With Purpose Success, part 78

In other words, if you'll indulge an American football metaphor, Buffett is the quarterback who drove his team to the goal line and then left the game, handing off responsibility for gaining the final yard-the toughest yard-to another teammate. Gates is no ordinary teammate, for sure. But Sir Tom's point is worth considering: Someone with unusual ability owes it to others to stay with the job until it is finished. In Hunter's view, making a fortune is the easy part; distributing it for maximum good (getting over the goal line, to complete the football metaphor) is the real challenge. "I really believe there's nothing that you can't solve with the right brain power," says Hunter. "I would love to get Warren Buffet's brain engaged in some of these challenges. And, by the way, he would also get so much out of it." 

Taking on Goliath comes naturally to the direct and enthusiastic Hunter, forty-seven, who enjoys playing drums with a local rock band and usually sports a "make poverty history" wrist band. His earliest role model was Wal-mart founder Sam Walton, and he later fashioned himself after a fellow countryman, Andrew Carnegie-whose name Hunter endearingly pronounces as only a Scot would, with the accent on the second syllable (Car-NAY-gee). 

Hunter is the son of a working-class grocer from the Ayrshire mining village of New Cumnock, about an hour south of Glasgow. After a bitter miners' strike in 1984 his father's business failed, which proved to be a valuable early lesson for Hunter in the importance of becoming self- reliant. He was an average student. But he developed a knack for buying and selling things and after college he went to work for a newspaper that he audaciously offered to buy after being there just a few weeks. He was fired by the enraged owner. 

But Hunter found his mark soon enough, striking riches in the global athletic apparel business. His company grew into the U.K.'s top sports retailer before he sold it for $600 million. He was just thirty-seven at the time, and soon after selling the apparel company he opened a private investment firm called West Coast Capital, which provides seed money to entrepreneurs. By age forty-five, Sir Tom had become Scotland's first- and wealthiest-homegrown billionaire. 

It was around then that his personal journey from success to significance took wing, springing somewhat ironically from a strategy to shelter his wealth from taxes. Shortly after selling his company, he established the 

Hunter Foundation with no clear vision of what it might do other than keep the tax man out of his pockets. From this bit of self-interest, though, emerged a new worldview. Hunter began to transform from driven businessman fixated on lavish living into devoted, roll-up-your sleeves philanthropist. "When I became rich, I found I didn't have anything to do anymore, which was kind of scary," Hunter recalls, after selling his company. "And, of course, as my profile grew so did my mailbag. People would write me and ask if I could do this or that for their football team, or their church, or their hospital. Some of the letters really pulled at my heartstrings. So 

I'd send them a check. But then that was it. I didn't know if the money had made a difference. I didn't know if it was even real, and it wasn't fulfilling. Who would have imagined that giving out money would be so boring?" 

He began to research ways he might give that would have more meaning and satisfaction for him and came upon Andrew Carnegie's famous 

Gospel of Wealth, which states that "a man who dies rich, dies disgraced."