Laughing and Dreaming: The Key to a Fulfilling Life
What I always used to say is that people that don't laugh are not serious people. To be serious, you need to laugh. Those people that always appear serious are fake serious because they're always acting. This is what I think. It's not because you do something hilarious or comic or dancing that you cannot do serious stuff. In terms of being rich, I'm only interested in being rich in the moments that matter. Once they're gone, the bank account of moments, I want to be in the Fortune ranking. For the rest, I don't care. So, money for me is not a target when I was 20, but as soon as I started to do it, I understood that I needed the money. There was enough for the quality of my life and my friends. You need to have electricity in your blood. But how can you have it if you always have the same routine, always every single thing?
Imagine what is for me going in front of people and performing some music. They are 20 years old. This is something that gives me a lot of satisfaction. And then, what I always say to my friends is, imagine how interesting it is to pass from a meeting room with lawyers and bankers to a meeting with a producer or a singer. Now, it happens to me to deal with very important singers. What I think is that contemporary society lives without the dream. They are all concentrated on what they need to do, which is normal, but if I wouldn't have dreamed in my life, I would never be what I am today. So, what I'm doing is pushing people to dream. Life is motivation. People are not believing in themselves anymore because the need is overpowering the desire. The problem of this era is that people are more focused on what they need to do to survive and less on what they have to dream about.
Now, some people might say, "Oh, it's easy for you." Yes, it's easy now, but it was not easy before. I risked what I had so many times. My life changed really around 44-45 years old. When I was 30, I was saying I am young and I was not thinking about the projection of my life. When I was 45, I started to say time is passing. Being an entrepreneur, the most important loan we receive is life. We have to give it back, but we don't know when. So, that's the loan of life. It's not what we receive from banks. Yes, you have to give it back for sure, but the real loan of your life is your life. I am a guest in my life, not the owner of my life. And this is the philosophy that I apply to everything. So, this house is mine, but what does it mean it's mine when I don't own my life? Because my life is a borrow, it's a mortgage. I am a guest, you know?
I started to say that I want to run. Now is the moment. If I want to have another second life, it's now the moment. I want to do stuff that are totally different. I have to tell you, because I'm very sincere, I've always been attracted by the idea of being very popular. Not because I wanted to be a role model, but because I thought that I had something to share with others. I don't pretend to be a role model, but I leave other people free to judge what they want to think about me. If they want to see me as a role model, they can. In Italy, I've been criticized a lot. Now, everybody is saying, "Oh, she's a genius." But first, anytime I did something strange, even under the entrepreneurial point of view, I was judged. But you know why? Because I always watched things not like this, but like this. I always thought that if you see things like this, you can even see them like this because there's always a different way.
At what point did you say, at 45, "I'm going to stop working that hard and I'm going to go enjoy my life?" No, when I was 45, starting from the point of view that I'm not interested in accumulating money. I don't want to live in a routine. So, I always delegated in my business activities and I had free time, but I didn't want to talk about it. I was performing a company, I was evolving a sector. I was not interested anymore. I was always attracted by those people who had two lives. There was an entrepreneur in France, Bernard Tapie, who was the owner of Adidas, but at a certain point, he had some problems and he switched and became an actor. I was always attracted by people who had the courage to change their life because having a successful life is super difficult, but having two satisfying lives is almost impossible. If I can have two lives, I'm going to be so happy.
John Lucavaki in School
First of all, it's very weird to say, but I was a very shy guy. I was a super shy guy. I used to be a skier, a professional skier, until 18 years old. I used to live in the mountains, and my life was sport. Then, I went to the University of Bologna. I finished when I was around 25, and I started immediately trying to restructure what were the interests of the world, what was the worth of my family. I tried to understand which could be the sectors that would have had the most growth potential. I started to buy shares from some of my cousins who were not interested in the family company. When I was 25, I had a big debt, and then I spent 10 years not even going on holiday. From 25 to 35, I was really focused on paying my debts and making the company grow. For 10 years, I was so concentrated, and I did my first money. Immediately, I started to build the life of my dreams. There are people who are much richer than I am, and I'm very grateful to life because it gave me the chance to have two lives. Until 45 years old, I was like an active entrepreneur. Even today, I'm an entrepreneur because once you manage the risk of being a shareholder in industrial companies, you're still an entrepreneur. But from 45, I started to be less curious about financial matters. I decided to watch how the conventions of dialogue, the way of communication, were changing. I was going to dinner with younger people, and I noticed that they were not talking with the person beside or in front of them, but just talking with their smartphones. I said to myself, "I'm not old enough to not be interested in how the way of communication is changing." So, I started to show my life as it was, even when I was doing serious stuff. I was always laughing, smiling, joking, and not taking myself too seriously. I said, "I can become a global entertainer of the new platform."
