Building a Team
What is the mindset you need to have to build a sustainable team?
I think what you have to do, and what I've done is to think beyond yourself.
It's not enough to just want to be successful for yourself. Or be financially free just for yourself.
What is the level above that? The answer is–how do you make the other people around you successful and financially free as well.
Not successful in your terms or your definition of success, but successful in their own estimation.
So whatever success means for them, that's really what you should focus on every single day. How do you build an organization that allows everyone to flourish in their own environment?
You can't do it when you have five employees, but you can do it when you have a hundred, 200, or 300 people.
At Blackstone, we have a little over 300 employees today, and there's enough room for everybody to grow and to be able to flourish.
If you look at the successful–really successful–entrepreneurs on the planet, they're thinking with a bigger game. And they're making a lot of people a lot of money and they're making a lot of people very successful as opposed to just themselves
And that’s a big difference between those looking for long term sustainability versus getting rich.
I enjoy seeing other people fulfill their own dreams and get what they want out of life; being able to facilitate that is a great reward. And I think it's a greater reward than just making money for yourself, you know?
It's a bigger cause.