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If someone offered you a CEO job for millions, would you take it?

biophase

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No, I would not take it (I do not have millions). A $50K to $100K salary keeps so many people trapped. Imagine how trapped you would feel making millions per year at a CEO job?

"I really want to pursue this other business that society needs, but I get paid millions to do this CEO job that takes up all my time and kills my soul, so - I guess I'll just keep doing it."
I’m just finding some of these answers hard to believe. Maybe if the pay was $1M, but Fortune 500 CEOs avg compensation is around $15M a year.

So none of you are getting out of bed for $1.2m a month? Guaranteed?

Do you realize that one year in this job and you have f-you money the rest of your life?

Even if your net worth is $5M, if would be hard to turn down tripling your net worth in a year.

Think about how hard it is to start and run a business and then exit for $10m? How long does that take? 3-5 or even 10 years of grinding?

And now you are guaranteed $10M in a single year whether you do good or not. How do you turn this down?

Oh but you have no freedom. One year of hard work vs 3-5 years? Which choice is the one that’s really the sacrificing your time here?
 

MJ DeMarco

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Conversation extracted from the Chat thread.

My answer is HELL NO.

In fact, the answer was NO even when I didn't have millions already.

I remember being in Arizona and just getting started. Someone asked me, if I paid you $1M a year to move back to Chicago to head this firm, would you?

The answer then was NO.

Today it is F*ck NO.

There is no amount of money you can pay me to live somewhere where I don't want to live, especially in a "job."
 

Mathuin

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If someone offered you a job as CEO of a fortune 500 company making millions per year, would you take it?
No

I would immediately be cancelled and lose shareholders a fortune.
 

MoneyDoc

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Lol I understand if MJ, Kyle, Kenric, or AntiFragile, wouldn't accept this role, but if you're currently working a 9-5 and you're saying no, you're kinda painting a false illusion of someone you're not...

I would understand if money doesn't mean anything to you, but if it DOES, you're blatantly lying and I find that a bit odd (if you have a 9-5) because you either think a "job" on this forum means you're a loser (which is 100% NOT the case), or you're trying to fit in.

Interesting thought experiment.
 

Antifragile

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Perhaps my hypothesis was correct? No details?

I imagine that role being very demanding on me and my family. And I’m not willing to sacrifice my time for money. In part because I make more than enough to live luxurious lifestyle and still growing my own business. My priorities are:
1. My family
2. My health
3. My business - which exist to support top 2 priorities.

I see very few Fortune 500 CEOs that I want to emulate (outside of founders who grew their companies to that level).

So… no.

But then, no one is asking me either haha! So it’s giant hypothetical! If it became a reality, maybe I’d change my mind? Who knows…
 
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MJ DeMarco

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A lot of posturing going on here, lol.

Would have thought this too 10 yrs ago, but not so much today.

Maybe you have different values than others, which you have extrapolated to the whole. A lot of people, even without money, don't give a shit about fast cars and big houses, the # one thing they value is their kids, followed by autonomy. If they already have both, even with a low-level business, a CEO job ain't helping.

The # thing that shocks me as a writer is to hear how many people that tell me they don't give a shit about nice cars and nice things ... they just want a high level of freedom, even if that entails a low-level amount of financial freedom.

The actual company would matter also. For example, what if it was Monsanto? What if it was Exxon? Home Depot? Amazon? My answers would be different depending on the company.

"Come be CEO at our new vegan snacks company and help us guide our vision for $15m a year!"

Still No.

(However if I was younger and had more life AHEAD of me, I'd likely consider it more heavily. I think my answer weighs heavily on my age.)
 

biophase

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If someone offered you a job as CEO of a fortune 500 company making millions per year, would you take it?

I feel like if you aren't already rich, answer should be a resounding "YES!" but for those who are already financially free, answer might be "meh."
I would probably do it. And the reason I’d do it is partially for the money, partially because I think I can make a difference and partially because I’m bored. People been complaining about the new leadership at the local county humane society lately. Pay is about $300k a year. If they offered it to me I’d take it in a second. But I’m also not going out of my way to apply for it.
 

