#82 Bill Ackman: Getting Back Up

I've always had this view that success is not a straight line up. If you read the stories of successful people, almost every successful person has had to deal with some degree of hardship, whether that hardship is personal hardship, health-related hardship, or a business issue. And I've always had the view that how successful you are is really a function of how you deal with failure. If you deal with failure well and you persist, you have a high probability of being successful.

You have the entire world working on solutions to the problem [of COVID-19]. Just yesterday [April 12th, 2020], I read a piece saying there are 70 different vaccine-related and therapeutic trials that are underway as we speak. You have the world's best global biotechnology/pharma companies looking for solutions. So, I think that increases the probability that there is a therapeutic that is available sooner rather than later and that there is a safe vaccine within a reasonable period of time.

If you want to be successful, all you need to do is look around the room and think about the classmate or classmates you most admire and what qualities they have. And just decide to adopt those qualities. And if you do that, your chances of being successful go up enormously.

People have always told me, 'Bill, you deal with stress incredibly well.' And I think it's really about being healthy, going to the gym, playing sports, and having the perspective that comes from spending time with people that you love.

If you make a little progress every day, eventually that compounded progress will dig you out of the hole.

You should organize the world not from your perspective, but from the perspective of not knowing where you'd end up in the genetic and the geographic lottery.

What does success mean? Success means you have a very good ability to deal with inevitable failure and mistakes.