7 Critical Lessons Learned from Billionaires, Best Selling Authors & Other High Performers

Okay, so today we are going to talk about 7 critical lessons learned from billionaires, bestselling authors, and also just really accomplished people. So I've interviewed over 300 people on the Leveling Up, formerly Growth Everywhere podcast, and I'm going to tell you about what I learned. But before I do, don't forget to subscribe and hit the bell button, whatever channel you're coming from. Uh, the bell button is for YouTube so you can get notifications. Uh, if you want to grow both personally and professionally, The first one that comes to mind here is the most recommended books, because I always ask the question at the very end. So on this podcast, I ask them about their story, how they're growing, where they failed, just trying to get the story so people can kind of figure out what they want to do with those experiences and then take them into their own businesses and then kind of go from there. But at the very end, I'll typically ask them, you know, a couple of questions like, what's your favorite book? What are your favorite tools? Things like that. The most recommended book by far is The Hard Thing About Hard Things from Ben Horowitz. And that book is really powerful. I remember reading that book and I remember everything, every chapter I was like, yes, yes, yes. This video itself, this title, this actually started from me writing a tweet and I literally put the tweet out and I tagged Ben Horowitz in it and he actually shared it. That's the most recommended book and I highly recommend it too. And that actually leads me to my second point, which is he has a chapter in there called The Struggle. And The Struggle is where, you know, you lose a big deal, you lose a key employee, you have a bunch of people quitting on you, you lose a bunch of, uh, You lose, you know, maybe your office space or whatever, and then just things are blowing up around you, right? And you can't, you just feel depressed. You can't taste your food. You're not hungry. You just don't know what to do, right? And every single kind of high performer or business owner, entrepreneur that I've ever met, they have gone through the struggle. As an example to that, I had someone on the, on the Leveling Up podcast. His business was called HireVue. That's a V-U-E. And they almost went bankrupt 10 times before they emerged. As a company, I think they've raised over $100 million so far and they're doing really well now, right? And they're doing, they've really ascended to the top, but it just got it. They just kept getting punched in the face over and over. When you go almost bankrupt 10 times, you would think after the second or third, fourth time, fifth time, sixth time, you probably want to throw in the towel. But you know, this person kept going through the struggle and he stuck with it and that is what led to the massive success that he's had with his business. A lot of these businesses, when I, when I look at them, you know, companies that have become really big, sometimes they get rejected by venture capitalists like, you know, 50 times, 60 times or so. I think the idea of Disney was rejected maybe 100 times or 200 times. And look at where Disney is now. Disney now owns ESPN, Disney owns National Geographic, they own Marvel, they own Star Wars, they own all these things, right? They own ABC as well. So Disney is legit. Because guess what? They didn't give up. They went through the struggle. Walt Disney went through the struggle over and over and over. Number 3 here, it's ultimately how you react to the struggle that defines whether you make it or not. So you can either crumble and blame all the circumstances around you. You can blame your bad luck. You can blame, I don't know, the bird in the sky that pooped on you. Who knows? The companies that actually make it happen, those are the ones that reacted well to the struggle. They powered through it, right? They decided that, you know, they were going to figure out a way versus like the billions, let's just say millions, the millions of failures that you haven't heard of before. It's because they didn't have what it took to continue on, to power through, to get to the next level. Number 4, you know, sure, you can work hard in your business, but if you don't work hard on taking care of your mind, if you don't work hard on taking care of your body, and that includes sleep too, right? Taking care of your body is sleep, having good energy. Um, you know, having a good diet, um, you know, training your body, having good metabolism, uh, maybe a good metabolism, it depends. But for me, I find that whenever I'm training, whenever I don't train, my metabolism definitely slows down. That all affects how you work. If you decide to drink alcohol all the time, sure, that's your decision. If you decide, like when I see people smoking cigarettes in the morning, God, I hope there's nobody that works for me that smokes cigarettes in the morning. But when you smoke cigarettes in the morning, like that's a bad habit. That's That starts the day off on the wrong foot. You know, having the right habits and working hard, not just on work, but like your surroundings. You have to make sure you take care of everything, right? Because you lose your health, you're going to end up making bad decisions because you're grumpier, right? You're not as effective, um, when you're negotiating with people, when you, when you're, uh, when you're in an intense