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Israeli-American entrepreneur Shai Agassi is revolutionising the automobile industry by reducing the dependence on oil with a holistic electric car system

What does spirituality mean to you?
Doing the right thing. Which of course means something different for every person. But I mean doing the right thing in the general sense.
One day I heard that the meaning of the whole Jewish religion could be explained into one sentence: do onto others what you would like them to do onto you. The rest of the Bible is just an interpretation of that one sentence. And to me, the summary of that sentence is ‘do the right thing’.

What has “doing the right thing” meant in your life?
When I was a kid, I was just young and stupid. In my early twenties, I went on record saying that my goal in life is to retire at 30. I think that each generation tries to fix the failings of the previous ones. I saw my dad work at 40, 50, then start a new career and so on. So I always wanted to be in a position to retire at 30 and do whatever I want. Interestingly enough, I sold my company for the first time the day after my 30th birthday.
And I keep telling people that I just meandered from that point on. I somehow grabbed on to a stream and went along with it.

I did not have a plan of what one does after. So I stayed with the company that had purchased mine, became the CEO and three years later sold it again, this time to [world largest business software company] SAP. And I stayed at SAP, once more because I had no other plan. There was no other mission that called out to me and said "come do this". And thus somehow, I got from a job to a career. The traps of a career are really evil. You get bigger and bigger wingspan but you always know that the wings are stamped with someone else's logo. Then it is really, really hard, scary, frightening to let go of those wings. A lot of people forget that they had their own wings before they put on someone else's wings on. They do not use them and end up like the Galapagos birds who cannot fly anymore because they found food on the ground and forgot how to fly. I actually got to such a point, but then got really lucky.

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