Kak

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Andy Black

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And that people like to portray a certain persona online.


Full of philosophers.
Or maybe people are telling the truth?

I’m reminded of this thread:

I have zero desire to be CEO of someone else’s company doing all the work I hate doing. I like being free to pick and choose my clients, decide on a whim to change direction, and have no-one to answer to.
 

MoneyDoc

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"Come be CEO at our new vegan snacks company and help us guide our vision for $15m a year!"

Still No.

(However if I was younger and had more life AHEAD of me, I'd likely consider it more heavily. I think my answer weighs heavily on my age.)
Man MJ flexing so hard on us discreetly and I LOVE IT!

MJ, I don't know you personally, but I'm genuinely happy for you. Not only are you SUPER successful as a REAL entrepreneur (not some guru getting rich off of book sales) but you also had such a BIG impact on SO MANY lives, it's praise worthy.

Some people around me always tell me, "show me what you do, so we can do it too!", "help me start a business!", "copy your business for me!" (lmao), and the ONLY thing I tell them is that they need to change their mindset and I refer them to your book. I am genuinely grateful for you.
 

heavy_industry

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It depends on where you are in life and what are your priorities. If you already have a family and kids, I would assume that you would want to spend more time with them.

But for someone young, this would be the opportunity of a lifetime. Here's why:
  • a ton of money
  • a ton of hands-on business experience
  • a ton of networking and relationships
  • back-breaking work that will turn you into the most disciplined and productive person you can be
You can quit at any time, and when you do, you will have an insane amount of money, experience, knowledge, and work ethic. Which are exactly the things required to build your own business.

It doesn't get any better than this.
You get the best education and business training course in the world, hands-on experience, and you are paid millions for it.

Nothing wrong with being employed for a short amount of time if you learn a lot from your job.
 

woken

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No.

The whole point of living this life is to create my own thing and answer to nobody apart from the tax man.
Sure. =)

I’m always amazed how some guys are ‘devouring’ MJ’s books yet they skip the “get a job as a way to bootstrap your business” part. LOL


Also,

this is the same as saying “If I found 1 Tonne of gold on the street, I wouldn’t take it, because it’s heavy and my back would hurt.”
 
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Kak

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To be fair on this discussion, it’s not just accepting a job for pay that you’re happy with. It’s also exiting all of what you currently have going on. You can’t realistically be the CEO or upper exec of a major company and also run your own stuff anymore.

So you have to sell, or turn it over, or quit.

If I had nothing else going on, sure I’d take it. The problem is many of us believe in what we are currently doing to a greater extent than a really good, but linear job opportunity.

To @biophase point, yes, I’d figure it out for the real deal $20m a year with stock options, CEO of a giant company, position.

The hypothetical awesome job paying $1-3m where you still have a boss and have to live the corporate life? Meh, that’s not exciting enough to totally uproot my life and all my projects.
 
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biophase

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This is a pretty dumb comment.

Getting a job to fund your business is getting something easy like a security guard so you still have time to build your business. Getting a job as a CEO in a big company will take up most of your time, long hours and leave you exhausted with little to no time to build your business so enjoy the rest of your life being stuck in the trap.

Seems like you have a job mentality.

“Hey I just got drafted into the NBA!”

“Don’t take that job. You won’t have any time to work on your fastlane business.”
 
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Antifragile

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Guest-5ty5s4

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Now I know why you were surprised when I turned down that offer a few months ago.

Jobs can teach and pay a lot, but you can’t sell a job, or give it to your kids. You don’t own it, it owns you.
Yes but if you are paid $10 million per year, you can funnel that into assets that you can give your kids.

Of course, the kind of person with this level of job could probably start a company that's pretty huge, so there's that. It's all hypothetical
 

ElDiablo

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Hello everyone.

I can see quite a debate in here. However, there's one crucial aspect that people are overlooking, and that is that even getting offered the position of CEO at a Fortune 500 company entails a hard process in the making of several years; if not several decades.

