- 英文原文 -

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I visited Google a few weeks ago and, after almost getting arrested, my mind was blown.

First, Claudia wandered into the garage where they were actually making or fixing the driverless cars. When they finally realized she was wandering around, security had to escort her out.

We got scared and we thought we were going to get in trouble or thrown out.

Then we met with a friend high up at Google and learned some of the things Google was working on.

Nothing was related to search. Everything was related to curing cancer (a bracelet that can make all the cancer cells in your body move towards the bracelet), automating everything (cars just one of those things), Wi-Fi eveywhere (Project Loon) and solving other 'billion person problems'.

A problem wasn't considered worthy unless it could solve a problem for a billion people.So now Alphabet is aligning itself towards this strategy: a holding company that owns and invests in other companies that can solve billion person problems.

It's not divided up by money. It's divided up by mission.I want to do this in my personal life also.Just analyzing Larry Page's quotes from the past ten years is a guidebook for 'billion person success' and for personal success.

Here are some of his quotes (in bold):

'If you're changing the world, you're working on important things. You're excited to get up in the morning.'

To have well-being in life you need three things: A) a feeling of competence or growth. B) good emotional relationships. C) freedom of choice.

Being able to wake up excited in the morning is an outcome of well-being.

Feeling like every day you are working on a billion-person problem will give you those three aspects of well-being.At the very least, when I wake up I try to remember to ask: Who can I help today?Because I'm a superhero and this is my secret identity.

'Especially in technology, we need revolutionary change, not incremental change.'

Too often we get stuck in 'good enough'. If you build a business that supports your family and maybe provides for retirement then that is 'good enough'.

If you write a book that sells 1000 copies then that is 'good enough'

You ever wonder why planes have gotten slower since 1965? The Dreamliner 787 is actually slower than the 747.

That's ok. It's good enough to get people across the world and save on fuel costs.

It's only the people who push past the 'good enough syndrome' that we hear about: Elon Musk building a space ship. Larry Page indexing all knowledge. Elizabeth Holmes potentially diagnosing all diseases with a pin prick.

Isaac Asimov wrote classic science fiction like 'The Foundation Series' but it wasn't good enough for him. He ended up writing 500 more books, writing more books than anyone in history.

Larry Page keeps pushing so that every day he wakes up knowing he's going to go past 'good enough' that day.

What does your 'good enough' day look like. What's one thing that moves you past that?

My job as a leader is to make sure everybody in the company has great opportunities, and that they feel they're having a meaningful impact and are contributing to the good of society.

Whenever I've managed companies and have had the small opportunity to be a leader I've judged my success on only one thing:

Does the employee at night go home and call his or her parents and say, 'guess what I did today!'

I'm not sure this always worked. But I do think Larry Page lifts all his employees to try to be better versions of themselves, to try to surpass him, to try and change the world.

If each employee can say, 'who did I help today' and have an answer, then that is a good leader.

Empowering others, empowers you.

'Lots of companies don't succeed over time. What do they fundamentally do wrong? They usually miss the future.'

The stock market is near all time highs. And yet every company in the original Dow Jones market index (except for GE) has gone out of business.

Even US Steel, which built every building in the country for an entire century, has gone bankrupt.

Never let the practical get in the way of the possible.

It's practical to focus on what you can do right now.

But give yourself time in your life to wonder what is possible and to make even

the slightest moves in that direction.

We're at maybe 1% of what is possible. Despite the faster change, we're still moving slow relative to the opportunities we have. I think a lot of that is because of the negativity... Every story I read is Google vs someone else. That's boring. We should be focusing on building the things that don't exist.

Sometimes I want to give up on whatever I'm working on. I'm not working on major billion person problems.

And sometimes I think I write too much about the same thing. Every day I try to think, 'What new thing can I write today' and I actually get depressed when I can't think of something totally new.

But I am working on things that I think can help people. And if you are out side of people's comfort zones, if you are breaking the normal rules of society, people will try to pull you down.

Larry Page didn't want to be defined by Google for his entire life. He wants to be defined by what he hasn't yet done. What he might even be afraid to do.

I wonder what my life would be like if I started doing all the things I was afraid to do. If I started defining my life by all the things I have yet to do.

'Many leaders of big organizations, I think, don't believe that change is possible. But if you look at history, things do change, and if your business is static, you're likely to have issues.'

