Do you agree with a founder of search that success is about compounding love?

Compounding Love Last summer, I taught a course to 14 male student-athletes at Wesleyan University: basketball players, soccer players, and rowers. The whole thing was an accident. A curriculum I had developed to help a friend who was too busy to take on my son as an intern, which both my friend and my son had rejected. I mentioned it to the rowing coach at Wesleyan, with whom I am friendly, and he talked to the basketball and soccer coaches. I went into the experiment unsure whether I even really wanted to do it. Halfway through the summer, I had trouble talking to my friends about the class without welling up with tears just thinking about bringing my 60-year-old friends into the class so I could ask them, among other things, what they are most proud of in their lives. I could see these 19- and 20-year-old men dying to know the secret, to learn from the starting point of this whole exercise at the end of a career, from the mouths of men and women with massive resumes filled with accomplishments. The biggest mistake I ever made was to believe that I was alone in this world, and I was going to exert my will to succeed despite that fact. That being a contrarian meant not just charting my own path but refusing to accept help or, in fact, love along the way. I never had the chance, my students got in those moments. You know what every one of my speakers, who built massive businesses as CEOs, or ran giant investment banks, or revolutionized the investment business, said? They aren’t proud of the deal, the money, or the front-page Wall Street Journal splash. They could give a shit about any of that. Every single one of them said it was the relationships, the people, the culture of love and caring. Yes, take risks, be a contrarian, find your path. But never do it alone. Never forget the whole point is the people. Will Thorndike, probably the most famous of all my speakers, who literally wrote the book on investments, “The Outsiders,” and who is a legendary founder of the search ecosystem, said it best when he pointed to the power of compounding mathematically over extended periods in investing and in relationships. And how they are intertwined. The best investments are when you commit to people you know, love, and admire for life. The most rewarding part of my career has not been all the big deals I have done. It’s been the men I have had the unmerited gift of mentoring. Watching them blossom, seeing them succeed. And the love I feel for them—the ability to walk through everything that I had to do alone at their side. It’s the very same reason I have fallen in love with teaching this accidental course. It gives me an altogether more profound sense of meaning than making a bunch of money. The joy of the deal lasted about 30 seconds. The pleasure of watching my students is forever. Sure, the idea is to swim upstream, but the goal, one that took me way too far to realize, is to seek love.