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‘Die you will, but only regret can kill you.’

In 1997 I had my wake up call. I was twenty-two and watching people in their fifties grappling with having just been made redundant like me. Their whole world was collapsing as they lost their business card, and with that their identity.

I decided never to go back to sleep. Never live with regret.

Not knowing what I should do with my life, but knowing I had nothing to lose, I decided to write a book, which became a bestseller. Not your average response to a situation like mine.

Every seven years since, I try to take stock. I look at my life, the world around me, and how I’ve been spending my time. What am I learning, and what impact am I making on people’s lives? How can I consolidate my knowledge about one area of life? Am I happy? What meaning is there in my life?

The job I’d lost in merchant banking at twenty-two was supposed to be the glamour career job that set you up for life, but the reality was I was miserable. And looking back, many of the people I worked with didn’t strike me as happy either.

The experience changed my life. It forced me to stop and think about changes I needed to make. I wanted to know what it meant to live a meaningful life.

At the time, my father gave me two books which really got me thinking: Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People and Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich. Together, these books offered two valuable insights I’ve never forgotten. First, your ability to deal with people is more important than anything else. Second, success in business and life comes when you model successful ideas that build great habits.

I’m a person who doesn’t ignore good advice, so I took the authors’ advice and took control of my situation. The first book I wrote was called Collective Wisdom. It was a compilation of thirty-four interviews I conducted with prominent Australian achievers – people who, in meeting with them, changed me.

Seven years later – in keeping with my new seven-year review discipline – I published Universal Wisdom in which I examined the lives of seven people who changed the world, including Nelson Mandela, Warren Buffet and Martin Luther-King.

And now you’re holding Business Owners’ Wisdom, a book that chronicles my latest round of interviews with successful business owners. Seven years comes around quickly, but in this case not quickly enough. This is the first of two books to exclusively focus on what makes business owners tick, and you can expect the next instalment next year.

So, why the focus on business owners, you ask?

Firstly, my family has grown to three young children: two boys aged seven and five and a new baby girl. My kids are reason enough to make me stop and reflect on life: where I’ve been and where I’m going. They grow so quickly and seem to emphasise the need for considered and deliberate living.

Secondly, our business. I have been building Kelly+Partners chartered accountants from scratch to five offices and a hundred-plus staff over the last six and half years with an exclusive focus on helping private business owners achieve their goals. And I want to keep learning in order to help my clients and my business.

Thirdly, the combination of my experience in family and business has helped me find my passion: what I call ‘helping people get somewhere’. Whether that’s a client, a friend or a team member, I’m driven by a desire to help people improve their situation.

And lastly, I’m inspired by the example of successful private business owners.

These are independent thinkers, people who are driven and determined to change the world. They challenge me to push my standards higher and demand more of myself.

These thoughts inspired and shaped the way I approached the business owners interviewed in this book. Every interview is different in that every person has a unique story. I asked them to share a story with me that would change my thinking or challenge my assumptions.

The result is a collection of profoundly moving and inspiring stories. Here are a few examples:

 Brett Blundy built retailers Sanity, HMV, diva, Bras N Things, and Dusk with a relentless focus on doing the best for the customer;

 Collette Dinnigan and Lorna Jane Clarkson both started completely different fashion companies but started from the same place – other people wanted what they made for themselves;

 In contrast, Mike Cannon-Brookes is a young man who in the space of eight short years has, together with his co-founder Scott Farquhar, built a company that employs more than five hundred people and attracted this accolade from Fortune: ‘Atlassian is to software what Apple is to design’;

 Then we have Mark Carnegie, a successful man who’s made millions of dollars and thinks deeply about how to improve society; and

 John Cutler, a fourth generation bespoke tailor who operates a family business in Sydney that’s continued for more than a hundred and twenty-five years.

I’ll let you discover all the other stories in this book for yourself, but if there’s a common thread that’s captured me it’s that these are people who have found what they love and dedicated their life to being the best they can be at that endeavour.

To me, there’s nothing more inspiring than spending time with entrepreneurs, game changers, deep thinkers, and people who never stop dreaming about a better tomorrow.

I found myself walking out on the street after meeting these business owners and feeling completely overwhelmed, literally on a high. I’ve been challenged to constantly raise my standards, to think of new ways to innovate and help my own clients achieve their goals.

I’ve come to realise that for me, there’s no excuse for living an unconscious life. I want to live consciously and very deliberately. In my travels I constantly talk with business owners such as these and wider afield, addressing audiences of business people at conferences and private events. It’s taught me the value of constantly seeking to grow in wisdom and understanding.

In my mind, there are few things worse than turning fifty and realising you still don’t know much more about life than when you were twenty.

Brett Kelly