Lesson #5: Help Others to Help Yourself

“Any society begins by realizing that together, by helping each other, you can survive better than if you fight each other and compete with each other,” says Lucas. “We have the tendency to lose it when we forget that, as a group, we are stronger than we are as individuals.”

Lucas will forever be remembered as a prudent businessman who was able to use his natural talent and passion, combined with his business savvy to propel him to new heights of success. However, when it came to lending a helping hand to the competition, Lucas was all for it.

Speaking about the advantages of growing up in his generation, Lucas recalls, “When we were in film school and we were starting in the film business, the door was absolutely locked…all of us beggars and scroungers down at the front gate decided that if we didn’t band together, we wouldn’t survive.”

Lucas recognized that when similar difficulties were facing both himself and his competitors, it could actually be more advantageous to help each other and support each other in their respective pursuits. “If one could make it, that one would help all the others make it,” he said. “And we would continue to help each other. So we banded together.”

It goes against the grain in the business world to suggest helping your competitor in any way. “We want to succeed but we don’t want anybody else to succeed, because we want to be the winner,” says Lucas. But, it is precisely that attitude that will lead to your downfall. “Once you get that mentality – which is unfortunately the way a lot of the society operates – you lose.”

Lucas attributes his success to the support his fellow filmmakers gave to each other as they struggled with their respective careers. But, he says, this requires seeing success as more than just dollar signs and rather as a joint steady progression upwards. “If I got a job, I would help somebody else get a job,” he says. “If somebody got more successful than me, it was partly my success. My success wasn’t based on how I could push down everyone around me. My success was based on how much I could push everybody up… And in the process they pushed me up, and I pushed them up, and we kept doing that, and we still do that.”

Lucas is not naïve enough to ignore the competition between the filmmakers, but for him, if one of them succeeded, it was a success for all of them. “That’s the key to it,” he says. “To have everybody succeed, not to gloat over somebody else’s failure…if you do that all the time, it helps you personally. But it’s a good business decision.”

He extends this philosophy beyond his film career to his many philanthropic activities, including the George Lucas Educational Foundation. “The best way to pursue happiness is to help other people,” he says. “Because there’s nothing else that will make you happier.”

Lesson #5: Help Others to Help Yourself

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