Billion Dollar Secret -> notes from the book
Hi. Please have in mind these notes are just copy-pasted from the book, the most important highlights for me.
The first one is the realization that you can overcome all unfavorable conditions and become extraordinarily successful in business despite or maybe because of them. It’s your inner workings that make you excel in business, not the conditions outside you.
Millionaires are strong to take their lives into their hands but still believe their success depends on favorable conditions. — Billionaires know they have it inside them, and they make it big in business independently of external factors.
For a car, the limit is given by its construction; for you as an entrepreneur, it’s given by your inner setup: your mindset, your belief system, your attitudes, your worldview, your motivations, your skills, your habits, your knowledge, and your personality.
Cai Dongqing, called the Chinese Walt Disney, stresses that you need to dare to dream and fight for it. Asked about the difference between millionaires and billionaires, he says: “They have different goals which will decide whether they will get going or feel satisfied with the status quo after they have reached the first level of success.” That’s also what Frank Stronach, the Canadian billionaire and founder of Magna, confirms:
“Once you stop dreaming, you’re a dead person. There’s no limits in dreaming. It’s unlimited. Knowledge is limited. You must always have dreams. Once you have a dream, then you daydream, and then you say what you have to do to maybe fulfill those dreams.”
“If you’re going to take a bite, take a really big bite. A really big bite, so your mouth is full, and there’s blood running down the side of your mouth and on your chin and onto your chest. That’s what you should be doing. Do something big and worthwhile. If you’re going to bother taking a bite, take a big bite.”
“You do, you die. You don’t do, you also die,” right? You’ve got one bloody life. Do your best and die. So if that’s the case, then you should challenge yourself and maximize yourself. Leave a legacy as much as you can. There’s a sense of achievement. What do I live for? Sorry, I don’t live for God. I’m living for glory, the sense of achievement and what you can achieve before your run-out date comes. You create something and leave something behind.
“How big is your heart? How big is the dream? That’s the key difference. How big your heart is determines how big is your vision.” And this, as we know, determines how big will be your results.
“I think if you want to achieve something in business, the worst thing is a good salary. Because you don’t become rich with that, but also you have the guarantee. Most people give everything away for the safety. Safety meaning: to have a lifetime job. This is a dream of 99.9% of people.” So don’t trade your future for safety, it’s a bad trade. Lirio didn’t do it and you shouldn’t either. Also, don’t become a prisoner of your lifestyle.
At the end of the day, does anything matter other than laying on your deathbed and either you lived the life you wanted or the life you didn’t? I think as human beings, we do so many things in the world to look good in front of other people. But I think on our deathbeds, looking good in front of other people means absolutely nothing. And I think about how many things that would’ve been incredible in my life that I didn’t do because I didn’t want to get turned down by that girl or I didn’t want that guy to think that I wasn’t smart or I didn’t want something in that kind of realm. We only have 35,000 days on this earth and then you’re gone, and no one gives a shit after that. You’re a little speck of germ in the whole universe. So it really doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks; it’s a matter of, did I completely fulfill every second of my life? It helps me stop doing a lot of things that aren’t really, really, really important. Sometimes I think, if I only had three months to live, how would I change my calendar? What projects would I do, what wouldn’t I do? It really helps me prioritize. Because I find myself taking on things that I should do or things that are really important. I can’t stand going to my deathbed and having an idea untried. I need to find out whether it’s viable or not.
Naveen Jain, after having built several multibillion-dollar companies, still claims to be at the beginning: “Well, I am very early into this book; only a few chapters have been written. The majority of the chapters are yet to be written. I’m going after every one of the major industries. I started with space and I’m going into health care.
Next thing I’ll probably attack will be education. I’ll probably attack the food, and I’m going to continue to attack these biggest problems because I know the biggest problems are the biggest opportunity for an entrepreneur. As an entrepreneur, I really think if I can solve any of these big problems, there is a massive business to be created.”
I think not many people want to go above a certain level. Once people have achieved the amount of success that will support more than their lifestyle for the rest of their lives, people get disincentivized from that, and there aren’t many who want to go on and on and on and on. I think to go way beyond where you need to, you’ve got to want to make it bigger and better all the time, no matter how big. You’ve got to want to rule the world. I spend only a tiny percentage of my income.
