Israeli-American entrepreneur Shai Agassi is Founder and CEO of Project Better Place, a company focusing on a green transportation infrastructure based on electric cars as an alternative to the current fossil fuel technology. Previously President of Products and Technology Group at SAP, he was next in line for the position of CEO and left to pursue his interests in alternative energy and climate change.
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’.
Do you believe you have a special mission or purpose in this 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.
Basically, I ran the Jim Collins exercise, and in the cross section of passion, skills and economic drive, I found a question that became my mission in life. From that moment on, in the middle of 2005, the career path was trumped intellectually and emotionally --- regardless of the fact that it was leading me to a point way beyond my wildest imagination when I had first started at SAP. Compared to embracing my mission, it was just not a fair competition or a fair fight.
I keep saying that it is as if the question had found me, more than me finding the question. And my sense is that everybody has got their question out there. But very few are lucky enough to have their question find them. From that point on you are on a mission, you are on a calling.
