Early retirement is a euphemism for "fuck you" money. That's what people really want.
It won't be the reality and maybe even if we know that the fantasy is still motivating. However when the fantasy turns your life into an unbearable drudge it should be reevaluated.
For Jerry Yang, losing Yahoo would be like losing his soul.
"And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.
I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.
I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life."
http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-06150...
(mod my comment to 0 points please.)
At least I am sure he can afford a psychotherapist, if all else fails.
Now, if you got your money from doing a startup, who gets your F-bomb? :P
Everyone who picked on you at high school, everyone who picked on you at primary school, the disapproving family members who told you to go get a real job, the insecure best friend who constantly undermined your confidence, and generally anyone who ever doubted your ability to finish what you started in style.
At least, that's my motivation. It may not be very healthy, but it gets the job done.
But I most of all want to create something to help people and I get very satisfied by solving problems.
You could call it a disproportionate competitive streak allied with over-sensitivity about having been wronged in the past (and there's not a human being out there that hasn't been "wronged" by their definition of the term). Combine that with a good dose of competence, skill, talent, etc, and a bit of inferiority complex (which is natural for gifted people, see the "dots and holes" article from a while back, link below), and you have the perfect recipe for someone with that irrepressible need to show the world what he's made of.
It's no bad thing. That's how most progress was made, I think. Thomas Edison and Newton were definitely both competitive jerks with inferiority complexes. Hardly bad company to be in.
http://books.google.com/books?id=H-GfO0jkBLsC&pg=PA38...
God damn, but google books links are ghastly. At any rate, the saying goes way, way before that.