Do you see yourself as a risk taker? Is it important in life to be willing to take a risk?
Carlos Slim: In my opinion, I never take risks. Maybe small risks, but I think I am not a risk taker. I think I am very conservative. All my life I have been very conservative. Maybe my challenges were not economic or financial, but professional. We took on very strong challenges, but the big risk was not economic, it was professional, not to fail in these big challenges.
In any profession, in any career, there are bound to be some failures. Have you suffered setbacks? Have you suffered failures? How do you deal with that?
Carlos Slim: Well yes, but like I said, small mistakes or small failures. We take small failures very often. We have failures in investment. We have failures in operation, but no big mistakes or big failures. How do we take that? Like ordinary business.
You've been known to buy companies in sectors that other people were leaving. Wasn't that risky? When businesses were failing in Mexico in the early '80s, you had the vision to buy into those businesses, knowing that they would be of great value in the years to come. What gave you the courage to do that?
Carlos Slim: Well, it was in 1982. I was 42 years old. I had good experience, and there were many factors that made it very clear that I should do that.
During the Revolution -- and that's very important, the experience of my father -- my father made his business -- buy 50 percent from his brother -- invested in Mexico. My father was very young. He had no family. He was not married. He was without so much roots in the country, and he stayed in Mexico, and you cannot make any comparison with the revolution. Yet, he invested during that time, and he worked hard in this time after 1911 to 1920 during all these times.
When you read about what happened, in the U.S. in the '30s, it was clear that the country was not finished. We had a big problem (in the 1980s) because the fiscal deficit was very high, but also because the interest rates went above 20. It was 21 or 22 prime rate. The price of the companies was crazy. Not only the values were very low. That was really very, very low. Let's say three percent of the book value, or five percent of the book value. It was crazy. Very, very low.
There were available businesses (to buy). Because in our country, the companies have a "group of control" regularly, because they're not such big companies. Also, there is a group, a person or through the bank, that the controller of the companies is there. In these years, the U.S. companies -- the foreign companies -- want to sell, because to be investing in Mexico was not good, and they sold out these Mexican operations. The banks sold the assets, and many people wanted to sell everything, and we were the only buyers.
Excerpt from Interview with Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com
If a young person came to you for advice, "How do I make the most out of my life?" what would you say to them?
Jeff Bezos: Do something you're very passionate about, and don't try to chase what is kind of the 'hot passion' of the day. I think we actually saw this. I think you see it all over the place in many different contexts, but I think we saw it in the Internet world quite a bit, where, at sort of the peak of the Internet mania in -- say 1999 -- you found people who were very passionate of something, and they kind of left that job and decided, "I'm going to do something on the Internet because it's almost like the 1849 Gold Rush in a way." I mean, you find that people -- if you go back and study the history of the 1949 Gold Rush you find that, at that time, everybody who was within shouting distance of California was -- you know, they might have been a doctor, but they quit being a doctor and they started panning for gold, and that almost never works. And, even if it does work, according to some metric, financial success, or whatever it might be, I suspect it leaves you ultimately unsatisfied. So, you really need to be very clear with yourself.
And I think one of the best ways to do that is this notion of projecting yourself forward to age 80, looking back on your life, and trying to make sure you've minimized the number of regrets you have. That works for career decisions. It works for family decisions. I have a 14-month old son, and it's very easy for me to -- if I think about myself when I'm 80, I know I want to watch that little guy grow up, and so it's -- I don't want to be 80 and think, "Shoot! You know, I missed that whole thing, and I don't have the kind of relationship with my son that I wished I had," and so on and so on.
Another thing that I would recommend to people is that they always take a long-term point of view. I think this is something about which there's a lot of controversy. A lot of people -- and I'm just not one of them -- believe that you should live for the now. I think what you do is think about the great expanse of time ahead of you and try to make sure that you're planning for that in a way that's going to leave you ultimately satisfied. This is the way it works for me. There are a lot of paths to satisfaction and you need to find one that works for you.
Excerpt from Interview with Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Co-Founders of Google:
Were there any particular books that were especially important to you along the way?
Sergey Brin: I remember really enjoying (Richard) Feynman's books. He had several autobiographical books, and I read them. It seemed like a very great life he led. Aside from making really big contributions in his own field, he was pretty broad-minded. I remember he had an excerpt where he was explaining how he really wanted to be a Leonardo, an artist and a scientist. I found that pretty inspiring. I think that leads to having a fulfilling life. Beyond that, just within the computer field, there are classical books I still find impressive, like Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. That was really ten years ahead of its time. It kind of anticipated what's going to happen, and I find that really interesting.
