Jay Chaudhry has seen his share of success.

The 66-year-old co-founded his first company, SecureIT, with his wife in 1996. That sold for $70 million in an all-stock deal in 1998. He then founded three other companies, AirDefense, CipherTrust and CoreHarbor, all of which were ultimately acquired.

In 2008, he founded his current venture, cybersecurity company Zscaler, at which he now serves as the CEO. Zscaler has a current market cap of $25.31 billion as of Thursday. Chaudhry’s own wealth is estimated at $9.5 billion, according to Forbes.

When it comes to what traits it takes to succeed, Chaudhry cites one characteristic: passion. Specifically, a “passion to achieve something meaningful,” he says.

Here’s why he believes it’s critical.

To begin with, being passionate about what you’re doing makes it much easier to do the job.

When that’s your driving force, “then work becomes your hobby,” says Chaudhry, “because you’re enjoying it.” It motivates you to work harder and get results. And those results drive you even further. It’s a domino effect of success that starts from that deep desire to dive in.

For Chaudhry, that passion came from “building something,” he says, or founding these multiple companies. He loved laying the foundations for his startups and seeing them through.

Ultimately, you end up saying, “let’s do more,” he says.

The opposite is true for people who don’t feel that fire.

“If people don’t have passion,” he says, “it doesn’t matter how much experience they have. It just doesn’t matter for any job.” You won’t have that internal drive to keep working toward solving problems and moving ahead. You won’t be as excited to do the work, and when you do sit down to produce, working could end up being less pleasant.

When Chaudhry’s looking for employees, he pays attention to how much research his candidates have done and the kinds of questions they ask to gauge their passion. If it seems like they’re very enthused, there’s potential for that to drive achievements on the job.

After that, he says, “success drives success.”

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We can expect to face a growing number of setbacks, distractions, and challenges in our increasingly chaotic world. That’s why we need resilience more than ever.

Resilience is one of six “mental muscles” that make up mental strength, or the ability to productively regulate your emotions, thoughts, and behaviors. It’s essential for success but tricky to cultivate. 

The good news is that, as I share in my new book “The Mentally Strong Leader,” anyone can build habits for greater resilience and fortitude.

Part of my research on mental strength included developing a self-assessment that allows you gauge where you are when it comes to each of the six muscles, and understand what you can do to level up. 

Here’s a mini-assessment focused on fortitude: If you can answer “always” to these seven questions, you’re already more resilient than most. 

If you view any setback as a threat — to your goals, identity, or reputation — you focus on everything that could go wrong. Your anxiety often feeds on itself, making it even harder to navigate your way out of a difficult circumstance. 

But if you view the setback as a challenge that tests your skills in a good way and as an opportunity to explore, learn, grow, or achieve more than you thought possible, it’s dramatically more productive. 

For example, during COVID, I saw a microbrewery turn a major setback (having to temporarily close) into an opportunity to have their employees spend time in the community on a variety of volunteer projects. Instead of sitting idle, they built bonds in their neighborhood. 

Resilience demands problem-solving skills. But a rigid approach to problem-solving fuels frustration, not fortitude. A flexible mindset is a must. 

As I share in “The Mentally Strong Leader,” you need three specific types of flexibility: 

• Intellectual flexibility, which means keeping an open mind, considering “outside-the-box” solutions, and being open to having your assumptions challenged
• Emotional flexibility, which means not getting too attached to a possible solution or letting your emotions drive you to make rash decisions
• Dispositional flexibility, which means having fun with the problem-solving process while improvising and experimenting as needed

The most resilient leaders I’ve worked for all shared one superpower: the ability to balance reality and hope. 

I’ve had managers who only communicated the reality of an adverse situation. They were depressing. I’ve had managers who only communicated optimism. They were out of touch. 

The best managers I’ve had were realistic about the circumstances at hand, but operated with an undertone of hope. They successfully navigated through big obstacles when others failed.

Adversity often makes us feel as though we’ve lost something, like time, money, support, or confidence. But highly resilient people concentrate on what they still have to be thankful for when setbacks arise. 

When you focus on working with what you have versus bemoaning what you don’t, you can do what needs to be done rather than getting stuck ruminating on what you’ve lost and what else could go wrong.

Fixating on how unfair your circumstances are can paralyze you, leaving you with the capacity only for anger, not action. Getting stuck in “it’s not fair” can lead to a victim mentality, which erodes resilience. You learn to believe you’re helpless or powerless. You’re not. 

