A woman at the Limited once asked me, 'Why do you work?' She said, 'You made a lot of money as a young man, so why are you still working?' I had never thought about it before. Forced to consider it, I told her, 'You know why? Because I think that if you stop to smell the roses, you'll get hit by a truck.
Les WexnerAsk yourself: What forms the decisions you make? What is it that gnaws at you? What are your crucible moments?
Les WexnerMy Picassos and Ferraris - those are kind of just toys. Those aren't the things that matter. What matters in the car collecting or the art collecting is to learn about it, and then actually not the acquisition but to put them into a collection that I think is curated. You know, so something of me in the collection that the artist actually created the work. If I was going to collect art, it had to be something of me, my eye, things that appeal to me so when I looked at it, it would really look like a collection, not just an accumulation of stuff.
Les WexnerI think leaders lead themselves, but leaders have ideas and maybe they're visionary ideas. Probably today, people would say Steve Jobs was a visionary because he invented this little gadget, the cell phone. But he didn't invent cell phones, and he didn't design the cell phone. He just took a couple of ideas and put them together, and no one else put those same ideas together as successfully as he did. But he had something that he was trying to do that intrigued him, and he could do it very well.
Les Wexner