conversation with someone, you're not up to 100% because you're not 100% body-wise, energy-wise, right? Mm-hmm. Mind-wise. Number 5, I really liked the concept around this. Nobody really knows what they're doing. Like, sure, I have experience, but a lot of us, we're still figuring things out as we go, right? I read this, this, um, this quote the other day from one of my, um, my friends on Instagram, and she basically said, look, you know what we don't realize when we're growing up as a child, as we're growing up, when we look at our parents, that they're also growing up at the same time, right? My point there is that, look, your parents didn't really know what they're doing. They're kind of figuring out as they were going. you don't really know what you're doing as a kid. And I'm not saying like totally like, you know, oh, this is a license to just kind of goof off. But what my point is, don't be so hard on yourself and it's okay to not know what you're doing at times. Just keep up the work ethic, keep working hard, keep working hard on your mind, keep working on your body. And, um, that's how, you know, the billionaires, the high performers get to where they are. And similar to that, this is actually point number 6 over here. As long as you have that beginner's mindset, you understand that you don't really know what you're doing. You shouldn't get too high, but you also shouldn't get too low too. And you shouldn't— like when people say you're really that good, You really aren't that good. But when people say you're really bad, you're really not that bad either, right? You kind of just have this even keel, right? You know, even line. You're just like, you're just cruising, right? You know, if you can keep that mindset and just be open to understanding that, look, hey, we're all kind of just figuring things out, that's going to help you have that beginner's mindset so you can continually improve. You'd be open to feedback and not be this arrogant person that thinks he knows or she knows everything, right? When I watch on that show Succession, the main guy, the billionaire, He's really stuck in his own ways, right? He's also very arrogant with it. Like he thinks he knows everything. Um, he's not open to the new, the new technology. Like he owns a newspaper company or a news company, right? And he's not open to the new trends that are happening. He's trying to, you know, desperately, you know, hold onto his kingdom, but he hasn't evolved enough, right? So you have to have that openness to, to be able to evolve. What's interesting to me is we had, um, Howard Marks who co-founded Activision Blizzard. He came to our conference and Neil, the conference Neil and I do called the Growth Accelerator Mastermind. And after he spoke, He sat down and he was furiously taking notes. That to me shows me a lot, right? He's still open to, to learning. Like he doesn't need to know this stuff, right? That's not, that's not his business too, but he's still there learning. And I had another guy, Sunny Mordecai. He was there too. And this guy's, you know, he's on the board of the XPRIZE, which you should, you should check out. He knows a lot of people. He has a pretty big network, but still he was sitting there. He was actively learning, trying to get better at his craft. These are people that are very successful, right? So the high performers, very successful people. We had, um, you know, just all these different types of people from, from all different walks of life. So number 7, your life experiences help define who you are and what really makes you unique. When I think about what makes me unique is I spent a lot of time gaming growing up and gaming was actually cool at my high school growing up because, you know, everyone, you know, the people played StarCraft, they played Counter-Strike, you know, we played Warcraft 3 together, we played Dota, um, we played all these different games. That's what made me into what I am. Like I take those concepts into, Um, how I work with business. Like everything to me is like, okay, how do you plug something in together? It's a puzzle, right? How do you make the puzzle work? If this doesn't work, how do you make it work? Right? So that's my unique experience, which has led to me saying, okay, I have this business experience. I also have this gaming experience too. And how do I combine it to make it something stronger? Right? But that also defines what I'm aiming for long-term. My point here is that you can combine your unique experiences and intersect them, or maybe you'll have like 3 or 4 different things. and combine them and then you have something that's really unique that makes you you. And then you have a unique perspective which other people think is really genius, but you saw it all along, right? Those are just 7 elements, um, kind of 7 critical elements that I've seen from high performers after interviewing over 300 entrepreneurs, uh, high performers, billionaires, bestselling authors, um, even I think even like inventors and even some actors as well. So a lot of different people, right? So let me know what you think in the comments. Did you think I missed anything in terms of what you typically see from high performers? Uh, also, also, also don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe whatever platform you are coming from because it helps us grow faster and because I love you. And if you're coming from YouTube, don't forget to check out the next video over there and we'll see you tomorrow.