why, and again why, you arrive at the root cause and the first moment in which the thing happened and the key reason why it happened. That takes you back to the beginning of time, to the time in prehistoric times when there was a woman or a man that decided to take what was available in nature and modify it. They took two stones and they scratched them one with the other and they created the first tool, the first thing that was not what God or mother nature created for us but was modified by a human being. And why did they do that? They did it first of all to protect themselves, to hunt, then to prepare their food, later on to decorate their bodies, to express themselves, to decorate their environments, later on to celebrate mother nature and the gods. Think about the statues and the decoration of the caves. So if you look at all these acts, they're all connected to what Maslow codified many, many years later into his hierarchy of needs. The base is the physiological needs and safety. Then there is this need all about self-expression, belonging and connecting with others, all the way to the creation of meaning, purpose, why we exist, what is the sense of my life. So by definition all these acts were acts of love and generosity towards yourself and people close to you. You were doing it really to serve yourself, as like an act of love towards yourself and the people close to you. Then at a certain point we started to specialize and so we started to create more and more tools and it was better if I will do the one for hunting and you will do the one for decorating the body and somebody else will do the one for celebrating the gods. At that point we needed to invent something to exchange these goods and we invented barter and then later on the idea of currency and then borrowing currency and then exchanging goods and then we started to produce and organize ourselves in corporations and then in companies. So fast forward to today, we have a completely different kind of scale and we started to forget why we started to do all of this. Why we were creating products, objects and then later on services. We're doing it again to help each other, to really support each other in our communities. And instead today we are confusing so many times death with the reach of fame and wealth and success. And we're not understanding that even if you reach the fame, the wealth, the success, if there is not love behind it in the way these companies, these brands, ourselves as leaders create these products and we serve our communities, we help our society, we connect with our planet, then we're going to create a collective of people that are not happy, that are not satisfied, that are not fulfilling their life in the best possible way. We are confusing the two things and so this message of design is an act of love, innovation is an act of love, the two things are equivalent, is a reminder to society, not just to the companies, that we should go back to the reason why we started all of this because that's what we need in the world today more than ever.
Yeah. And I don't think this is front and center with most businesses because they do talk about their consumers, not human beings that they're creating a better experience for. If most companies realized that looking at it, approaching it the way you're describing would create so much more material value for them, you think they would do it, but they're really missing this. Why do you think we've lost our way in, I guess, in large part?
I think that this approach is creating material value today much more than in the recent past. And let me explain. If you are a big corporation, until a few years ago, you could build huge barriers to entry through scale of production, of communication and distribution, and eventually through patents for your products. Now if you are a big company, there is a high probability that at the beginning your product was really valuable for people. That's how you grew from a small reality to a big one. But over time the world changes. You may have new competition. The needs of people evolve and so your product that was so valuable at the beginning may not be that valuable anymore. But if there is this dynamic balance in the industry where the products that you find when you go to the store, whatever the store is, are somehow all similar to one another and they all offer specific solutions with all the pros and cons, you know, things that work well but eventually are not ideal. But if this is what people were offered, this was just the reality. And with those barriers to entry, you are protecting the kind of system, the kind of business, those kind of products. And that kind of business model worked very, very well for decades for so many companies. But in the past 20 years and especially in the past 10, that got even more accelerated. Something changed dramatically. Today, anybody, any individual, you, me, anybody in the world can come up with an idea and get access to funding for that idea in a much easier way than 10, 20, 30 years ago. Because of the proliferation of investment funds, they're looking for the next startup, the next big idea to build the next startup. Many kids out of school, they don't dream anymore to work in a big corporation. They dream to create their own company. There is so much pride. I was talking with a few professors from Harvard recently and they were so proud of me on naming how many students build their own startup and how many unicorns, meaning, you know, the billion-dollar companies, came out of Harvard and these students. So there is this kind of mindset and it's easier to find the money now. The cost