I just got to the part of Steve Jobs where, in the earliest days of Apple, the guy who helped them draw up their first legal agreement declined his 10% stock in Apple computers.

When I say “early” I don’t mean a hundred employees, I mean, three employees. Jobs, Wozniak, and a guy from Atari who was doing these two kids a solid.

His name is Ronald Wayne.

Wayne is probably the most fascinating character in the Apple saga and I recognize that I’m roughly a tenth of the way through the book. We focus so much on the stories of people who face adversity and stick to their guns and come out on top. We love stories of entrepreneurs making history in their garages. But how often do we focus on people who were close to greatness and, through sound decision making, miss out?

That is Ron Wayne.

Ron Wayne drew the first Apple logo. He was also twenty-two years older than Steve Jobs and had failed in a business before. As a partner, if debts were incurred, he would be liable. As I can attest, the world looks different to a forty something than it does to a twenty something. So, he relinquished his stake in Apple for a total of $2300 (including a settlement from venture capitalists, according to wikipedia).

As of March 2018 (again, according to wikipedia) he would have been worth over $84 billion dollars.

That’s not the part that interests me, though, here’s what interests me. According to Walter Isaacson’s book, “He later claimed he had no regrets. ‘I made the best decision for me at the time. Both of them were real whirlwinds, and I knew my stomach and it wasn’t ready for such a ride.'”

No regrets. That’s the part that I respect.

Remember the part in The Social Network where Justin Timberlake regales Jesse Eisenberg about Victoria’s Secret? How the founder sold a billion dollar company for one million dollars and then later killed himself by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge? That’s the story that we expect. That’s the American story. You missed your payout? Failure!

It doesn’t look like Ron Wayne’s life ended up great by anyone else’s standards. He didn’t go on to found Flexisoft, a company that is revolutionizing the way that we do business. He ended up living in a small home in Nevada living off social security checks.

And yet he had no regrets. I made the best decision for me at the time.

You have to remember that at the time Ron Wayne was dealing with Steve Jobs, Jobs was literally a barefoot college dropout who thought that acid and traveling in India were the keys to success. Would you put your financial future on the line for that guy in the 70’s? If you said yes, you’re either lying or broke.

Ron Wayne fascinates me because his story gets to the core of our definition of success. I hate to sound like an asshole here but Ron Wayne is 83 years old. Steve Jobs died at 56. What is success if at the end of the game the king and the pawn go back in the same box? What would any of Steve Jobs’s spiritual teachers have said about the value of twenty-seven extra years of life?