Beware that I'm not glorifying an extremely well paid job with even more extreme benefits, but rather stating that getting the offer for such a position is just an event. We're simplifying the fact that in order to get there, you first needed several factors in your favor.

Just to name a few, you first have to show both extensive experience and proficiency in business and business management. That alone is something that take several years at a bare minimum.

In addition, you have to be intimately connected to people with higher socioeconomic status; something that goes beyond being good at what you do.

And third, the type of "formal qualifications" that make entrepreneurs quit the corporate ladder in the first place. I'm talking about having at least an MBA at a top 10 university, plus all kinds of certifications and training. And if we add up that nowadays is almost a must to hop between companies to actually grow professionally, you have the perfect cocktail of the opposite of what an entrepreneur is looking for in the long run.

And finally, as some of you have pointed out, just to be even considered for the offer you have to be a certain age (50+) where people can assume that you have invested time and money in all of the above.

The only exceptions that come to mind are founders that are also CEO's which circles back to the Fastlane.

In overall, I'd argue that becoming CEO at a Fortune 500 company from scratch is just slightly easier than having a great exit as an entrepreneur. Both paths involve a long and hard processes if we are talking in a realistic sense.

Those are my 2 cents.

Please let me know if I'm also overlooking something ;)
 
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The Sandman

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Depends, but probably not. A CEO is usually just a highly paid job. What it would depend on is how much freedom I’d get to actually run the show as I want to, vs how much interference and order-taking there would be from others. In addition to that, I’d need to be passionate about or find their mission meaningful, otherwise I’d probably not be interested in it.
A "highly paid job" with a tremendous amount of authority and the punishment for failure is being paid millions of dollars to go away, usually followed by offers to do it all again at another company. Yeah they've got it rough :rolleyes:

Hell yeah I'd do it. It'd be a heck of an experience. As well as a lot of money. Primary reasons to not do it:
1) It's an incredibly social position with a ton of politics. An introvert could find it overwhelming and exhausting.
2) The job will demand a lot of time and location demands. If you'd rather be elsewhere that's understandable.
3) Value alignment: if you don't value what the company does you shouldn't lead it.
 
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Kak

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I would say yes.
Now I know why you were surprised when I turned down that offer a few months ago.

Jobs can teach and pay a lot, but you can’t sell a job, or give it to your kids. You don’t own it, it owns you.
 
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Rabby

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If I wanted the job, I would already be pursuing it. I'm not, which means I don't want it. Therefore, I would turn it down.

Also, anything that involving the following list of misfortunes is a hard no:
  • Attending more than one business meeting per month
  • Being part of a publicity campaign
  • Proximity to cubicles or similar torture devices
  • Listening to people who don't know what's going on try to explain what's going on
Can't say for sure, but I suspect that rules out most of the Fortune 500 CEO positions. :troll:
 

Rabby

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Setting aside the fact that nobody here is qualified for the job and the opportunity won’t happen anyway, I agree with @biophase .

Everybody has a price. 1 year of running a company, getting 15M in the process + experience + connections and you say No?

What are you, a brick?
Some people here are qualified for the job.
 

Kak

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Okay, the real conclusion I think is that most people have a number and it depends heavily on how rich (or not) they are right now.
Or how much they believe in what they’re currently doing.
 

Andy Black

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Okay, the real conclusion I think is that most people have a number and it depends heavily on how rich (or not) they are right now.
I refuse to spend less time with my kids now so I can spend more time with them later.
 

MJ DeMarco

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I’m just finding some of these answers hard to believe. Maybe if the pay was $1M, but Fortune 500 CEOs avg compensation is around $15M a year.

So none of you are getting out of bed for $1.2m a month? Guaranteed?

Sorry, still NO.
 

Antifragile

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The irony of someone saying “I would do it and so should you because you would make all this money guaranteed“ is that mindset is what will prevent you from getting the offer.

Even a young person, with no experience, if accidentally offered such a job must feel the responsibility of doing well. Imagine you are in your 20s and you get the job, a year later you are the laughing stock of the business community. Books are written about the dumbass who was so useless, politicians started to look useful in comparison.

