8 Things That Self-Made Billionaires Do Differently
Is there some unique way of thinking that gives self-made billionaire entrepreneurs an edge? Fascinated by this question for my whole career as a serial entrepreneur and writer, I’ve read more billionaire entrepreneur biographies than I can count, researched what they have in common, and met and interviewed several
Billionaire Entrepreneur Hack
Identify a core customer need that will likely stay the same (even as technology and culture evolve) to which your company is uniquely positioned to cater, and build your company around it.
- Purchase overlooked historic properties at a large discount, invest heavily in repurposing and restoring them, and tell the story of what they meant to the community through social media.
Billionaire Entrepreneur Strategy
Having a powerful vision is essential for all entrepreneurs, but if you are going to excel, your stakeholders need to buy into your vision
- For many, the vision ends up becoming a few lines of mission-speak on their corporate website
- Steve Jobs and Elon Musk, however, seem to have the superpower to distort reality
- It is easy to attribute this ability to charisma, but it is also because they are good at storytelling
Billionaire Entrepreneur Strategy
Don’t chase success, chase failure.
- The only way to protect yourself from failure is to not try, or not try anything hard at least, both of which are sure and direct routes to mediocrity
- You can only achieve big things by daring to try big things, and failure is inevitable, so why not start racking up failures now? Not only will you get used to it so that every subsequent setback stings less but with each attempt you increase your odds of landing on a world-changing idea
Billionaire Entrepreneur Hack: Utilizing a decision tree does not require a PhD
All that’s needed is a basic understanding of probability
- Here’s a step-by-step process you can follow to use the principles in your decision making
- Understand the different outcomes that could happen
- Calculate the expected return or loss of each outcome: Attach a probability to each outcome
- Understanding the magnitude of the return/loss
- Multiple the probability by the magnitude
- Add up and subtract all of the expected returns and losses
Billionaire Entrepreneur Strategy
Avoid stupid mistakes by religiously following basic tenets and ideas they know will work
- To counteract the often negative influence emotions can have in investment decisions, Buffett and Munger use several checklists
- They claim that using these checklists has been crucial to their miraculous 21.6% return over four decades
Billionaire Entrepreneur Hack: Blake Goodwine has used a decision-making checklist to build his Lionize Media Group into a network of niche media sites with tens of millions of monthly visitors
Brainstorm
- Test
- Evaluate
- Learn
- Dive deeply into the data
- Avoid taking mistakes personally
Thinking independently requires:
Courage to stand up against the herd when you’re right and everyone else is wrong
- Access to or understanding of information that other people don’t have
- Unique ways of analyzing that information
- Develop an information advantage
- Build deep relationships with people who have accomplished the goals you want to accomplish
- Learn from other fields and bring the insights into your own
- Analytical advantage
Billionaire Entrepreneur Strategy
Charlie Munger, Berkshire Hathaway vice chairman and long-time Warren Buffett business partner, shows another equally important path to success; thinking through what can go wrong.
- Invert, always invert
- What happens if all our plans go wrong?
- Where don’t we want to go, and how do we get there?
Billionaire Entrepreneur Hack:
Blakely offers specific advice: “My dad would encourage me anytime something didn’t go the way I expected it to, or maybe I got embarrassed by a situation, to write down where the hidden gifts were, and what I got out of it.”
- She realized that in everything there was some amazing nugget that she wouldn’t have wanted to pass up.
Billionaire Entrepreneur Hack:
Test your plan with this three-step pre-mortem process developed by Meathead Movers CEO and cofounder, Aaron Steed
- List the ways the project could fail
- Assign a probability to each possibility
- Prioritize actions that can be taken to avoid failure
Turn Your Vision Into A Detailed Story And Picture
Retreat, visualize, and ask
- Find a quiet space where you don’t have any distractions from your daily life
- Visualize
- Transplant yourself five years into the future
- Ask: What is your top-line revenue
- How many people are on your team?
- What is the press saying about your business
- Describe your office environment in detail
Billionaire Entrepreneur Strategy
In the information age, one of the best ways to get information is not from just being better at searching Google, it’s from learning how to build a network and get the information you need through that network.
- Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn and part of the PayPal mafia, puts these types of relationships at the center of his career and makes a case that others should too.
Billionaire Entrepreneur Strategy
Jeff Bezos shows that big trends are only part of the story. It’s also about doing the exact opposite and focusing on what does not change.
- Amazon has focused on being the best in one core area by continually investing in it over time.
Billionaire Entrepreneur Strategy
The key to having enduring, extraordinary performance is to do what others won’t or can’t and to be right
- This is easier said than done
- 86% of professional investors do not beat the market
- 30.9-37.6% of new businesses fail in the first three years
Two keys on building long-term relationships
Be picky about who you spend a lot of time around
- Value relationships over pure achievement and are willing and able to invest in the relationship
- Open to being vulnerable and to sharing their true experiences
- Enjoy spending time with them
- Invest the time
Billionaire Entrepreneur Strategy
Elon Musk uses decision trees to make big decisions
- This is useful for avoiding stupid risks and big bets that aren’t likely to succeed
- He thought the most likely outcome for both SpaceX and Tesla was failure, but felt the risk was worth it because they were so important to the future of humanity and had so much potential
- If there is even a tiny chance that doing something could destroy you, it’s a very bad idea
Looking to apply these self-made billionaire lessons to your business now?
Create an amazing free resource and an active community to help you go to the next level
- Curated from the top 460 book recommendations from leaders like Bill Gates, Sheryl Sandberg, and Elon Musk
- The team spent dozens of hours collecting recommendations on the Internet