Ever wondered what it takes to become a billionaire? I recently sat down with a few members of the three-comma club to find out. Here are the top five takeaways that you can implement to supercharge success in your own life.
Introduction
What’s the opposite of “when it rains it pours?” Over the past two months, I met three real-world billionaires on three separate occasions. Before that, the closest I had come was the intimate virtual connection I forged with Bobbie Axelrod binging Showtime’s Billions from my living room.
I recognize this may sound a bit ridiculous. It feel pretentious even writing it, but it’s true. I did meet three billionaires in the past two months. And the encounters proved transformative.
One of the billionaires is a prominent public figure and benefactor. The other two fly below the radar. The most impactful of these meetings was in-person. One-on-one. The others took place via Zoom with about 30 people in attendance.
All three conversations covered a broad range of topics: careers, investing philosophies, fulfillment, leadership, economics, politics, philanthropy, and more. What an indulgent treat for a personal finance nerd like myself.
I emerged from each discussion feeling like I had soaked up a lifetime’s worth of financial wisdom in a few hours. I immediately wrote feverish notes following each conversation in an attempt to memorialize the standout moments.
A few intriguing themes emerged. This post represents my meager attempt at distilling all of that wisdom into 5 key lessons.
I aimed to identify the points that I thought would resonate regardless of age, career, or level of the financial game. There’s no substitute for life experience, but close observation of peak performers can certainly help accelerate our own development. By immersing ourselves in this world, we can effectively normalize the rare behavior and drive that underpins radical success.
With that, let’s begin.
Billionaire Lesson #1 – Curiosity is King
Each billionaire mentioned the power of curiosity and the role it played in their achievements. The innate desire to learn motivated them to work harder and dig deeper. In essence, curiosity transformed work into play. This allowed them to unlock massive reserves of energy, and ultimately, financial success.
Whether as investors or entrepreneurs, curiosity empowered the billionaires to think differently than the masses. For the first billionaire, a financier, this led to the implementation of unique and untested investing theses. For the other two, both entrepreneurs, it facilitated the creation of novel product solutions. They filled whitespace in markets that had long been overlooked.
And curiosity built endurance. The billionaires found deep joy and purpose where external observers simply saw unsustainable hours chasing ideas with low likelihoods of success.
An additional manifestation of this curiosity: all three billionaires highlighted voracious reading habits. Despite demanding professional calendars, philanthropic engagements, and personal obligations, they prioritize non-negotiable windows of reading time.
Key Takeaways for the Non-Billionaire
- Read more
- Ask all the “dumb” questions
- Pursue curiosities relentlessly, even when it seems like they will lead nowhere
- Double down on activities that feel fun to you but look like work to outsiders
Billionaire Lesson #2 – Winning Over Wealth
I was eager to probe into the topic of motivation with the billionaires. After reaching what most would consider unfathomable levels of financial success, what is it that continues to drive them daily?
For context, these aren’t your tech unicorn 20 year old founders. It would be more than socially acceptable for all three of these individuals to hang up the cleats and ride into the sunset given their age. However, none of them show any signs of slowing.
It was difficult for them to precisely identify why they felt compelled to continue charging, but here’s my interpretation:
After hitting a certain threshold, it seems that the concepts of individual wealth and net worth faded into the background. They had built enough wealth to fund even their most extravagant wants and desires long ago. Something replaced this desire to accumulate. This “thing” was the desire to compete and win.
See, the masses view their professional lives as a necessary grind. They work a job to earn money and provide for a family. Employment is a means to an end. They yearn for a better life “someday.”
For the billionaire moguls, business success and financial success are the game. And it’s a game they must win. It is the someday. (Side note: two of the three billionaires grew up playing high-level competitive athletics of some sort.)
In other words, the billionaires aren’t working towards some better life. They don’t yearn for a fleeting rose-colored future. Instead, they wake up with an eagerness to play and win a game that they helped to design. The motivation to build a cohesive team, the best product offering, the best returns for investors. These are the factors that endure. As crazy as it sounds, money becomes a byproduct.