of producing goods is going down, driven by globalization, new technologies, and AI and robotics will bring that cost even further down. So the combination of these things is giving many people the possibility to create new companies, new enterprises, new products more than ever. And then finally, you can go directly to the consumers, the users, the people out there to sell them your products through the digital channels, the e-commerce channels, and you can communicate those products and build your brands through the digital channels, especially the social media channels. So once again, these were all the areas where these big companies were building barriers to entry. If you didn't have the millions or hundreds of millions or sometimes billions of dollars to invest in manufacturing or to invest in communication of these big companies, or if you didn't have access to the big retailers, the mass distribution, it was almost impossible to compete with the big ones. Today you can. And by the way, on top of it, globalization is creating also competition from regions of the world where you didn't have before competition. So all of this is creating a reality where as a company you don't know anymore what will hit you in the near future, what new products will arrive, what kind of products will come to market. So there is this uncertainty. You have no idea. And on top of it you have the certainty that sooner or later if your product is not excellent, is not ideal, sooner or later somebody will arrive and will hit you. And again you may have a product that is very functional but it's not beautiful. Or you may have a product that is functional, beautiful but not sustainable. Or maybe it's functional, beautiful, sustainable but the experience is not great or the brand is not inspiring. It's enough one area of weakness and this is exactly where competition will arrive. And so in this kind of situation, one of the most powerful competitive advantages that you can build, the meta-competitive advantage, is human-centricity, is reminding yourself that this innovation is an act of love, is creating products that are functional, beautiful, that are sustainable or healthy, with incredible experience, with incredible service. You need to have it all. And this mindset of love, this approach to the product, to the brands, to the service, with love and care, means that you're going to have people within your organization in design, in marketing, in R&D, in all the different functions that are obsessed with the creation of value for other people, that see the users, the consumers as if they were their children, their parents, their loved ones, their friends. And so even when the company is successful, especially when the company is successful, these are people that relentlessly will always think about how to better the product, the brand, the service, the solution. And this is what really builds competitive advantage for your company and creates sustainable value in time for your organization and protects you from that unexpected competitor that may arrive any moment in this market where those barriers to entry are lower than ever.
Yeah. And in the spirit of sustainable competitive advantage and all the ways you're talking about it, I was really curious. So I looked at the Milan Design Week where Samsung Electronics had the exhibition 'Design as an Act of Love' and the way the photo gallery landed on me, it looked like something that Apple should strive to achieve, like it was a next level up from what I would see from the Apple brand. That's incredible what you did there. What went into creating that exhibition?
Well, first of all, not looking at our competitors. You know, I've been working for so many years in companies where often from outside, you know, you see this tension between one brand and the other. I was in PepsiCo before. So, you can imagine what was the other brand and what was the tension. But the reality is that the best way to design, to innovate, is not to think of competition at all at the beginning and really focus on the creation of value for people. Because if you focus too much on competition, you end up creating incremental innovation, evolving the category within the typical codes of that category, of that industry. But if you think like nothing existed before, like I'm inventing mobile phones for the first time, I'm inventing TVs for the first time, and inventing a way of washing or cleaning your home for the first time. And I'm really focusing on what people need, what are the real needs, and eventually what are the frustrations with, after that, when you think about what is existing already out there as a benchmark. But if you focus on that, you unleash your imagination, you unlock opportunities that you may not have if you have a narrow view that is just focused on the industry. So this approach that you saw in Milan Design Week, it came out of really thinking about humanity and really trying to understand what people want. And one of the key needs of people is to express themselves. They want to express themselves. They want on one side to belong to specific kinds of community. In the meantime within those communities they want to differentiate themselves and be unique and original. That's why this trend of mass customization that is impacting so many different kinds of industries. So there is this big need and then another need in a society where there's so much instability, financial instability, political instability, social instability. Things are evolving so fast. There is also a lot of negativity and concerns around tech. On one side there is excitement because AI