The Quest For Success

PERFORMANCE: In a world of performance and the quest for wealth, what does that mean to you? The world itself looks at wealth in monetary terms. What is your interpretation of what it is we’re looking for?

RICHARD: Well, I think that a “quest for wealth”, per se, is not a particularly satisfying thing to do. But having a quest or quests is very satisfying. If the by-product of those quests is that wealth is created, and you use that wealth productively, that’s satisfying. In my own particular case, I originally wanted to start a magazine. When I was fifteen years old, I wanted to put the world right. The Vietnamese war was raging, and I wanted to do my little bit to stop it. In order for that magazine to survive, I had to become an entrepreneur. I had to become a businessman—I had to worry about the paper manufacturing and the distribution, the marketing and so on. The end result was that it became successful. I could then set about challenging myself to make a difference in other areas. I love music, so I found a particular band that I loved the music of, and we couldn’t find anybody else to put them out, so I decided to form a record company. Now, the end product of forming that record company, the product of signing bands like the Rolling Stones, Genesis and Janet Jackson, was wealth. But that was not where I got my satisfaction.

I got my satisfaction from creating a great record company that I was proud of.

PERFORMANCE: So, the old adage of “follow your bliss, follow your passion” is what’s been leading you, really, all along.

RICHARD: Yes, and I think that the most successful people are the people who do not sit down and think, “How can I make a fortune?” It’s people who have a passion for something, for instance when I moved into the airline business, I hated flying on other people’s airlines, and I felt I could do it better. If I was looking for wealth from doing it, everybody would have advised me that I was mad. But my reason for doing it was creating the kind of airline that I’d like to fly. As it turned out, I created Virgin Atlantic that I liked to fly and other people liked to fly, and twenty years later it’s enormously successful. We’ve managed to sell 49 percent of it to airlines that are worth billions of dollars, and we’ve made good money from it. But if I’d actually gone into it because I thought I was going to make good money, I don’t think I would’ve made a penny.

PERFORMANCE: I think what really keeps a lot of people back is enormous fear, whether it’s enormous fear of success or failure, and sometimes you don’t know which it is. I think that one’s identity is so tied in with that success. If you could just elaborate on that in terms of your own identity and your work. I read something that really touched me, that when you sold Virgin Records, you were very emotional about it and cried, but you had to do it in order to get the airline moving.

RICHARD: Yeah, you know, I think that unless you’re doing something in life that you feel passionate about, and you feel passionate about the people, you shouldn’t be doing it. In my own particular case, I had a record company. It was very successful, I had a fantastic group of people running it. I had an airline that was less successful that was being attacked by British Airways, and they were desperately trying to put us out of business. It came to a stage where I had to sell the record company in order to protect the jobs at the record company, and also to protect the airline. It was bizarre. I sold it, and got a billion-dollar check in my pocket. I had seen the staff, and I was running down the street, tears streaming down my face, and past a newspaper that said, “Branson Sells For A Billion.” I did think it would have been quite amusing, if a photographer got a picture of this person blubbering his head off with a billion dollar check in his pocket. But I do believe that if you’re human, you’ve got to care about people.

PERFORMANCE: So what do you think has been your core strength and has made you take all these enormous risks? I mean, the sort of dangerous element of the challenges you’ve taken on physically and in business? Is there something in your childhood that has driven you to these kinds of adventurous extremes?

RICHARD: I think the adventurous side of me, I suspect, was brought out by my mother, in particular. I remember at age five, we were driving to my grandmothers’, and two miles before we got there she dropped me off in the countryside and told me to make my own way there. She would’ve gotten arrested today. I got horribly lost, but it was her way of trying to get me to stand on my own two feet. At age eight, she doesn’t even drive me, she puts me on a bicycle and tells me to ride three hundred miles to granny’s house, and so on, and so on.