Never Enough Quotes

“John D. Rockefeller: “I know of nothing more despicable and pathetic than a man who devotes all the hours of the waking day to the making of money for money’s sake.”
― Andrew Wilkinson, Never Enough: Why You Don't Want to Be a Billionaire

“Okay, imagine that you love chopping wood in your backyard,” I said. “You do it for fun. To relax. To enter a flow state. Then, one day, your neighbor pops his head over the fence and asks you if you could chop him some wood, too. He offers you $20. Suddenly, the thing you love doing becomes a business. Before you know it, you’re chopping wood for all your neighbors. You buy a truck and start selling door-to-door. It’s just you and a bunch of buddies, side by side, chopping wood and working outside. The business grows. And grows. And grows. And a decade later you wake up. You’re in a little glass office, perched atop one of many sawmills. You look down at the hundreds of workers beneath you, operating the industrial equipment on the factory floor. Huge logs getting fed into machines that slice the wood. Totally automated. “And there you are. Isolated in your little office, wearing a suit, the air-conditioning blowing a chill down your back. No axe. No fresh air. No friendly coworkers. Just you sitting in your office, doing some paperwork—alone. That is what it feels like to build a business this big.” He looked dejected and I wondered if I should have just shut my mouth and told him it was awesome. He could learn the truth on his own. Every founder dreams about getting to the end—the part where they’ve created the billion-dollar behemoth—but ironically, once there, we all fantasize about going back to the beginning. After all, the beginning is the best part, and most of us probably wouldn’t have kept going if we knew about all the speed bumps. The journey is the reward.”
― Andrew Wilkinson, Never Enough: Why You Don't Want to Be a Billionaire

“During a lunch the week before, a similarly overworked friend had shared a quote by John D. Rockefeller: “I know of nothing more despicable and pathetic than a man who devotes all the hours of the waking day to the making of money for money’s sake.”
― Andrew Wilkinson, Never Enough: Why You Don't Want to Be a Billionaire

“When I told another successful friend about this experience, he told me an anecdote about William Golding, the author of Lord of the Flies. At the time, he had just won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and a young writer asked Golding what it felt like to receive such a prize. His response was telling: “You find out who hates you.”
― Andrew Wilkinson, Never Enough: Why You Don't Want to Be a Billionaire

“With the confidence that only a one-line email can convey, I’d send mysterious messages like, “Hey, big fan of your business. Would love to work together.” Believe it or not, these random cold emails—most of which took me less than a minute to send out—ended up winning some of MetaLab’s biggest clients and helped me build friendships with some of the most successful people in business.”
― Andrew Wilkinson, Never Enough: Why You Don't Want to Be a Billionaire

“Joseph Heller and I were at a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island. I said, “Joe, how does it make you feel to know that our host only yesterday may have made more money than your novel Catch-22 has earned in its entire history?” And Joe said, “I’ve got something he can never have.” And I said, “What on earth could that be, Joe?” And Joe said, “The knowledge that I’ve got enough.” —Kurt Vonnegut”
― Andrew Wilkinson, Never Enough: Why You Don't Want to Be a Billionaire

“It’s good to learn from your mistakes. It’s better to learn from other people’s mistakes. —Charlie Munger 1924–2023”
― Andrew Wilkinson, Never Enough: Why You Don't Want to Be a Billionaire

“anxiety mellow. He recognized that the fight was over. His kids were launched. We all had our own happy work lives. Nobody was counting on him anymore. I had been able to build the thing he struggled with for decades: a stable, diversified business. The baton was passed, and along with it I was able to take away the financial strain on our family. Around that time, I asked my”
― Andrew Wilkinson, Never Enough: Why You Don't Want to Be a Billionaire

“Either it’s ‘hell yeah!’ or it’s ‘no.’ Life is too short for ‘nos.’ This is the ultimate freedom.”
― Andrew Wilkinson, Never Enough: Why You Don't Want to Be a Billionaire

“Every fuckup now began to pay me back in spades.”
― Andrew Wilkinson, Never Enough: Why You Don't Want to Be a Billionaire

“Then came that saying: that you can figure out what you do want to do in life by first figuring out what you don’t want.”
― Andrew Wilkinson, Never Enough: Why You Don't Want to Be a Billionaire

“Never wrestle a pig. You’ll both get dirty, but the pig will enjoy it.’ You”
― Andrew Wilkinson, Never Enough: Why You Don't Want to Be a Billionaire

“that we distinctly disliked selling companies and—even when big numbers got thrown out—there was rarely a right time to sell a great business.”
― Andrew Wilkinson, Never Enough: Why You Don't Want to Be a Billionaire

“To think about what you hate, then work backward to optimize your life to avoid the things you disliked being a part of it.”
― Andrew Wilkinson, Never Enough: Why You Don't Want to Be a Billionaire

“There’s a famous Upton Sinclair quote: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
― Andrew Wilkinson, Never Enough: Why You Don't Want to Be a Billionaire

“It’s a decision that many entrepreneurs fear making. I was embracing what I came to call Lazy Leadership: the idea that a CEO’s job is not to do all the work, but more importantly to design the machine and systems. Not a player on the field. Not the coach. But the owner, sitting up in a little box at the top of the arena, passively observing until the next critical fifty-thousand-foot decision had to be made.”
― Andrew Wilkinson, Never Enough: Why You Don't Want to Be a Billionaire

“money bonfires.”
― Andrew Wilkinson, Never Enough: Why You Don't Want to Be a Billionaire

“You don’t know who’s swimming naked until the tide goes out.”
― Andrew Wilkinson, Never Enough: Why You Don't Want to Be a Billionaire

“I remembered a line that stopped me cold during a Francis Ford Coppola interview I’d watched recently: “You can always understand the son by the story of his father. The story of the father is embedded in the son.”
― Andrew Wilkinson, Never Enough: Why You Don't Want to Be a Billionaire