may change our life for the better. But on the other side there is concerns because AI may eventually create problems of different kinds, starting, you know, with a fear of people that AI may take our jobs as an example, or fears that AI may erode human qualities. So understanding the two dimensions is really, really important and understanding therefore how can we create a portfolio of products that really serve humanity. And so for instance one of the conclusions was that we are all different, you know, look at how we are dressed. We are dressed in a different way right now. We are in different kinds of environments. We have different houses, different living rooms. We live different kinds of lives and yet there is a high probability that our TVs look the same, our refrigerator looks the same, our phones look the same. In tech there is a huge uniformity across every product category and this uniformity is pretty recent but again is an anomaly if you think about what human needs want. You know, you buy the furniture for your living room. You know, you pay attention to the chair and the table, you buy the lighting. Eventually we put wallpaper or we paint our walls, our houses represent us. So why shouldn't our televisions as an example or our speakers do the same? Why can't I have diversity in my portfolio? Why should I tell you this is excellence, you should buy this because this is the best thing ever instead of giving you choice and give you the possibility to choose different kinds of TVs, different kinds of technological devices on the basis of your taste, your lifestyle, how you want to project yourself. So this is one of the conclusions and one of the insights that led to the kind of portfolio with the vibrancy, the diversity, the energy that reflect the human vibrancy, diversity and energy. And the other one we're talking about purpose, this idea that AI should be aimed at the service of humanity, that technology, you know, much broader than AI, technology in general should be aimed at the service of humanity. And so in the exhibit there was this idea that AI is there as a companion, as a friend, is there for you to support you. It appears when it needs to appear and then it disappears when you don't want it around. It may appear through traditional products, through your television or through a mirror or through a table or through a refrigerator and disappear when you don't need it so that those products go back to do what they're supposed to do. But it may also appear through new products with a very strong presence and identity. Like we present a few AI home devices that materialize AI and we have so many people that told us I will buy this product no matter if there is AI or not. And that was exactly the intent in so many products that I designed over time in the past many years. The brief I gave myself and to my teams was this. Even if people are not interested at all on the functionality of the product, I want a product that is so beautiful, is so inspiring, it's so original, it's so different that people will want to have it anyway because it's just a beautiful object. And we had so much of this in tech in the past. I still have today speakers from Samsung that I bought in 2007, part of the Bordeaux TV lineup and they were so beautiful that they were so original, so unique and I kept them all these years. I brought them with me here in Korea and obviously, you know, I joined Samsung just one year ago. So I brought, I kept them because I love them, not because I work at Samsung, but because they were objects, they were very original and so you build a kind of emotional attachment. So just to close, we want to dematerialize AI in certain situations and materialize AI in others and we want to build this emotional connection. We want to reflect human diversity. But then also we need to have, as we do all of this, we need to have this ethical compass, this focus on creating real value for people because design is a powerful tool and you really want to put it at the service of good values, at the service of humanity, at the service of the love and the happiness I was talking about earlier.
Yeah. Yeah. You know, to make your point about focusing on customers, not so much the competition. I built a global aerospace business. We did a lot of business in South Korea and about 60 other countries. And we had really large competitors trying to compete with us and they couldn't. And I had somebody reach out years later and ask, 'What did you do? And can I come work for you and sweep the floors just to learn?' And I said, 'Well, the big difference is all we cared about was the customers having a better experience and all you cared about was beating the competition. It was easy to beat you.' And I think that's your point. And 100% on that experience. And I think how we feel going through life is everything. And there's a lot that goes into that. And when I was looking at the photo gallery, I wish I could have experienced it in person for your exhibition at Milan Design Week, but it was just beautiful. It landed on me in a way that just felt amazing. So you achieved it at least in my eyeballs looking. I thank you for doing that. So, I'm really, really curious about how, you know, how a small or medium-sized business could incorporate this, but one of the foundational things you talk about in the book is really good answers to the wrong questions aren't going to get you anywhere. And that feels like the foundation to me, like what are the questions, the right questions that we need good answers to? What's your advice on coming up with the right questions and spending enough time there?