Guess which company had the original patent that ultimately Larry Page derived his own patent (that created google) from?

Go ahead. Think a second. Guess.

An employee of this company created the patent and tried to get them to use it to catalog information on the web.

They refused.

So Robin Li, an employee of The Wall Street Journal, quit the newspaper of capitalism (who owned his patent), moved to China (a communist country), and created Baidu.

And Larry Page modified the patent, filed his own, and created Google.

And the Wall Street Journal got swallowed up by Rupert Murdoch and is dying a slow death.

'I think as technologists we should have some safe places where we can try out new things and figure out the effect on society.'

A friend of mine is writing a novel but is afraid to publish it. 'Maybe it will be bad,' he told me.

Fortunately we live in a world where experimentation is easy. You can make a 30 page novel, publish it on Amazon for nothing, use an assumed name, and test to see if people like it.

Heck, I've done it. And it was fun.

Mac Lethal is a rapper who has gotten over 200 million views on his YouTube videos. Even Ellen had him on her show to demonstrate his skills.

I asked him, 'do you get nervous if one of your videos gets less views than others?'

He told me valuable advice: 'Nobody remembers your bad stuff. They only remember your good stuff.'

I live by that

'If we were motivated by money, we would have sold the company a long time ago and ended up on a beach'

Larry Page and Sergey Brin wanted to be academics. When they first patented Google, they tried to sell to Yahoo for $1 million (ONE MILLION DOLLARS).

When Yahoo laughed them out the door, they tried to sell to Excite for $750,000.

Excite laughed them out the door. Now an ex-employee of Google is the CEO of Yahoo. And the founder of Excite works at Google. Google dominates.

Money is a side effect of trying to help others, trying to solve problems, trying to move beyond the 'good enough'.

So many people ask: 'how do I get traffic?' That's the wrong question.

If you ask every day, 'How did I help people today?' then you will have more traffic and money than you could have imagined.

'Invention is not enough. Tesla invented the electric power we use, but he struggled to get it out to people. You have to combine both things: invention and innovation focus, plus the company that can commercialize things and get them to people.'

Everyone quotes the iconic story of Thomas Edison 'failing' 10,000 times to get the electric light bulb working.

I put failing in quotes because he was doing what any scientist does. He does many experiments until one works.

But what he did that was truly remarkable was convince New York City a few weeks later to light up their downtown using his lights.

The first time ever a city was lit up at night with electricity

That's innovation. That's how the entire world got lit up.

'If you say you want to automate cars and save people's lives, the skills you need for that aren't taught in any particular discipline. I know - I was interested in working on automating cars when I was a Ph.D. student in 1995.'

Too often we get labeled by our degree and our job titles. Larry Page and Elon Musk were computer science majors. Now they build cars and space ships.

David Chang was a competitive golfer as a kid, majored in religious studies in college, and then had random gopher jobs in his 20s.

The gopher jobs all happened to be in restaurants so he became familiar with how the business was run.

Then he started probably the most popular restaurant in NYC, momofoku. A dozen or so restaurants later, he is one of the most successful restauranteurs in history.

Peter Thiel worked as a lawyer in one of the top law firms in NY. When he quit in order to become an entrepreneur, he told me that many of his colleagues came up to him and said, 'I can't believe you are escaping'.

Escaping the labels and titles and hopes that everyone else has for us is one of the first steps in Choosing Ourselves for the success we are meant to have.

We define our lives from our imagination and the things we create with our hands.

'It really matters whether people are working on generating clean energy or improving transportation or making the Internet work better and all those things. And small groups of people can have a really huge impact.'

What I love about this quote is that he combines big problems with small groups.

A small group of people created Google. Not Procter & Gamble. Or AT&T.

Even at Apple, when Steve Jobs wanted to create the Macintosh, he moved his small group to a separate building so they wouldn't get bogged down in the big corporate bureaucracy that Apple was becoming.

Ultimately, they fired him for being too far from the corporate message.

Years later, when Apple was failing, they brought him back. What did he do? He cut most of the products and put people into small groups to solve big problems.

Before his death he revolutionized the movie industry, the computer industry, the music industry, TVs, and now even watches (watch sales have plummeted after the release of the Apple Watch).

All of this comes from a guy who finished one semester of studying calligraphy in college before dropping out.

Studying the history of Apple is like studying a microcosm of the history of how to create big ideas. Larry Page is recreating this with his new corporate structure.