“But all of a sudden, I'm home, and it's the first time I ever had to think through the question: ‘What do you do?’ I hated that question.”

Eventually, he became president of the company’s Asia operations, before leaving for Dell in 1998 to run its Asia and EMEA regions. “I left AT&T because I realized that I had a lot more to give, and I wanted to break out of the big hierarchy,” he said.

The Dell role lasted a couple of years before Legere joined telecoms company Global Crossing in 2001 as CEO, taking it through a “really tough” restructuring and eventually selling it to CenturyLink (then Level 3) in 2011.

And then, for the first time in years, he was out of full-time employment.

“I stopped being CEO and got divorced in the same month. I did well in the sale (of Global Crossing). But all of a sudden, I'm home, and it's the first time I ever had to think through the question: ‘What do you do?’ I hated that question. And you know, I don’t know. I'm reading Eckhart Tolle’s (book), ‘The Power of Now,’ and I'm thinking, wow.

“My friends and my doctor said: ‘Dude, you’ve got to go back to work.’ I'm on (dating website) Match … but I did give some thought as to what I was going to do.”

Then a headhunter friend appraoched him with the T-Mobile opportunity. “She was a wonderful woman. So, yeah, I'll go. But the odds of me working for (parent company) Deutsche Telekom are, like, none, you know. I'm thinking, that's not going to happen.”

But he went ahead and met the then Deutsche Telekom CEO Obermann. “Okay, here's the following, like, eight things,” Legere told him. “And if we can agree on these eight things, I'll come. But I'm really not that interested,” he said.

His list included investing in better network coverage, doing a deal with Apple to be able to sell the iPhone to customers and merging with wireless carrier Metro PCS — all of which Deutsche Telekom agreed with.

On a holiday in Capri, Legere made a decision: he would take the job. “Because this has been, and still remains… it's so me and it's so core to what I was made to do. And to think that I even thought about it for more than two seconds is incredible.”