This afternoon, I was discussing with an old friend of mine about doing something meaningful. He has been a successful entrepreneur and has been working very hard and smartly for the last 3 decades. He admits that earning more wealth for himself or his family is no more his prime objective. What motivates him to carry on in life? What kicks him now? He enjoys challenges, learning and making best use of his skills & knowledge accumulated through his life. He is after all an entrepreneur, an economist with a strong sense of finance. Whilst still the chairman of a number of very profitable companies; he has taken a back seat in running the companies. He oversees the companies whilst remaining the strategist of his group. To keep an interest in business, in general, he spends the major part of his day in Mauritius, studying successful entrepreneurs and have a keen eye on the stock exchange in the UK from which he is reaping couple of thousand of Pounds regularly.

One of the entrepreneurs mentioned by him and from whom one could learn from was Philip Green. The 4^th wealthiest man in the UK, he started with very modest means.Not only did Green not go to business school, he didn’t even take A levels. Having left formal education aged 15, he has built Britain’s biggest privately-owned retail group and accumulated enough debt-free assets to put him in that rarest of clubs: those who are not only worth a billion pounds, but created it themselves. I read what I could gather from the net on Philip Green and was stunned by the story of a self made 55 year old billionaire who started his first company with 20000 Pounds loan less than 30 years ago.

” ‘Retailing is bloody hard work. You have to be absolutely committed, passionate and prepared to get into every level of detail. It is all-consuming. We are not dead yet,’ he says.”