When I was 15, 16, I started to study philosophy at school, at high school, and that really changed my life. The methodology of the philosopher that, as I mentioned earlier, asks why, and when you get the first answer, ask why again, and then why again, and then why again, until you arrive at what they call in philosophy the primary cause or the root cause. That for me has been always very useful. So when I see a consumer behavior, a user behavior, or a behavior of people in society, because, and I mention them in this order because it's exactly this: the consumer is when you sell stuff to people. The user is broader than that, it's finally people using this stuff. Society is broader than that, it's how you create such happiness and create value for the world through what you do as a company and with your products and brands. So asking yourself why I'm creating these products, why I'm creating these brands, why people behave in a certain way, why they buy products, why they buy brands. So arriving at the primary cause through this why and asking yourself all the time why is a powerful tool. Now one thing that you will find often when you arrive at the primary cause, there is a high probability that you're going to land in the arch of needs of Maslow. So combining the two dimensions. So using Maslow always as a framework and then asking yourself why, you know, for behaviors of people and the relation between these people and your products and brands will help you to land in the right area of the Maslow pyramid. When I joined Samsung, so I've been using this at Samsung now, I've been using it in so many different companies and therefore in many different industries. When I joined Samsung, I took the Maslow pyramid. I looked at the portfolio of the company and the tech industry, you know, the broader tech industry, and I tried to understand how to translate Maslow into a framework that would make sense for our portfolio, that was easy to use and understand, and I translated Maslow into four categories. So our goal is to enrich the quality of life of people and unleash the potential of humanity of people through technology, and we want to do it by helping people live longer, better, loud, and on. Living longer is the base of Maslow. So essentially it's all our technologies, for instance the wearable technologies that help you monitor your mental and physical health, and then all the technologies that are all about your safety. The safety of your body, the safety of your loved ones, the safety of your pets, the safety of your home, the safety of your belongings. So safety, the broader meaning of safety. So we help you through technology to live longer. That's the goal. Live better is all about technology that can do things on your behalf or can help you be more productive. So AI, robots, are there to serve you. They are there to do things on your behalf or to make you more productive and to also enjoy what you're doing so that you can free time to do whatever is important to you. So that you can free time, for instance, to go to the park with your kids or to go work out or to play music. You know, I see in your background a music studio, to do what you love. And in this category, live better, you know, we want to better your life. Technology is there at the end of the day to free you up from technology. And this is a powerful one because often people in the past year ask me, but do you want to build even more technology? You know, people are already attached to those phones and those TVs and those so many technologies. Do you want to do more of that? And the goal is, if you are clear on your goal, if you have the right purpose, actually you want to free people to do whatever they want. Now they may use more technology, maybe to build their startup or to entertain themselves or to do whatever they want. But they may also use technology to free up time to do what matters the most to them. Now the decisions they will take are based on the value that they have in their heart and in their mind. So love, once again, you know, is a topic we need to talk about when we talk about technology because the way you choose to use technology is driven by your values and what you believe in. A journalist asked me, and sorry, I'm opening a parenthesis and then we'll go back to the four categories, but a journalist asked me when in Milan Design Week, again, you know, you want to create more technology, more devices, there are these husbands, they wake up in the morning and the first thing they do is to just check the phone and they don't even give a kiss or hug their wives. And my answer to the journalist was, but is the problem technology or is the husband or the wife, is the human being. Meaning that you can choose if to take that phone and check whatever you want or you can choose to prioritize the people you care about, the people you love and decide that you can postpone checking something you need to check no matter your curiosity because you understand what is important in life. So the conversation should really move from technology yes, technology not, AI yes, AI not, to what is the purpose, what drives us. And that's why I talk about love because love is important both in the way we design technology but is also important in the way we use technology. And this should be the conversation we have in podcasts, in conferences, in interviews, in any kind of social media platform and physical platform. We should talk about humanity, love. Today more than ever in the age of