Optimists are the ones who accomplish everything. Pessimists don’t accomplish anything. Pessimists just give you all the reasons why it’s not going to work.
“All of us are capable of far more than what we think we are. We have so much inherent potential. So believe in yourself.” Tim Draper has a similar perspective: “Anything that can be imagined can actually happen. I watched Star Trek when I was younger, and there’s a communicator now — it’s the smartphone — there’s a holodeck — it’s the VR — the tricorder reading, that’s happening. We have pretty much done everything except space travel to all the different planets.” One of his life mottoes is “Anything is possible.”
“There were always guys in my classes who were smarter than I was. Even now I never think of myself as the smartest guy in the room.… I try to instill in the students confidence and courage. I tell them that if they believe and they work hard — I worked very hard — they can be successful like me. I also tell them you have to have it in the bottom of your heart.”
If you’re trying to do something extraordinary, you will be ridiculed.
Billionaires don’t do it for the money. It’s not the money that drives them, but the fun of the game.
Billionaires focus on solving problems, not on making money. “If you want to be really successful in business, first find a problem to solve,” advises Dilip Shanghvi. “If you can solve a problem that is currently unsolved, you can create an interesting business opportunity. Don’t start a business to make money as an objective, money is just an outcome.”
And here we come to the next billionaire motivation: winning. In order to win, you need to become the best, and for that you need to compete.
I’m not a religious guy, so I kind of see life as: “You must be here for a purpose.” So if you are here for a purpose, you’ve got to maximize and be as useful as you can be, and make something out of nothing for yourself, for your family, for your friends, for your people. And leave something behind that probably people can learn from.
I don’t think you’re successful in business unless you understand people. One of my favorite subjects during medical school was psychiatry. People say, “Oh, did you do accounting? Did you do finance?” And my answer is, “No, I didn’t. You can hire accountants, you can hire lawyers, you can hire professional people.” Business is all about people. How do you get them to do what you want them to do? How do you reward them? How do you make them feel good about themselves? How do you get them to accept the direction?
The self-made billionaires that I interviewed get up on average at 5:30 a.m. with some variation to it. Result is always what follows.
There’s no point in doing anything in life unless it’s 100%. You might as well just go do something else.
Out of all the 21 billionaires I interviewed for this book, only one was a smoker. All the rest either have never smoked in their lives or gave up smoking long ago.
Reading is, together with exercise, the activity that billionaires spend time on regularly. Almost all my interviewees named reading as one of the habits they follow daily.
Chip Wilson approaches every day in a systematic way. Asked what is the first thing he does in the office, he says: I sit down and I think about what my number one priority of the day is. What is my goal to get done for that day? And I look at my calendar and go, “Okay, is my calendar right?” Actually, do that the night before, so I rearrange things. Then I go, “Has anything changed between last night and this morning, and what do I need to do?” I need to actually insert it into my calendar to give me time to do it.
I wake up every morning and do things I don’t like. I force myself to do them every day. Because I am not hardworking, I force myself to do hard work. I am not systematic, so I have to force myself to become systematic.
I like playing football but don’t feel like doing physical exercises. But to keep playing, I force myself to do exercises every day, do push-ups, curl-ups, I swim in a pool. It takes me 40 minutes in the morning, and often another 40 minutes in the evening. I don’t like that in principle. But I do it, simply. Generally after doing some exercises I feel better, but I don’t like the exercising phase itself. If I could achieve the same effect without doing those exercises, I wouldn’t do them. Well, but I do them. Every day I have to persuade those “lazy bones” that are in me, and they keep telling me: “Today I think I woke up late,” or “I am in a hurry, no time,” or “I don’t feel well enough.” But then I respond to myself: “No way, don’t cheat yourself, bud, you simply feel lazy …” and I do it. In this way I learned about consequence and determination.
Our family was very poor it was a fact, but I have never wanted to be defeated by that. Hard life is not a problem. I had to stay on and work step-by-step toward the success in that direction. So I never wanted to give up, never wanted to say, “I will be defeated.” That was a very clear mission. First mission,
I wanted to get out of the poverty. Second, try to have a good life. That was the direction.”
Not showing up to the opportunity can come extremely expensive. You may think, such opportunities never occur in your life. But think about it! How many opportunities have you missed in your life? How many opportunities have passed before your eyes that you haven’t noticed? How
many opportunities may exist right now that you are not aware of? Are you sure none of those could turn out to be a billion-dollar opportunity?
