Jelly via AP file

Biz Stone, Twitter co-founder.

Line up all the elements of Twitter co-founder Biz Stones success story and what you have is a list of all the things you shouldnt do: skip homework, drop out of college, run up credit debt (despite his extraordinary success Stone still had debts until as recently as 2010), and show up to crucial job interviews worse for wear. Stones path may not have been traditional, but it is certainly inspirational, and it is explored in depth in his new book Things a Little Bird Told Me: Confessions of the Creative Mind.

Part memoir, part business manual, part creative treatise, Stones book traces his success (non-linear and not without its bumps), all the way back to his school days and reflects upon the qualities that set him on the path to achieve the extraordinary things his young self always sensed he would.

Here, Stone, a generous and committed philanthropist, discusses the more empathetic, evolved success metric he now aspires to and explains how it relates to his new venture Jelly (an app which enables users to tap into their social network to get answers to lifes questions). He reflects on the risks he took, the rules he challenged, the stuff he can live without, and how our digital evolution has only just begun.

You once toasted your future self who will pay for all this. You say you felt destined for something extraordinary. Was that intuition or ambition?

I guess it was more of an intuition. I wouldnt describe it as an ambition. I just felt like eventually something really important and big would happen, I just didnt know what it was. When I was a little kid I always dreamed that I could fly, and then I thought maybe one day Ill actually be able to fly, and then as I got older I was like, well, I dont think Im going to be able to fly but maybe something big -- I just didnt know what it was. I was just sort of constantly in search of that. And it finally came true.

You were raised by a single mom who struggled financially. Did your early awareness of how money impacts quality of life and social standing, influence your attitudes to work and risk?

Thats a good question. Well, my attitude towards work was that I just always had to work. I started working when I was nine years old mowing lawns. I just always had jobs, I was always working, so I mean there was no question that work had to be done; you had to make money somehow.

With regard to risk, thats an interesting question because you would think that I would be averse to it -- having achieved any level of homeostasis would be good enough. There was just always this intuition that there was something greater. My hunch was always that I should just follow the next thing that I felt was right, but was also very, very intrigued by, and they could turn into big opportunities. First it was becoming a designer and making that into a career, and then it was my first start-up, and then it was this idea of democratizing information, and I became very passionate about that.

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Conscious Captalism: Biz Stone's New Success Metric