artificial intelligence. Now going back to the four categories, we say live better. Before it was live longer. Then there is live loud. Live loud is all about creativity, imagination, creation. So it goes from creating content for your social media platform all the way to create music, all the way to create a startup and everything else you can create with the use of technology. I'll give you an example of how human can be the use of AI and technology. A few weeks ago I was here in Seoul. I was alone and it was a weekend and my family was in Italy. I was missing them and I like to write. So I wrote a poem dedicated to my wife and I wrote one dedicated to my children. And then I asked AI to transform that poem into something that could be the lyrics for a song. Then I went to, and then I got something, then I adjusted a little bit, but I needed to rely on AI because I don't know how to write a song, you know, what is the right length of all the different words and everything. So I needed to rely on that. Then I took that and I went in an app very renowned that is used to produce music, one of the leaders up in the field, and I tried to create the song with a style that I liked. So I started to experiment with different prompts and I did dozens and dozens of experiments. At a certain point I got something, it was okay. I took the prompt and I went back to the other AI platform. I was like, can you help me building a better prompt for this kind of music for this other AI platform to build my music. So long story short, finally I created something I liked and then I went to another service to publish my music that now is available in Spotify or music. Even in Instagram, you can use it for the reels. Nobody knows how to find it because I put a different kind of name even though if you really search probably you can at the end find me somewhere there. But my goal was not to share it with the world. My goal was to share with my family members. So I took those songs and I sent them not just to my wife but also to my parents, to our parents, to a few family members, to a few super close friends. And essentially every single person answered telling me I am in tears. And I'm almost in tears now telling this story because, you know, that came straight from my heart and reached straight the heart of the people I love. In the middle there was tons of AI. But this is a beautiful example of AI at the service of humanity, of AI helping me doing something that it would have been impossible for me to do because I don't know how to write a song and for sure then I don't know how to play instruments and sing to actually create a real song. And by the way I did all of this in a few hours in an afternoon when I was lonely. So even just in that afternoon AI gave me a consolation, you know, it was there with me and let me create, being creative. So this is what live is about and then live on to close is about preserving memories. Today we preserve pictures and videos of the people we love and they are with us even if they are on the other side of the world or even if eventually sooner or later they're not on this planet anymore. The past and the future. We are essentially creating these digital twins of us. You know, we have AI that knows everything about what we do, what we think, and so on and so forth. So when people are far away, we may replicate these people, you know, with digital platforms when they're not with us anymore. If I think about my parents, they are in their 80s, when I hope they live 50 more years, but when they're not with me anymore, I would still love the possibility to ask my dad, 'What would you do if you were me in this difficult moment?' Or ask my mother, what was the recipe of the carrot cake that you were doing for me when I...
was a kid because I would like to do it for my grandchildren by then. So this is an example of, you know, a positive use of AI also for that. But once again, in these four dimensions — live longer, better, loud, and on — these are powerful tools. You need care and love and generosity to drive the use of these tools in the right way. These four categories are the categories we use to think about the future. So when you're asking what is the right question, you focus on these four categories and you're like, how can I use my products, my technologies — or this applies to any industry — but how can I use whatever I have available to me to help people living longer, living better, living on.
Yeah, you said something earlier that I think really is the biggest challenge on the planet, and it's getting aligned to someone's purpose. So I love all the technology and having options. But I also see a lot of folks that are drifting through life. They don't really have a solid purpose and they're a slave to the technology. They're afraid of it. They're just going through life in not a great place in terms of how they feel. And for me, I am so clear on my purpose. Everything I do every day, it's threaded in it. All the seeds that I plant out into the world to move things forward, everything is fully aligned. Most really have a hard time, you know, coming to terms with that and figuring out what it is. I don't think it has to be some giant thing that, you know, needs to impress everybody, but I think it has to be something. Can you say a little bit more around developing one's purpose so it's easier to feel even better and better as you go through life, happier, more fulfilled, you know, all of it, as opposed to constantly living maybe in fear?
