True Success

The way that you carry out your work, you're almost like a private equity firm. You're a nonprofit, but you operate like a private equity firm. You're helping to finance all these entrepreneurs around the world. So what are some of the common traits that you see in the entrepreneurs who succeed that you have helped?

They grabbed the chances that life affords them. These are people born on the bottom of the pyramid. They get very few chances compared to most of us today who probably will watch a podcast, you know, is you get very few chances when you're bottom of the pyramid. Very, very few opportunities. They're not going to give those up. They want to grab them totally when those opportunities come their way. They remember that they will not succeed alone. Now and I think that's the important part here, the lesson we have learned watching these ladies, is that because they come from a social context that is desperately poor, that doesn't have any services at all. No help at all. They have learned how to rally each other. Right. So they survive by helping each other. When they start to do well, when they grab these opportunities, they don't forget that lesson. So they bring into their workplace that same lesson that helped them survive on one dollar a day. Okay. We're gonna work together. So that's a total lesson. The fourth lesson that I would have for these ladies is they are given to celebration with endless celebration. I mean, if ever you feel down in life, you and your daughter give me a ring. I will ring up one of these ladies and say can you host them for a day or two days? You will come back on the top of the world. It's the endless celebration.

I think it's because they've lived, you know, with so much hardship that there's so much to celebrate.

Exactly right. I call it living in the eternal present. They live in the eternal present. They forget about the past and don't worry about the future. Hey, by golly, we accomplished this today. Let's celebrate each other. And I think if we all did it, we'd be happy people, too.