That should bother you. Not all money earned is the same. Some of you will say “but you shouldn’t care what others think about you” and I agree, but I do care what I think about myself.

I don’t want a job where I know I’ll fail.

Compare this to being in the NBA by some fluke or weird ”lucky” connection. Now you are on the starting line. I guarantee you are not thinking “but I’ll have $10M extra after this year”. You’ll be thinking “get me out of this, I cannot stand the way I am failing here and all those commentators are making fun of me and they are right”.

Just another way to look at it. It’s not just the money.
 
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I would say yes. I have a job right now, and a seed of a fastlane business on the side, and the beginning of some real estate investments as well. I'm not rich, just on my way. If I had the chance to make millions in a different job, I'd pack up my bags and move in a heartbeat. Hell, I'd probably sell everything and go do it.

Would I do the CEO job forever? Maybe if I liked it. But I'd probably just plan to grind it out for a certain number of years, get the company running top notch, and find the next person to run it.

In my opinion, a job like that is like its own fastlane... like one of those Elaine Pofeldt "million dollar one person businesses" - you know, the onepreneur jobs.
 

Red

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I’m just finding some of these answers hard to believe.
This. A lot of posturing going on here, lol.

I would probably take it. I would then retire my husband, build our 2nd home in Colorado & then go about my plans that are currently in place. Nothing would change but a year hiatus fulfilling that CEO role that would set me up for the foreseeable future & I'm down for that more than likely.
 
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fastlane_dad

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There's so many variables to this it's not a 'yes I'd take it' or 'Yes I wouldn't'. To me this is on the parallel lines of asking if you'd sit in jail for X amount of time for X amount of dollars. Sure there are some that would possibly take that or consider it, but it's NOT an easy question to answer or decision to make.

I don't think it's very easy to answer this question for anyone honestly, unless we get into long form discussion, laying out all that it involves - AND actually offering the position of CEO.

There are MANY times in my life I turned down more money, or the HUNT for more money because I knew all of which was involved in it.

Sometimes more MONEY could involve more responsibility, or travel, or time away from family dinners or having employees under your belt. All of these points I'd have to SERIOUSLY ponder, no matter the sum and what the 'job' entails.

Yes - money is important in ALL of our lives, to one extent or another, but answering a one liner such as this is virtually impossible until the offer is on the table in front of our faces and we're signing on the line.

A job as a 'fortune 500' ceo is EXTREMELY grueling mentally, emotionally and physically. You are in the spotlight ALL the time. You are working 80 HOUR+ weeks. You are countlessly shaking hands, networking and making decisions that will impact the rest of the company strongly, etc.

H3LL NO for me before, and H3LL NO SQUARED for me now.

------------------------------------------------------------------

QUICK STORY and personal example!

After I completed my undergraduate studies - I took an engineering job for roughly 15-20% LESS then current average annual pay for the position that I had.

I was more then thrilled to be getting paid less at that time, as the position was not overly demanding, there was zero travel, and I had weekends and evenings all to myself to spend however I wanted. That led to opening up time and opportunity to creating my first cash-flow business on the side (that eventually several years and iterations later turned into a FASTLANE business My Fastlane Exit )

I had more then enough money off my job at the time to upkeep a cushy lifestyle while saving a ton (still living with parents then) - but enjoyed the extra freedom I had of not needing to be always 'extra' all around for my boss or as an employee.
 

Johnny boy

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Your job isn't to be busy, your job isn't to even make most of the decisions, your job is to deal with equity deals. M&A, strategy, delegation, etc. You aren't a manager. You aren't even the managers' managers' manager. You aren't even the captain of the ship. You are the captains boss, who calls in and makes sure the captain is being a good captain while you're negotiating doing a merger with another ship.

You can make millions, spend little time in the office, make a few good decisions and have an awesome life.

It doesn't necessarily have to be demanding. Now, it might look bad to the board if you're out on Lake Como for 25 weeks of the year...but if you are helping the company do well by making good decisions, you are doing your job.
 

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