Look, at the end of the book I talk about how to design happiness, and I'm not inventing anything here — it is human science. There are three steps that you go through in life in this quest for happiness. The first one is the definition of your identity. And you start as a kid. I mean, I have a four-year-old and a one-and-a-half-year-old, and it's clear how they are starting already to fight for their identity. I mean, this is pretty known at that age, especially the four-year-old. You know, there is this tension because this is a little person that is forming itself — and herself in this case — and is there trying to find what are the boundaries, you know, and redefine herself in opposition, in tension often with people around, but also trying to belong as well. So it's fascinating to see this, you know, how Mother Nature does this with us from the very beginning. But then we go on in life and often we get jobs and we start to associate ourselves with our job. Now sometimes we're lucky. We have jobs we're proud of and we love and we're very proud of being associated with that. In other situations we are not. We do jobs that we don't like. We wouldn't want to do it, but there is no other alternative.
And in both cases it presents opportunities. When you do things that you like and you're proud of, the risk is that you just define yourself through that job. So the moment you lose that job, you're lost. You lose your identity. And we see people that really fall into psychological trouble, even before material trouble, because maybe you don't have an income. There is a psychological trouble of losing your identity. On the other side, again, there are people that maybe do jobs they don't love and they're not happy and they don't find any other way to define themselves. You know, in this my parents have been incredible role models for me. My mom — she was, since she was a kid, she was very young, she loved writing and philosophy and literature. But she comes from a very humble family. They didn't have the money to send her to university. So they told her — even in high school she wanted to study at the Liceo Classico, where you study literature and philosophy — and instead they sent her to Ragioneria, where essentially you study finance but in a way where you don't need university, you go straight to work. So that's what she was forced to do, and then she hated what she was doing in finance, and at 38 she retired. And we were a, you know, we didn't have a high income, you know, we are a very humble family, no matter that my parents took that decision. My mother retired and she started to write poems. And she was 38, she's turning 80 in a few days, and she's been writing poems every single day of her life, a lot of them with this very Catholic focus, you know, religious focus. My father was and is an architect, but he was not a successful one, so he started to teach in high school technical drawing. He didn't like too much the work. His passion was eventually to be more of an architect, but he couldn't do it. He did very few projects in his life. But then the other passion was painting, and so I remember my father painting with all kinds of techniques, experimenting with all kinds of things since I was a kid, and I would paint with him many times. He is today 83, he's turning 84 very soon, and he's been painting all his life. The two of them together, they published eight books and they're about to publish a ninth one. But they did it by themselves, figuring out how to do it online. You can buy the books, but they don't care about selling them. They don't promote them. They're just printing them for their family members, and online it was easy to do it. And this is amazing because they found a way to define their identity no matter their job, and we'll talk later about purpose, but they gave purpose to their lives also through all of this. But the first thing again is identity. So what can people do to define their identities? Finding a balance between work and life. So if you're lucky — I wish this to everybody, I am one of those people, I think Lee, you are one of those as well — we are privileged. We love what we do at our work. But then balanced people find things to do outside of the work that define them as well. And you were telling me before the recording that you love to play music and record music and you have so many different kinds of things that you do. So no matter if you lose your job — and by the way, in your case, you know, I guess you own some of your business or anyway you live — but even if you lose your job, you have so many things that define you. And so for the people listening to us right now: what defines you beyond your job? And in your job, are you happy, or is there anything you can do to eventually try to be happy? If you are in a company or you're doing a job that doesn't make you happy, what can you do to change that? The second — I will be shorter in the second and the third. But the second step is to selflessly love people close to you, your family members, your friends, your close community. This applies also in your work environment — people, your colleagues. You know, establishing relations with some of them. You know, sometimes you work in companies with thousands of people. You can't become best friends with everybody, you don't want to. But a few, a select few, you know, to be people that you trust, that you care about, that you love, that give you the kind of warmth in the working environment where you spend so many hours of your day. But again, then