Resilient people don’t think, “Why me?” They think, “Why not me?” As in, “Why can’t I be the one who courageously rises above these circumstances?” 

Own your part in the circumstance you’re in, commit to learn and grow from it, and be willing to change your situation rather than just wishing it would change. 

“Catastrophizing” makes mountains out of molehills. It frazzles you instead of focusing you. It distorts the situation instead of defusing it.

Resilience comes from being realistic about the true impact of the circumstance without minimizing or exaggerating. It means compartmentalizing any truly negative effect so it doesn’t bleed over into other parts of your job or life. 

Staying resilient is hard enough. Why make it harder by beating yourself up when you stumble? 

When adversity strikes, pay attention to what you feel about yourself. Instead of judging yourself, name the emotion. For example: “I feel like a failure right now.” 

When you name it, the sensation begins to lose its hold over you and becomes something specific you can address. It’s something you’re experiencing, not who you are. You feel like a failure. That doesn’t mean you are a failure.

Be kind to yourself. Talk to yourself like you would a friend in need. And remember that you’re bigger than any mistake. 

Scott Mautz is a popular speaker, trainer, and LinkedIn Learning instructor. He’s a former senior executive of Procter & Gamble, where he ran several of the company’s largest multi-billion-dollar businesses. He is the author of ”The Mentally Strong Leader: Build the Habits to Productively Regulate Your Emotions, Thoughts, and Behaviors.” Follow him on LinkedIn.

The idea of financial independence can mean different things to different people, but one common way to define it is having enough money that you no longer need to rely on a job, a paycheck or someone else to sustain your lifestyle.

While the path toward financial independence can feel daunting, there has been one tried and true method of success: live below your means and invest what you save.

That’s exactly what Shu Matsuo Post did to achieve the freedom he has today. Over the course of about seven years, the 38-year-old consistently poured over 50% of his and his wife’s dual income into real estate investing.

Now, Matsuo Post owns a $2 million real estate portfolio consisting of six rental properties located in the U.S. and three in Japan, according to documents seen by CNBC Make It.

“I’m very fortunate to be able to say this, but I don’t have to work for money,” Matsuo Post told CNBC Make It. “I enjoy earning money, but I can focus on what I want to do… it’s completely the other way around.”

Today, Matsuo Post lives in Japan with his wife and two kids. Besides managing his investments, he also creates online educational content about real estate investing and runs his own consulting business Post FI, which helps foreigners purchase property in Japan.

Matsuo Post’s journey toward financial independence was not straightforward. Pivoting his career multiple times, he worked in industries like journalism, retail and technology before entering real estate.

Born and raised in Japan, he moved to the U.S. at 15-years-old and ended up staying for about eight years to study and begin his career. Following his stint in the U.S., Matsuo Post also worked in Hong Kong for several years before settling down back in Japan with his wife, Christina, seven years ago.

After getting married in 2017, Matsuo Post and his wife decided to combine their finances. When they began investing, they focused primarily on index funds and ETFs, but ultimately decided that they wanted to be more active with their investments instead of waiting around for stock market returns.

“We found real estate and kept talking about it, and then we decided that we can live off of one income,” Matsuo Post said. They chose to live off of Christina’s income from teaching and saved all of Shu’s salary for their first property.

“For us, we were super fortunate to be able to do that having relatively high paying jobs at the time and we just saved quite a bit,” said Matsuo Post. The couple ended up saving over $250,000 before investing in their first property, he said.

In 2018, Matsuo Post and his wife purchased their first property — a duplex in Minnesota — for a total of $216,500, according to documents seen by CNBC Make It. Just one year later, he purchased three more rental properties across Minnesota and New York.

In September 2022, Matsuo Post was laid off after his company shut down the business division that he worked in. But after evaluating his finances, he realized that it was no longer necessary to find another office job.

“So after I was let go from the startup, I had a choice to go back to the corporate world or to start something [of my own],” said Matsuo Post. Ultimately, he decided that he wanted to spend more time with family, so he chose to leave the corporate world for good.

Shortly after being laid off, Matsuo Post started his YouTube channel, which has garnered over 100,000 subscribers, and in 2023, he started his real estate consulting business Post FI, or Post “Financial Independence.”

“I’m never going back,” Matsuo Post said. “Achieving that financial independence is absolutely important, but retirement and not having to work ever — I realized, it’s not something that I wanted. I wanted engaged work that I didn’t need to retire from.”

“If that generates money, that’s great, and if it doesn’t, that’s okay too, because you have other forms of income coming in to support your lifestyle,” he said.

