Digital Ventures

I am a “car guy” and so I happened upon a great story on Autoblog today and I wanted to share the video and the story about Porsche collector Magnus Walker.

To me it made me think of the “slow food” movement when watching…I felt this guy had achieved his life mission, had a great time, loved what he was doing in the moment…all almost the opposite of today’s way of thinking about Entrepreneurship where it’s all about “speed” of execution and getting big fast or getting out!

It was about a mans life, his passions and what happens when you have a simple goal: “freedom”. He took 28 years to get to today building many successful businesses along the way. No shoot for the moon or swing for the fences here.

In his case from nothing, no education, he grew several successful businesses – against everything we are taught at business school!

In each case he sort of fell into projects and ways to build businesses, grew them and made money all the while still being able to stay “free” and do what he wanted with his life. He didn’t raise and VC, he didn’t have a ton of advisors, he followed his passions and they lead him to build these businesses and a worldwide name for himself.

I am sure there is more to the story, lots of hard work no doubt and more besides…what struck me was the fact that he is my age, he seems very happy and has been very successful taking a totally “alternate” route to his success.

Success can then be measured not by money, or what others think of you, but in following your passion and achieving your own personal goals…in this case his is the same as mine = freedom!

I found his story inspirational and it resonated with me in many ways.

Outside the lesson here about following your passion and actually knowing what drives you and aiming for that (freedom in this case) he also made another point and that was many times you have to take a leap of faith in life and he did this again and again and he used “his gut” as the barometer for whether these decisions were the right thing to do or not.

In my life, any time I have gone against my own gut feeling it’s been bad, a bad decision or bad outcome, so again I thought what simple and telling advice from this humble guy…indeed in just a few minutes this guy covers almost all the core life lessons I would give any budding Entrepreneur (and are in my book)!

Watch his TED talk to learn more below