Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff bought Time due to his ‘beginner’s mind’

It’s a concept he picked
up from Steve Jobs.
Justin Sullivan /
Getty Images

Time Magazine has a new
owner: Salesforce CEO and founder Marc Benioff.

The billionaire — whose net worth stands around $6.6 billion,
according to Forbes — acquired the magazine for $190
million.

According to Benioff himself, the purchase came about thanks to
his particular mindset.

“I live with a beginner’s mind,” Benioff told the New York Times in an
interview via text.

Business Insider’s Shana Lebowitz previously reported that the “beginner’s
mind” concept flows from Zen Buddhism. Someone with a “beginner’s
mind” constantly sees the world with fresh eyes.

In his text conversation with the New York Times, Benioff
reportedly cited wisdom from 20th-century Zen master Shunryu
Suzuki: “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in
the expert’s mind there are few.”

Back in 2016, Benioff described his thought process to
The Wall Street Journal: “I kind of try to let go of all the
things that have ever happened so far in our industry, which is a
lot of stuff, and just go, OK, what’s going to happen right now?”

It’s a mindset that Benioff — a former Apple intern — reportedly picked up
from Steve Jobs. In an appearance at a 2013 TechCrunch
conference, he praised his former boss as a “spiritual man” who was
“mindful and conscious of everything he did.”

Jobs himself was a major advocate for cultivating a “beginner’s
mind,” according to the Wall Street Journal.

Nowadays, Benioff is far from a novice in the world of tech — but
he apparently still relies on his “beginner’s mind” to make big
decisions.

“My power was that I didn’t really want to do anything but I was
open to all possibilities,” Benioff told the New York Times.