When asked about the guiding principles he used to achieve financial independence, Post said:

1. Invest in yourself first. Read books, attend seminars and learn from others who have already achieved goals similar to your own.
2. Increase your earning potential. Saving won’t make you rich but it allows you to have money, which helps you to take bigger risks with higher potential payouts.
3. Stay frugal. Save more than 50% of your income. 

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He may not have known it at the time, but in 2005 Sam Altman took a risk that changed the trajectory of his career.

That’s when Altman dropped out of Stanford to build Loopt, a location-based social networking app — the first of his projects before co-founding OpenAI, the game-changing artificial intelligence company behind ChatGPT.

It “seemed like a really fun thing to try,” Altman, 39, told students during an interview at his alma mater, the St. Louis-area John Burroughs School. More importantly, he added, leaving college was a decision he could go back on if entrepreneurship didn’t work out.

“That’s the key to most risk, is most things are not a one-way door,” he said. “You can try something, it doesn’t work out, you can undo it, you can do something else.”

Altman isn’t the only business titan to weigh risks this way: Amazon founder Jeff Bezos told the “Lex Fridman Podcast” last year that he considers whether opportunities are a two-way door risk and easy to take because they’re reversible, and “you can come back in and pick another door.”

On the other hand, a one-way door risk is harder to undo. It should be made deliberately and carefully, Bezos said, because “you go in that door, you’re not coming back.”

It’s crucial to choose the right risks but not avoid them altogether, Altman said. “The risky thing is to not go try the things that might really work out,” he said.

Regret can kick in, and “you kind of look back at your career 10, 20, 30 years later and say, ‘Man, I wish I had tried the thing I really wanted to try,’” he said. “You should just put a huge premium on doing that anytime you feel like you might say that later.”

Altman also encouraged students to be open to deviating from a traditional path of going to college, getting a job and staying there “forever.”

That might have been a guarantee of financial security for some people in previous generations, he said. “Now I think the traditional path is, I won’t say falling apart, but it’s quite challenged,” he said. “And AI will probably disrupt things even more and put more variants in the traditional path.”

Members of younger generations may be coming around to the idea of switching up their line of work over time.

Students from the graduating class of 2025 haven’t started working full-time yet, but 43% already expect they’ll pivot to a new field at least once in their careers, according to data from Handshake, the career resource for college students.

“They’re going to be working for a really, really long time,” Christine Cruzvergara, the chief education strategy officer at Handshake, previously told Make It. “This generation appreciates having optionality.”

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Tom Cruise is no stranger to big Hollywood paydays, but his latest role came free of charge.

The actor stole the show during the closing ceremonies of the Paris Olympics, performing a stunt during the symbolic handoff to host-city-in-waiting Los Angeles.

Speaking on a panel during CNBC x Boardroom’s Game Plan Summit, president of the Los Angles Olympic Organizing Committee Casey Wasserman said that getting the A-lister to participate was always his top priority, but he was skeptical of how much time he’d be able to get on Cruise’s calendar.

“We were like ‘There’s no way we’re getting this much. We’re going to have four hours of filming time [with him]. We’ll do the thing in LA with the Hollywood sign, he’ll hand the thing off and he’s done. The rest will be just a stunt double,’” Wasserman recalled.

But the 62-year-old Cruise quickly surprised the Organizing Committee with his enthusiasm and interest in their pitch.

“About five minutes into the presentation he goes ‘I’m in, but I’m only doing it if I get to do everything,’” Wasserman said.

Wasserman said Cruise “got more involved and engaged” as planning for the closing ceremony stunt got underway.

The stunt would see him rappel down from the roof of the Stade de France and accept the Olympic flag from Simone Biles and Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass. Cruise would then ride off on a motorcycle and the feed would cut to pre-taped footage of him riding onto a waiting plane which would fly him to Los Angeles, at which point he would skydive down onto the Hollywood sign.

Wasserman said Cruise was true to his word, arranging a jam-packed travel day in order to film everything that was needed.

“He finished filming ‘Mission: Impossible’ at six o’clock in London, got right on a plane and landed in LA at 4 a.m.,” Wasserman explained. “He filmed the scene where he pulls onto the military plane in LA. He did two jumps out of the plane. Then he helicoptered from Palmdale to the Hollywood sign, filmed from one until five, helicoptered to the Burbank airport and flew back to London at six o’clock.”

And despite the lengths he went to in order to fit the shoot into his schedule, Cruise “did it all for free.”

Watch Cruise’s Closing Ceremony stunt here.

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