Key Takeaways for the Non-Billionaire
- Embrace competition, teamwork, and the will to win
- Create the life you wish you could live in 40 years right now
- Find ways to conceptualize your work as a game that you MUST win
- If you can’t find this work, create it
- Don’t shy away from human instinct
Billionaire Lesson #3 – Your First Jobs Will Define You
All three billionaires learned the value of hard labor and a hearty work ethic at a young age. One worked in construction. The second worked in landscaping. And the third worked on a farm picking berries.
While they admitted that these jobs were challenging, they all seemed to place a premium on the perspective gained by working in manual labor. One even told me that he required his children to work on the same farm picking berries every summer.
Exasperation and exhaustion from the demanding nature of this manual work also motivated the billionaires to learn, and cultivate, high-value skills. They searched for ways to more effectively leverage their time for money, identifying and pursuing these opportunities quickly.
By the time they were 30, all three of these individuals had also worked in some type of sales role. One in particular stressed this point. He said that “no matter how technically gifted you are, making money is a measure of your ability to sell yourself, your idea, your product, or your company.” In an increasingly automated world, it seems those with superior sales skills will continue to dominate as technical prowess is commoditized.
Key Takeaways for the Non-Billionaire
- Don’t trivialize the importance of early career roles and opportunities
- No matter how painful it might seem, every job has a unique perspective to provide or skill to teach
- Think about how you can use your employer rather than how your employer can use you
- Learn to sell or get left behind
- If you can’t commit to a full-time role, pursue self-education
- The fear of rejection will paralyze you
- Solve for experience over pay when making early career decisions
Billionaire Lesson #4 – Build Legacy on Your Own Terms
Legacy creation and preservation appeared top-of-mind during these conversations. But the definition of legacy and how to build one differed across the three.
For the first two billionaires, legacy has taken the form of giving away as much money as possible. By nature, these two strike me as the type of people who are naturally inclined to help others at all costs. My hunch is that they’d both contribute significant sums of money to charity even if their net worth sat in one-comma territory. Billionaire status simply helped them magnify the scale of their impact.
Interestingly, one of these individuals admitted that philanthropy at this level becomes more of a self-serving endeavor than many realize. He mentioned deriving intense personal pleasure from his donations and the realization that future generations would admire the buildings, programs, and initiatives established to honor his family name.
The third billionaire views his legacy as more of a direct extension of his business success. He has created what he hopes is a sustainable platform. A professional community that will endure long beyond his time running it. Coming from humble beginnings, this billionaire gleans tremendous satisfaction from helping new generations of hungry, self-made professionals chart their own paths to wealth.
While this billionaire is also committed to philanthropy in a more traditional sense, he seems to view the ability to provide jobs, financial security, and outsize rewards to his own team as more meaningful. Put another way, he’d rather make a radical impact on the lives of a few than a small impact on the lives of many.
Key Takeaways for the Non-Billionaire
- What do you want your obituary to say about you?
- Align your actions today with the legacy you hope to leave
- You get what you give
- You often get back much more, but this only works if you give without any expectation of return
- Find purpose outside of money, status, and prestige. This purpose will carry you when no one’s watching
- Ironically, this deeper purpose will also lead to more money, status, and prestige
Billionaire Lesson 5 – Seek Failure…Now
My final question to each billionaire: what advice would you (or did you) give to your 20-something sons / daughters?
The answers were wide-ranging, and filled with some entertaining stories, but a common thread linked all three.
Failure. Embracing failure while young. Coping with the inevitability of failure and setbacks. Cultivating resiliency in response to tough moments.
They had all confronted some type of early failure that ultimately turned into a transformative motivator. They repurposed failure as fuel for success.
I have to admit, I felt a bit validated in these moments since I had recently written a post about why early money mistakes make millionaires. Hell, I guess they make billionaires too.
Key Takeaways for the Non-Billionaire
- Fail early, often, and hard. Repeat
- Life favors the bold. Embrace opportunities to leap outside of your comfort zone
- Take calculated risks professionally, financially, and in relationships while young
- If you never fail, your risks likely aren’t big enough. You’ll find yourself operating at a small percentage of your peak potential