Where are you going? And how did you imagine yourself getting here? But above all; what set the whole thing in motion? Do you know how you ended up where you are at this moment? Was it your unwavering determination, your shrewd ability, your exceptionally winning personality and IQ of 188? Or just sheer luck? Or even bad luck, if you feel you’ve ended up in completely the wrong place?

Successful businesses rarely come about by themselves. Even when a successful company is handed down from one generation to the next, it can become something completely different in the hands of its younger guardians. The inheritor’s goals for the business will not necessarily be exactly the same as those held by the parent. The tobacco heir Johan H. Andresen junior was naturally influenced by his senior, but he has undoubtedly left his own footprint.

In this article we take a closer look at some successful individuals and the events that led them to set out on their life’s work. Quite often the wheels are set in motion by pure coincidence, whereas on other occasions, there is a very deliberate plan to the whole thing. One feature that is common to the most successful players is that they have the ability to grasp the opportunities which present themselves. So let’s get down to a little name dropping and see what the larger-than-life personalities Elon Musk, Richard Branson, Anita Roddick, Jack Ma and Petter Stordalen have said and done.

Human enterprises

Why do you do exactly what you do? Work exactly where you work? Why did you start that particular business in that particular field? Did you plan it that way? Or did it just happen? Some individuals start up a company in a field that they are inextricably linked to, the idea coming about as they discover their aim in life. Others set up companies because it is the very act of starting something new that gives their life meaning. It was Mark Twain who said “The two most important days in your life are the day you were born, and the day you find out why”. Whenever one tries to extract a company’s unspoken aim or purpose from everything that company actually represents, it is not unusual to find the starting point was born out of the dreams and motivations of one or several leading persons. And quite often we see great success resulting from a combination of chance and determination.

Healthy purpose

According to Harvard Business Review, it has been shown that individuals working toward a purpose are less disposed to illness than others. Having a purpose makes it easier to respond to all of the fleeting, ambiguous, changeable and complex situations we are continually subjected to. Even when we have a clear objective, it can be difficult to navigate it safely through a topsy-turvy world, but those who have an objective to fall back on often have a mental – and healthy – advantage. This appears to be something with which everyone is in agreement; from psychologists and academics to various experts within the business world. So the question is, how can this be utilised to the company’s advantage?

Let the road take you where you want it to

Many roads lead to Rome, but it is important to know whether that is where you should be going. The path towards the goal will often be much clearer in a company led by an inspirational manager, who in turn is led by a clear purpose. Or it might be one or more smart individuals with good radar, adaptability and some kind of moral compass who can, at any rate, ensure that you never take a path leading you away from where you want to go or who you want to be.

Where do you want to go?

Even though there are almost certainly many business founders and owners who started up purely out of a desire to earn money, few of them retain that as their sole or most important objective throughout the whole of their careers. There is nothing to stop even those individuals who started out for financial reasons alone to gradually acquire new perspectives and points of view. You are allowed to live and learn, and lead and learn.

What is wrong?

Let's look at some successful companies, or rather the people behind them. What started it all? What kind of seed was sown? What was the dream that was followed? What was the resistance needed? Who was the enemy who represented everything you yourself absolutely would not stand for? For it is impossible to get away; It is not always just positive events that create a leader. There are undoubtedly successful companies that are a direct or indirect result of a victim of bullying or an antisocial nerd once biting their teeth together and mumbling, "I will show them, I." To then do just that.

Elon Musk

Inventor, engineer and businessman Elon Musk is, at the time of writing, the eighty-third richest person in the world, but he was bullied throughout the whole of his childhood in South Africa. He once ended up in hospital after being thrown down a flight of stairs and beaten up until he lost consciousness. Fortunately, he came from a supportive family of bold adventurers and at the age of 12 discovered the world of computers. The rest, as they say, is history. Now he’s driven by a set of bold political manifestos and has set himself a series of tasks which include 1) reducing global warming through the use of renewable energy, 2) reducing the risk of human extinction, and 3) preparing for life on other planets. In other words, the good Mr Musk is not afraid of setting his companies really daunting goals, whether they be Tesla (producing electric cars), Hyperloop (researching high-speed transportation of passengers in tubes), Solar City (provider of solar energy), OpenAI (not-for-profit company researching artificial intelligence) or SpaceX (working toward the colonisation of Mars).

