Asking A Billionaire How To Make Money

I have a friend who's 40 and damn near a billionaire. One night I was asking candidly, how'd you make your fortune? And I was looking for things to replicate. And the simplicity of his response surprised me. He said, I train my brain to perform one task incredibly well. One task alone. To never conform. That's it. And I said, okay, that sounds good, but how do you do that? Can you explain to me? And we came to this. What I'll call the funnel to non conformity. Become a funnel for ideas. Let ideas fight based on merit, not emotion. Focus. Find courage to act in non conformity and you'll have opportunities others never see or are too scared to act on. Then he gave me a series of ideas, ways that you could put this into work in your life every single day. And because I don't have access to that many billionaires, I thought I'd share them with you because they changed my life. And maybe they can change yours. So the first thing he said is, don't believe in anger. Anger is useful in physical fights, but it's a killer of logic. It's a trick of the mind. But pushing you into fight or flight. Let me tell you what you can't do well when you're fighting or flighting. Think, remove your anger and you'll find clarity. The second thing was that controversy and conformity are a conundrum. And the conundrum is that there's a spectrum where controversies and conformity sit on two ends of the line. More conformity equals less controversy. And yet most of the wins in life land on the edge of controversy. So choose your controversy wisely, but choose it. The third was reading as a diet. He said, be careful what you read because it becomes the way that you think. Number four was ideas strongly stated and loosely held. Having a strong opinion, he said, is the mark of intellect, but having to change it is the mark of true intelligence. Only politicians hold one stance forever for fear of flip flopping. We mortals do better to constantly experiment. Then the fifth thing he told me was, share your MVPs, your minimal viable products. Every time you produce a product or an idea, more come back tenfold. So don't make it perfect. Make it done. Then let the market decide. Most people, I think, wait for perfectionism in everything that they do. And he said most of the reason that he had created wealth is because he knew that perfectionism would never come. So he shipped it. Builders build. Number six is that Warren Buffett doesn't optimize. My friend actually met with Warren Buffett. Sat down and had dinner. And a couple things stood out to him. But one thing in particular is that people these days say things like, well, I wake up at 5am Meditate, work out, drink, drink 72 ounces of chlorine water. Then I stand up outside, then I go do a headstand, Then I drink green juice. Okay, I guess you could go do those things, or you could do none of them. And instead, focus on thinking clearly, intently, and strategically before you pull any triggers. Make it the one thing you need to focus on each day, and that might beat any morning routine that some guru tries to sell you. Number seven is boredom as a superpower. The best ideas need breathing room, he said. They're a flower stretching for the sun. Clutter them with meetings. You'll watch them die. Instead, clear your schedule every morning with no calls prior to 10am I do the same now, paired with two no call days a week. I need to let my ideas breathe. Otherwise, they die. Story time. All right, guys, this is kind of special because I just sold a website for 8k that I bought for about a hundred bucks. It was called Grow Getters, a newsletter that talked about marketing growth. I did it just for fun with two friends, and it made me realize that I wanted to tell more people that you could start with small deals, you could start with large deals, but you can definitely start with online deals. So I partnered with this company, Flippa. Thanks, guys. About where to buy online businesses. It's my favorite site to buy any sort of online business, period, full stop. That's why I'm trying to invest in them. So maybe you guys can check this out so that I could get part of this series. That'd be awesome. Thanks, Blake CEO. Because after all, we know that 94% of startups fail. That's why I like to buy them instead of build them. And this is true on Flippa, too. For online businesses, you can get loans or use seller financing. Although you got to put down some cash, you can have profits on day one of owning the business. You can use the cash flow of the business to fund your next brilliant idea. But instead of paying for an idea, you buy it first. So here's the link. Go check them out. There's 500,000 businesses that have been listed on Flippa. They've done billions of dollars in transactions. And, like, maybe you buy one like this. This is a business that's live right now. This is a sewing company. I don't know, you nerds out there maybe are into that. You could buy this one for 10k is making $642 a month profit. And then grow that bad boy to a few thousand dollars a month is what I do. It doesn't look optimized at all. And then flip it to the next seamstress you know. Anyway, thanks Flippa. If you guys want to find online businesses, you should check out this link. The company is sick. Number eight numbers greater than narrative. Anytime something is common practice. Check if it's common sense. You know, you return to the very first principle there is, which is 1 plus 1 equals 2. Numbers are often terrible liars. How can you find the truth numerically instead of what people want you to think through a narrative? Number nine is can you explain it to grandma? Take that shiny new idea in your head and go explain it to your grandma. Can you take the complex and make it simple? If not, you don't know enough about it. You need strong beliefs paired with intimate knowledge. If you have those two things, then you're not in a dangerous spot. You are dangerous. Number 10 is every new learning is a little death. You know, I read something which said that your skin regenerates itself every 72 days completely. So you're not the same person you were 72 days ago. Your ideas need an equal level of velocity and regeneration. You know, challenging the old ideas and letting them be reborn into something better as opposed to believing your own bullshit. Number 11 is the toleration challenge. What if your intellect is measured by how much truth you can tolerate? Can you be told you're wrong and that dress makes you look fat and you're getting older and he's smarter than you and can you take them all in stride? If you can't, you can't take the truth. And the truth is the only thing that accumulates large wealth. Number 12 was trust the process. There are no shortcuts. Shortcuts and get rich quick schemes will get you lost. Forget the outcome and focus instead on the process and watch your destination appear. I think this is one that all of us in 2022 have to think about. Number 13 was never forget failures. I love this. When you walk into his office, he keeps a collection of old failures on a wall in the bathroom. So every time you walk into the bathroom, it's the pictures of all the investments that they've lost on all the CEOs they bet on that they shouldn't. Most people, when you walk into their office, they hang medals. He reminds himself, instead of the scars gotten and the mistakes mishandled. Keeps you honest. And then you don't believe again your own bullshit. The gift of dissent, sick offense or yes, men. People that basically tell you whatever you want to hear will kill you faster than dissent. So you need to surround yourself with unruly individuals who make you stand your ground or berate you for not. This is something most people do not do, but it is usually the downfall of great men and women. Number 15, he said, was speak the truth even when it hurts. You don't really hold an idea in your head, in my opinion, until you can say it with your lips. Idea, word, action. Then you can say that this is what you truly believe. Then we talked about fluid intelligence. Fluid intelligence is the capacity to reason, make connections, solve problems and consider abstract, complex. It's a philosophical and psychological concept, the fastest way to grow. It is read widely, voraciously and continuously. You know, as we come into kind of another difficult year with so much happening around, where personal sovereignty becomes more important, we have to realize it starts with us. It's not the tactics of money making that matter. The most important thing you can do is train your brain to seek the ideas that stand out on their own two feet. Finally, I'll leave you with this. One of my favorite quotes from Naval Ravikant. He said a contrarian isn't one who always objects. That's a conformist of a different sort. A contrarian reasons independently from the ground up and resists pressure to conform. So I think if we all want to reach that billionaire status or millionaire status or financially free status, it's actually not about the tactics and the how. It's about who we are and how we train our brain to become just that. If you like this one, let us know below. I'll do more about what some of my billionaire friends think. If I see some ones and twos, they'll send them to you. I'm clear cut, hard headed like a diamond head.