“I think about the business all the time,” says Ellison. “Well, I shouldn't say all the time. I don't think about it when I'm wakeboarding.”
There can be no doubt that for years Ellison has put in the long workdays that inevitably come with running a billion dollar company. But, after a near death experience in 1998, Ellison has come to understand more dearly the brevity of life and the importance of making time to enjoy himself.
In December 1998, Ellison was taking part in a sailing race off the coast of Australia in his 78-foot yacht called Sayonara. All of a sudden, the crew found themselves right in the middle of a typhoon with 40-foot waves pounding down on their boat. While Ellison suffered only broken bones, six other sailors were killed. “I’ve known for a long time that life is glorious and fragile and short,” says Ellison. “This reemphasized it…You realize life is short and fragile, and when you are facing walls of water you understand your own mortality and how quickly things could change.”
Ellison went on to win the race, but he came out of the experience with something much more rewarding. “It’s something I’ll never forget in my entire life,” he says. “The glory, the wonder of being alive.”
Today, Ellison’s passion for his work is as strong as it was the day he first founded the company. “I've run engineering since day one at Oracle, and I still run engineering,” he says. “I hold meetings every week with the database team, the middleware team, the applications team. I run engineering, and I will do that until the board throws me out of there.”
But, Ellison makes sure to balance his business life with some personal time, not only for his own sake, but also for the sake of the company as a whole. “In some ways, getting away from headquarters and having a little time to reflect allows you to find errors in your strategy,” he says. “You get to rethink things. Often, that helps me correct a mistake that I made or someone else is about to make. I'd rather be wrong than do something wrong.”
Trying to find the delicate balance between work and play is still a struggle for Ellison. “There should be a guide book to the intelligent pursuit of happiness,” he says. “There isn't such a book, but there should be. More than anything else, that's what all of us need: a guide to how to pursue happiness intelligently. Jefferson guaranteed our right to do it, but he didn't give us a map.”
In the meantime, Ellison does his best when he’s at work and plays his hardest when he’s not. He measures his success not by the dollar figures beside his name but by how happy he is all around in his life. And, the rest, he lets take care of itself. “All you can do is all you can do,” he says.
Lesson #1: Balance Work and Play
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