Richard Branson

Another individual with a taste for extraterrestrial travel is Richard Branson. His big breakthrough came with offering affordable records with Virgin Music, but since then the Virgin name has expanded into a broad range of industries. The latest – and most far-reaching – is Virgin Galactic, which is selling suborbital flights at a cost of US $200,000 a ticket, a somewhat steep price which 500 people have already committed themselves to paying. Richard Branson once said, “There is no point in starting your own business unless you do it out of a sense of frustration”. Reluctantly finding himself in Puerto Rico with 50 other passengers when American Airlines cancelled the flight to the Virgin Islands, he chartered a flight, sold tickets for around NOK 400 a piece and flew the whole group to where they were meant to be going. Not long afterwards, he acquired a used Boeing 747 to set up the company Virgin Airlines. I dare not say for sure whether this is the absolute truth or a result of Branson’s healthy love for storytelling, but in any case he loves to start up companies in areas where he has no prior knowledge, but first and foremost, he points out, areas that no one else is running particularly well. On the subject of building up a company he said, “Don’t bother doing anything unless you can do it radically different from the competition”.

Bjørn Kjos

We have high-flying business leaders here at home as well. Bjørn Kjos’s father ran a small agricultural airline, and his son trained as a pilot in the Royal Norwegian Air Force. However, he worked primarily as a lawyer in the shipping industry and as a judge from 1983 to 2002. In 1992 he received a call from his lawyer friend Svein Klev who worked for the small Busy Bee airline; he was concerned about bankruptcy and needed some help and advice. One month later, Bjørn Kjos found himself the reluctant part owner of a brand new airline. Together with pilots from the bankrupt company he went all in, arranged investors and acted as personal guarantor for the remainder of the sum. In his book High and Low (Høyt og lav), he shares his belief that SAS (the company that wouldn’t give him a job after he left the Royal Norwegian Air Force) is constantly out to remove its small troublesome competitor, Norwegian. That won’t happen: Norwegian is currently the second largest airline serving the Nordic countries.

Anita Roddick

The prime motivation for the woman behind The Body Shop was to earn a living for herself and her two daughters while her husband was away in South America. She wanted to sell health and wellbeing products that were completely natural. They started recycling all of their bottles and packaging, at first due to lack of money, but thereafter because it fitted in well with the wider concept that had started to emerge. According to Roddick herself, even though the whole thing may have been set in motion by a series of coincidences, it was the things that she believed in as a person and that she wanted to give to the world which led to her finding a format that worked.

Jack Ma

The founder of the Chinese company Alibaba is a good example of the internet as an arena suddenly throwing up things that were impossible to predict. Ma Yun (Jack Ma’s real name) started out by offering his services for free as a tourist guide around Hangzhou for nine years in order to improve his English. One of the 30 jobs he went after but didn’t get, was at Kentucky Fried Chicken: he was the only one out of 24 applicants who didn’t get taken on. However, it was on a trip to the US in 1995 that he first heard about the internet, and he was surprised about the general lack of information on China. He set up a rough and ready web page and within a few hours he was receiving e-mails from people wanting to know more about him. He began to develop websites for Chinese companies and eventually, together with 17 friends, started up Alibaba from his own apartment. In 2014 the Alibaba Group was valued at US $155 billion.

Petter Stordalen

Norway (and Sweden’s) favourite Duracell bunny may have written the book I’ll Tell You My Secret (Jeg skal fortelle deg min hemmelighet), but writing in his own blog on the subject of his success with Nordic Choice Hotels, he discloses that “The truth is, there is no secret, just a little rule of thumb: I always employ people who are better than me”. The whole thing started with strawberries in Porsgrunn where the local paper named him as “Norway’s best strawberry seller”. However, it was almost certainly due to his achievements as Norway’s youngest shopping centre manager at City Syd in Trondheim, that he decided he was going to rescue Steen & Strøm from bankruptcy – which he did. There is a strong contrast between his public persona – not unlike that of a rock star who loves to hog the limelight – and the way he talks about community, cooperation and environmental issues, etc. In many ways he presents a good example of a leader who has gradually changed the focus and objectives in their life. Strongly influenced by his wife Gunnhild perhaps, amongst others? It may be that Petter Stordalen is one of those individuals who has had the same drive and ambitions their whole life, but is able to realise them to an ever increasing degree as their financial situation allows.

Can our purpose fit in with yours?

Mission’s purpose is to help individuals and businesses operate in alignment with their own. Perhaps you already possess the necessary essence to build or fine tune your identity. If you want to know how to display, strengthen, sharpen, modify, optimise, concentrate, nurture, massage, place, revitalise, autopsy, define, tweak, redirect, vary, harmonise, upgrade, completely overturn, reconstruct or calibrate it… come and talk to us.