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If you don't have a voice that forces you back to basics, you're a dangerous person. Or to put it another way: You're at risk, and the people with you are at risk. I'm not a daredevil. I don't fly without a safety net.
Without in any way minimising the economic and psychological blow that people experience when they lose their jobs, the unemployed in affluent countries still have a safety net, in the form of social security payments, and usually free healthcare and free education for their children. They also have sanitation and safe drinking water.
Bottom line is, I didn't return to Apple to make a fortune. I've been very lucky in my life and already have one. When I was 25, my net worth was $100 million or so. I decided then that I wasn't going to let it ruin my life. There's no way you could ever spend it all, and I don't view wealth as something that validates my intelligence.
Technology has a shadow side. It accounts for real progress in medicine, but has also hurt it in many ways, making it more impersonal, expensive and dangerous. The false belief that a safety net of sophisticated drugs and machines stretches below us, permitting risky or lazy lifestyle choices, has undermined our spirit of self-reliance.
Leap, and the net will appear.
I keep anywhere between 5-10 percent of my net worth in venture ideas.
Africa's informal economy is one of the most innovative and inventive environments in the world. Yet it is an environment with little regulation in which workers are often exposed to hard conditions and live without a safety net.
At the end of my life, is it better to say that I empowered people to make great stuff, or that I died with a net worth of $10 billion? Obviously I'm picking the former, although I would not mind both.
Your net worth to the world is usually determined by what remains after your bad habits are subtracted from your good ones.
People's jobs are the biggest asset that they have. The net present value of your job is worth more than your house or your stock portfolio. As people decide whether they're going to buy a car, they're more concerned about whether they have a job and are likely to have a job next year.