Jeff Sandefer started several successful businesses, beginning at age 16. These businesses have gone on to make hundreds of millions of dollars in profits.
He also teaches budding entrepreneurs a balanced approach to life.
In a talk he gave at BYU Idaho, titled ‘A Hero’s Journey‘, he imparted advice in the hopes of helping the young adult students to learn to be wise in their approach to success so that they would not reach the end of their lives having regrets.
You don’t want to spend life climbing a ladder, only to realize in the end that you had it pitched up against the wrong wall!
Some key points from his talk that stood out to me was that there is an activity he gets young entrepreneurs to do; he asks them to choose ten role models and then to spend 3 hours interviewing them about their triumphs and regrets, and lessons they wished they had learned earlier. Three of those interviews are to be with someone from their age to 45, three from age 45 to 60, and at least three over the age of 60.
What they have found is that all of the people over the age of 60 who are interviewed will say the same thing: At the end of life, only three questions matter;
- Have I contributed something meaningful
- Am I a good person
- Who did I love, and who loved me?
No one talks about how much money they made, or their power or their fame.
Most of us are guilty on focusing on how much money we want to make. And there’s nothing wrong with that because we all want to provide for the wants and needs of our family.
What the danger is, however, is when we don’t pursue that at the expense of more important matters, like compromising our ethics, and spending time building relationships with those who are most important to us.
In his talk, Jeff Sandefer gave the example of the CEO of Enron and a friend of his, Jeff Skilling. Jeff Skilling was a good man who lost sight of what mattered most, his integrity, and now is paying the price for that by spending the rest of his life in a federal penitentiary.
When I started my digital marketing agency in 2016, the main reason I did it was not to make money. I’m sure there are more efficient ways to make more money than running a digital marketing agency. The main reason I chose what I do is because I felt strongly that I could make a difference for many business owners.
You see, back in 2016 I was hearing many stories from associates of mine who were having negative experiences with digital marketing agencies. They were paying them hundreds, even thousands of dollars every month to get more exposure for their businesses online.
Unfortunately, the results were dismal. These agencies were promising them first page results on Google, but in reality my friends were not seeing any traffic to their websites.
In essence, they were paying a lot of money and not getting back anything in return.
This really upset me because with the knowledge I had I knew I could help my friends get the results they wanted, and would even be able to do it at a fraction of the price that these scammers were charging!
That’s how L&F was founded.
Fast-forward to today and we have a lot of clients who we help to build their business online and to be very successful, all at a fraction of the cost they would have had to pay someone else.
Our clients stay with us and are happy because we get the job done for them at a reasonable price.
I sleep well at night knowing that I’m not only providing for my family’s wants and needs but that I’m providing a needed service for the community that is affordable for them.
I hope that when I reach the evening of my life here on Earth that I will be able to say that I contributed something meaningful, that I have become a good person, and that I loved and was loved by those most important to me.