‘Sometimes your best investments are the ones you don’t make.’ –Donald Trump
What do you need to succeed in business? A mixture of luck and good judgement, according to Mikhail Fridman, one of Russia’s richest men and currently head of the Alfa Group. Gorbachev’s 1980s reforms made private enterprise possible – Fridman and others like him did the rest, as can be seen from this transcript of his lecture at the Publishers’ Forum in Lvov.
I think that to become a major, very successful entrepreneur, you really need to be in the right place at the right time – a lot of things have to coincide. It would probably be difficult to become an entrepreneur in a small or a very poor country. The world is changing and becoming globalized, and the list of the richest people naturally includes Chinese, Indians, Americans and Russians – Russia is after all an enormous country with enormous resources. But the richest person in the world is the Mexican Carlos Slim, who is certainly not from the largest and richest country in the world. Nevertheless, from his beginnings in a small town he created an enormous business empire, which works practically all over the Latin American continent and successfully competes with representatives of other economies of the world, which are much larger and stronger. So I think that everyone present here who decides to devote his life to entrepreneurship has a chance of achieving virtually unlimited success.
But the most important thing is not how to become a major entrepreneur or head of enormous business projects, but how to become an entrepreneur in general. For this I believe it’s not so much the circumstances that are important, as a completely different quality – entrepreneurial talent.
photo { Zackary Canepari }