make sure that you find time to do the same for people outside of your work. Too many people are just focused on working, working, working, working, and they forget that there are people out there that you want to love, and that kind of love gives you so much back. It gives you such happiness, satisfaction. And one of the biggest studies, the longest study done on happiness — I think it was done by Harvard, if I'm not wrong — showed that actually relationships are the biggest driver of happiness. So do we have these relationships? Can we build them? Is there anything we can do to get out of home and find people, force ourselves, even if we're shy, even if we're not comfortable in connecting with other people? Try, try, and this will help you so much. And again, don't do it just at work. Make sure — you know, people like us, you know, if you love so much what you're doing, you may end up not paying attention to people that are important in your life, and often many people realize this when it's too late. I realized this in two difficult moments of my life where I needed these people, and I was like, wait a second — I mean, the people that are the most important in my life, that are here for me right now, I eventually neglected them in the name of other things that I really love, you know, my job, design, and this. So we need to find the famous work-life balance that we often talk about. The third thing, the third step, is doing something bigger than yourself and your personal interests. You usually arrive to this conclusion later in life because later in life you start to feel sometimes unconsciously that life is not eternal, that sooner or later you're not going to be around anymore. So you try to defeat death and to become immortal by doing something that is bigger than you. And this goes from a little act of kindness and generosity to strangers, smiling to strangers, becoming the person in the neighborhood that everybody knows is a kind person, all the way to inventing products or companies that change the world for the better. All the way to using your platform, whatever it is — it could be a huge social media platform or it could be the platform of a few friends that you have in your community — using those platforms to spread positive messages that somehow help the neighborhoods, the community, or society as a whole. So doing these three things is vital. And today, you know, we have a new form of challenge, a challenge we're going to have more and more and more in the coming years. If AI is going to do more and more work on our behalf, if in 10 years, 20 years, we're going to have less jobs — assuming that governments will figure out how to sustain people and society — the real design challenge, innovation challenge of our society will be: how do we recreate the opportunity to define your identity, to connect with other people, and to give meaning to your life if the traditional idea of working, of job, won't exist anymore? Because once again, many of us today find their identity in their job. You find significant others, people that you love, your friends in the working environment. You give a meaning to your life through all of this. So let's keep doing that. And if you're not happy with your work, find a job and a work that gives you that. And that would be incredible. If you succeed in doing that, make sure though that you have also time for yourself to do all of these also outside the work. And then if you are not as privileged as many of us and you are forced to do a job that eventually doesn't give you all of these things, my parents told me that there is a way to recreate all of these also outside of your job and your work.
Yeah. Yeah. I believe if we're clear on the value that we want to create in the world, it doesn't matter what we do, we're going to be that person, move that direction. If something changes that doesn't change the value we want to create, we can manifest that in so many other ways. And I, you know, thinking about — I look at creating value holistically. So money is important in a business sense. It's important for a family to support it. Emotional energy, positive emotional energy, to me is the scarcest commodity on the planet. It supercharges everything else we do as a second bucket. The third bucket is the spiritual value creation around connectedness. So in all of the eight companies I've started so far, I am very intentional about creating value in all three categories. And it's interesting how I've never had a leader quit, ever. The biggest one that I sold for well into nine figures in 2016 — it was a 20-year ramp-up to get there from zero. And I was way more excited about where I was going after that. And I wasn't even intending to sell the company. They just came in and gave us an incredible offer — 3x what normally you would get for a company like that. And the reason I think I went through it that way, where it doesn't matter where I'm at, I'm going to create value this way — so I wasn't tied to that as my identity. And I see the same challenge with kids. They might be a sports star, maybe they play football or baseball or something, and they get injured and it just about destroys them emotionally. But if they're focused on creating value intentionally, they can shift that a number of different directions. Does that resonate with you? And I'm never going to quit working. I just want to keep working with thousands and thousands of employees and creating value. And this is so much fun. I'm 65. I hope I get another 65 years. This is amazing.