Most of my failures were failures to act.
“I think what you really need is good eyesight, not good foresight and not good hindsight. Every one of us has great hindsight. I can tell you exactly what you could have done. Some people claim
to have foresight. I can tell you what’s going to happen in the future. But I can tell you as a great entrepreneur, what you need is good eyesight. See what’s in front of you and be able to say, here’s an opportunity.”
Speed is important. Speed of action is a quality of most billionaires. They follow the motto “act now and think later”
It doesn’t matter whether you’re going to die in an airplane crash tomorrow or you’re going to die 80 years from now; you’ve got to treat every day and every second as though you’re going to only have a day to live. And there’s no time to waste. Especially talking to boring people, or to people that are complainers, or people that aren’t going to be great in life. There’s only one life to live.
“There’s no time to waste. It’s got to be great or nothing.” Treat every day and every second as though you’re going to only have a day to live. There’s no time to waste.
“If I had that hotel, if I had that shopping center, if I had that car, if I had that much money, if I had.…” I mean, it’s endless. You can always envy your competitors. Sell your hotel; everyone can sell the Ritz. My success thinking is to always start with what you have. Never focus on what you don’t have. Focus on what you have and make the most out of it. Do the best out of what you have.
Also, Manny Stul considers luck as the main difference between them, but he stresses you can make your own luck. “Difference between a millionaire and a billionaire? Luck. Being in the right place at the right time. But you make your own luck through hard work, through perseverance, passion.”
“You have to take risk to achieve something that is worthwhile. If you don’t take some risk, then you’ll have moderate success, if any.” Of course, you shouldn’t exaggerate, “everything in moderation. But you’ve got to take risk. You’ve got to be prepared to accept risk. If it doesn’t require risk, it’s not an opportunity.”
“Prepare to lose if you want to win.” For him, progress in life is a learning process. “If you don’t take risk, you will never learn.”
“When I communicated with clients in the bank, who were businesspeople, I felt how intellectually weak they were. But I was impressed by the way they think.
So these were people not of a smart mind, but rather of an adventurous mind. And this made a big impression on me.”
You have to be willing to do something that might look stupid and might fail.
If I’m alive, I’m at risk to die. You risk all the time. But if I make a choice in business, I need to be able to afford it if things go wrong.
1. You need to accept that you may fail. In the next chapters, I will show you actually must fail and fail many times before you become a success. 2. Realize that you are a tiny, unimportant speck of dust and your life is very limited. So why worry?
Everybody’s life is limited. It is very short, and each individual has very limited power, no matter how hard you work. Compared to the world, compared to the history, a person is very, very small.
- Billionaires know how to handle risk and take risks with huge upside and low downside.
Where most people see a problem, billionaires see an opportunity in solving it. They use obstacles to their advantage.
Don’t expect success to appear at the very first try. You need to try over and over again and fail over and over again. And you need to do it right only
once. Once you finally succeed, you become an “overnight success.”
“There’s lots of failures along the way; it’s part of the process. You can’t be successful without having failures. It’s not possible. The only people that don’t make mistakes are the people that don’t do anything. If you want to stay out of trouble, you can go and work for the government.”
“Success is continuing to be willing to fail.”
If you want to do business, you’ve got to get your hands dirty. You’ve got to be prepared to walk it “come what may.” And you’ve got to tell yourself that you’re going to fall many times, and you’re going to fail many times, and you’re going to lose many times. And those are not problems. Those are testing moments for you to overcome. If you take that with the right mindset, it’s a piece of cake.
Let’s just start with the basic thing of what’s an entrepreneur? If you look at all the humans in the world, you categorize them into three types of people. One group of people who say I can think about the problem. I can tell you what the problem is. And all of us are very good at it. So we call them human beings. Everyone is the person who can tell you what problems are. The second group are the people who would come up with the solutions. They will tell you what the solution to this problem is. These are the visionaries, and these are the people we would call the professors. There’s only one type of person who goes out and does something about it. And he says, “To hell with it. I’m going to go out and do it.” And those
are the people who are entrepreneurs. You can be an entrepreneur inside a company, inside a personal relationship, or starting a company. So, entrepreneurship is not necessarily about starting a business but about solving a problem.
