Ronald Wayne, Apple, and Why You Should Never Feel Regret
Ronald Wayne is the fifth Beatle of Apple, which has got be a mixed metaphor or something. He’s the guy who wrote the original contract with Jobs and Woz. He drew the original logo. They gave him 10% of the company, and he sold it 12 days later for $800. By last count, that 10% of Apple would now be worth something like fifty billion dollars.
Mr. Wayne now lives outside of Las Vegas, Nevada where he trades in stamps to supplement his social security checks. He’s been referred to recently (and frequently in my feeds) as the unluckiest man in the world and the standard by which you should feel better about your life.
Here’s the thing, though, he’s cool with all of it. Now, I’m sure you could say “doesn’t matter how he feels about it, it’s too late.” And you’d be right. And I think that’s the point. He knows that he made the best choice, given the available information, at the time.
“And I said this many times before and I meant it, if I have stayed with Apple I probably would have wound up the richest man in the cemetery.”
— Ronald Wayne, Interview with Benny Luo on NextShark.com
Professor Dan Gilbert, of “how much money do you need to retire” SuperBowl commercial fame, known previously as a Harvard psychologist and Ted talk star, said:
“… a year after losing the use of their legs, and a year after winning the lotto, lottery winners and paraplegics are equally happy with their lives.”
Admittedly, that’s not what the referenced study showed, but it sounds perfect in this context. Moreover, I think the actual point of the study was that we adapt to the situation in which we find ourselves, more or less.
Ronald Wayne did sell his 10% share of Apple. End of story. He claims to be pretty happy with his life. You know what would make him miserable? Spending his time wishing he hadn’t done that.
We assume that having more money is the express ticket to Happiness Town. Can you imagine how happy fifty billion dollars would make a person? It’s the ultimate lottery ticket.
So, how is it, then, that lottery winners can end up miserable? Joe Nocera wrote in a 2012 op-ed piece, “The Bad Luck of Winning”, for The New York Times:
“There is, to take one of the most prominent examples, the story of Jack Whittaker, a West Virginia businessman who won a $315 million Powerball jackpot in 2002. A decade later, his daughter and granddaughter had died of drug overdoses, his wife had divorced him, and he had been sued numerous times. Once, when he was at a strip club, someone drugged his drink and took $545,000 in cash that had been sitting in his car. He later sobbed to reporters, ‘I wish I’d torn that ticket up.’”
You just don’t know what would have happened. Jack Whittaker might have lived with his family, happily married, happily not-drugged-and-robbed-in-a-stripclub, forever had he not won his lottery. Or not. You can never know because that’s not what happened.
It is a mistake to look back on that which has already transpired and spend one second wishing it hadn’t. In Ronald Wayne’s case, he’s gone a step further and found comfort in exactly how it happened. Either attitude has the same ultimate effect on what happened. Zero.
The lesson is that it’s up to us. We can wish we’d held that stock, or sold it, or took that job, or quit earlier, or married that guy, or stayed single. But we didn’t. Or did. And that’s exactly how it’s always been and always will be.
So, instead of rejecting the reality of things we can’t change and imagining how much better everything would have been, let’s spend our fleeting time focusing on those things we can, making them better now, and being grateful that we have that opportunity.