Image via WikipediaMy personal hero in tech Larry Ellison (Larry Ellison, Larry Ellison's Personal Life) often talks in terms of paradigm shifts. When entire industries collapse that is a tectonic paradigm shift. When banks collapsed in New York and freed up tech talent for tech startups, that was a paradigm shift. Larry's own life is full of paradigm shifts. My favorite detail probably is when one of his wives left him for a Harvard MBA. Wait, there is another. One of his wives had the option to take the family pickup or Oracle stocks. She picked the pickup truck.
Larry Ellison's Personal Life
The very best entrepreneurs cascade from paradigm shift to paradigm shift. Ordinary mortals don't even see the tsunami coming. When you ride the wave - you could also call it the tiger - a lot of your assumptions get challenged. What was just true is no longer true. And that is a hard thing to navigate. The ordinary person feels tremendously unsafe when that happens.
I look at the details of Larry's personal life, one failed marriage after another, and the many paradigm shifts Oracle has navigated, and no wonder I think his biography reads like fascinating.
Freshly divorced yet one more time Larry shot this email to a friend: "Congrats on getting and staying married!"
A trailblazing entrepreneur necessarily navigates all sorts of socio-economic paradigms, half the time remaining oblivious to the social realities that is landscape to most other people.
Larry went ahead and bought a boat, and that sent his first wife into therapy. She figured it was between insanity and divorce. She picked divorce. Would you blame her? I wouldn't. He didn't.
No comments:
Post a Comment