Jack Cowin’s attitude is, “If you have not had a few failures, you haven’t tried enough. You’ve been slack and lazy.” So never look back. Don’t dwell on your failures. Instead, focus on what you can do now to improve the future.
Billionaires are willing to fail, accept their failures, learn from them, improve, move on, and never look back. They test their ideas and know that mistakes are inevitable to tell their good ideas from the bad ones and to move forward.
I asked him about the secret of his success. His answer: “Never accept a no.” If you accept, you lose. When you hear “no,” don’t just accept. You need to find another way. When I started the business, I came from the province into the biggest city of Brazil to do business
with the studios from Hollywood. Can you imagine it? It wasn’t easy. I didn’t know anybody. The people were a little arrogant. I was a salesman, and it was difficult to arrange an appointment because people didn’t want to talk to me. Lirio wasn’t deterred by this. One client I wanted very much when I started was Warner, and the guy who worked there was a Brazilian man, very complicated, arrogant. So I heard a lot of no’s, for years. But one day I convinced him. He worked with me; until I closed the recording business last year, he was here. But at the start it was very difficult. At the end, Lirio managed to convince all six major film corporations to work with him exclusively, thus holding over 90% of the Brazilian market in his hand. He told me it helps to understand “no” as “maybe.”
You have to believe and then work very hard and not give up. These days I give young people the example of a marathon runner, because life is a marathon, not a 100-meter dash. You can fall and still win the race in 42 kilometers. I tell them these things because that’s my life also. It’s been a roller coaster, a marathon.
There is a difference between a failure and the final defeat. You can only be defeated if you give up after a failure. Don’t do it. Don’t take the easy
way out; instead — persevere. The difference between defeat and success is the thin line between giving up and continuing to move forward. In case you fall, don’t sacrifice your goal; just choose another way. If you failed once, try again until you succeed. As long as you don’t give up, you haven’t really failed.
Failure only happens when you give up. Everything else is just simply a pivot.
There is no success without suffering. You have to suffer to succeed.
Make tough decisions. If you think that there is no end in sight to the road you are on, you have to get out. You cannot insist on a business where you’re not successful. Of course, you have to be patient, but if you cannot see the light at the end of the tunnel, you have to cut your losses. It’s difficult, but once you make the decision, you feel better. In Turkish we have a saying, “Cut the arm,” you know? The body doesn’t go away. You have to cut the arm sometimes.
Cut your losses if you can’t win. Don’t lie to yourself. Take the losses if there is no straight line to profit. Peter Hargreaves stops a project immediately as soon as he realizes it won’t work,
When I met the American celebrity billionaire Mark Cuban in Monaco, he told me business was an ultimate sport. It is played without end, without interruption, and without rules; and there is always somebody who is trying to knock you out. So if you want to win in this game, you can’t afford to stop competing even for a second.
In many sciences, scientists manage to explore something to the end and are done. There is nothing similar in business. What works here is that as soon as you fall asleep, somebody is coming to eat you. It’s impossible to say, okay the next year I am fine, I will feel good. You can’t feel relaxed at any time.
I always felt like the way to become successful was to do all the hard things. Do everything you feel is hard rather than try to take an easier route. If you just keep doing that and take the next step forward, that usually works. Easy paths don’t usually lead you to a good outcome. So, do the hard things, and then you can do easy things after the hard things are done.
if I don’t give 100% on everything, if I only gave 98% and I failed, would I regret that I didn’t give the other 2% my whole life? Would I go to my grave going, “I wonder if…?” And I never want to be in a “wonder if” position.
“the biggest advantage that you can have in business is loving the industry you’re in because you’re not working then. It’s almost a pleasure to come to work. It’s almost a hobby. And I do love this business, and I do love this industry. I have other small ventures outside this business, but I don’t love them, whereas I love this. So that makes a big difference.”
If you’re interested in something, you can’t tell the difference between work and play. If you’re interested
interested in it because you really like it, then it comes easy to you. Because if you don’t enjoy it, eventually you’ll fail. That’s the most important thing. Being able to identify where you belong and what makes you happy.
Let me put it this way: in all fairness, there is nothing — nothing — I would rather do than what I’m doing. There is nothing. If you ask me to be prime minister, no. I have the best job in the world, and I did all the years.
