Let's talk about the value of work ethic , which I believe is the most important ingredient of our success in your personal and professional life . When you worked in the White House for President Carter , one of your colleagues said you were the first person to arrive on the first day of the administration , the last one to leave on the last day , you were rumored to live in your West Wing office and you became semi famous when a magazine described your daily routine , which included regularly eating dinner from the White House vending machines .
You told the magazine that machine food is underrated . How important is work ethic on our path to excellence and this part of this , can we go back ? And can you tell us how many , what kind of time you put in a week when you first started your career and how much , what you're uh spending per week now , even after you're one of the most successful people in the world ?
You can have a luck in life , I guess . But the people that win Nobel Prizes or get on to great professional uh um accomplishments are generally people who work hard . You rarely see somebody uh not working hard and you rarely see somebody doing something great where they hated what they were doing .
You learn how to be a leader , not a follower , you learn how to um improve your brain and your , your , your capabilities of doing things almost every day by , by just learning more and reading more . Um So I , I'd say success is a difficult thing to measure , but in the end , uh the most important thing for success in the end and , and , and everybody should measure it is personal happiness . As Thomas Jefferson wrote to some extent , life is about the pursuit of happiness .
So tell us what are the ingredients to success and how do we get there ? Oh , I think success comes about because you have some goals , you try to work hard towards those goals . You learn how to get along with other people and share the credit .