F.A.S.T. means Flawless execution, Absolute focus, Speed, and Time management, in short: efficiency. How efficient, how F.A.S.T., are you in your execution?
“Execution is everything. You can be a professor at Harvard Business, but if you don’t have the execution, you will never succeed. People think a strategy or a market position is the most important thing for success, but I say no. That’s maybe 15%, 20%. Eighty percent of your success is execution, the ability to actually put your ideas into life, into reality.”
The first things I need to do are the things I don’t like to do. Why? Because it makes the other things easy. When you delay it for tomorrow, then if you have to do it tomorrow it’s even worse. So if you have something to do you don’t like, someone you need to call and you don’t take this call because you know that person would complain, or you have trouble or you don’t like the person or you need to fire someone
who’s disgusting, then it’s the first thing to do. At the end, we need to stay with just the easy things to do, things that are pleasurable. Peter Hargreaves asks himself two questions every morning: “Who do you least want to speak to?” and “What task do you least want to do?” Invariably, those are your two top priorities of the day. You should immediately speak to the person you don’t want to speak to and complete the task you didn’t want to do. Those two things were clogging your mind, and you will have a great day from then on.
Something my dad taught me was you go after one thing hard and do it till it’s done. Just focus until it’s there, until you’ve achieved what it is that you wanted to accomplish. I believed in that, and I do believe in that.
You must time everything, you must measure everything, and you’ve got to be disciplined. You cannot row in a rowing team without being disciplined and being a team player. Even if you’re a leader, you have to be a team leader. And why would you want to get into a race and not measure how well you do? Business is like that. Measure, measure, measure.
I always think, I took maximum risk in my life. Although, as time goes by, when you get older, everybody including myself wants to take less risk. It needs the sum of accumulated experience and intellect to understand how much risk you can actually take on. That’s what I call preparedness for the business. Give the thread the most strain without breaking it. That’s how you achieve the maximum velocity. For example, in the first five to seven years we didn’t make any money, but we were opening new branches. And every month we would open P and L Statements, and we were scared to see that it would be either loss or zero, but we continued to open new branches. But I was only 25, 27 back then.
The difference between financially successful people (millionaires) and financially super successful people (billionaires) boils down to the fact that the latter get pleasure MAKING money, but don’t enjoy SPENDING it.
Use every opportunity to learn. You never know what it’s going to be good for. So learn whenever and wherever possible.
I think one best way to learn is to keep an open mind and listen and ask the right questions. And I think everybody is a teacher. Every moment is a learning opportunity. Even simply talking to your customers and talking to your employees. So if you keep an open mind, that’s where you learn and people will give you good feedback.
For your development in business and in private life, it is essential to stay young in mind. Be curious. Be open to new ideas. Explore new opportunities. Petter Stordalen considers being open-minded the most important character trait for a businessperson, next to honesty. It’s important “that you’re open. That you listen to people around you, rather than to insist you have the right answers.”
One important thing is the ability to draw conclusions from defeats. To continuously learn and after all self-improve. Or the ability to accept that you manage people smarter than yourself and take for yourself what is best in those people. And a continuous search for such people from whom you can keep learning Michał’s advice is above all “to fight with your weaknesses and limitations.”
I want to do what I am doing well, and I want to be better than what I was in the past. I generally don’t compete with anybody else, but I compete with my own performance of the past.
It’s very hard to win somebody’s trust, but once you’ve got it, you probably have it for life, and you can lose it instantly by lying. I believe that once you’ve lost somebody’s trust, you’ve lost it forever. Sure, they can forgive, sure, the relationship can be maintained, but it’s not the same as it was before when they believed you always tell the truth. Life’s so much easier when you’re telling the truth. I learned, more importantly than ever, never to lie, ever. Because if they catch you lying once, you can forget about it. Very important.
Help someone who needs help. And help as many people as you possibly can. Nothing will give you more happiness and more fulfillment than truly doing something for someone without expecting anything back. And the amount of joy you get from that, there’s nothing in life you could own that will give you that much joy.
The price of success is much lower than the price of failure.
The success of life can only be measured by the degree of happiness you reach.
You will have to fail many times before you succeed. So be willing to fail, but don’t give up; persevere and keep fighting! Don’t be afraid to be different. Do not conform. Your passion will enable you to work hard for many years on the way to your dreams and overcome all the obstacles.
