How to THINK Like Jeff Bezos & OPRAH | 21 Minutes of Insight

If you want to know how billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Mark Cuban, and Oprah Winfrey think, act, and make decisions, then this video is for you.

We all have adversity in our lives.

Think about what you do as a consumer. What is it that makes you make the choices that you make? Why do you buy a certain thing? Why do you shop a certain place?

It's very difficult for me to even see myself as successful because I still see myself as in the process of becoming successful.

What's up, Believe Nation? It's Evan. My one word is believe, and I believe in you. I believe you have an amazing gift inside you that I want to see explode out onto the world. So today we're going to learn how billionaires think. Success advice from the top, volume 8. Enjoy. Up first at number 1 is choose to do the hard things with Jeff Bezos.

We all have adversity in our lives. I would, I would, I doubt if you really You know, if you know somebody, any friend or anybody that you talk to, there's no lack of adversity. And by the way, that's good because it's what teaches us how to get back up. You fall down, you get back up. It always happens. And, you know, you get certain gifts in life and you want to take advantage of those. But you— I guess my advice on adversity and success would be to be proud not of your gifts, but of your hard work and your choices. So, you know, you may be— the kinds of gifts you get in life, you know, you might be really good at math, it might be really easy for you. That's a kind of gift. But practicing that math and taking it to the next step, that could be very challenging and hard and take a lot of sweat. That's a choice. You can't really be proud of your gifts because they were given to you. You can be grateful for them and thankful for them. And but your choices, you choose to work hard, you choose to do hard things. Those are choices that you can be proud of.

Number 2 is create memorable experiences with Mark Cuban.

When people think about going to sporting events, and I'll use this as an example, You don't remember the jump shots after a while. You don't remember the home runs. You don't remember the touchdowns. You don't remember the score. You remember the experience.

Yeah.

You know, we remember who took us, you know, our first game with our mom or dad. We remember how we felt when we won that game. You know, going to a sporting event, it's one of the few places where you're allowed to stand up and scream at the top of your lungs, and you're encouraged to scream as loud as you want. And if someone hits a game-winning jumper, You're hugging people and high-fiving people you've never seen in your life and you'll never see again. And you're walking out of the arena, you know, singing and chanting and screaming. And if you lose that game, you're bummed out and, you know, the entire city or the entire school can be bummed out. So when we sell the Mavericks, we don't sell basketball, we sell unique experiences. And so you've gotta understand in your business exactly what the differentiation is and what the compelling aspect of that business is. But, you know, think about what you do as a consumer. What is it that makes you make the choices that you make? Why do you buy a certain thing? Why do you shop a certain place? Why do you go to a certain website? Those are the keys.

Number 3 is Demand Respect with Oprah Winfrey.

When I first started as a broadcaster, I was 19, very insecure, thrown into television pretending to be Barbara Walters, looking nothing like her, and still going to college. So I do all my classes in the morning from 8 to 1, and then the afternoon I work from 2 to 10 and did the 6 o'clock news and would stay up and study and all that stuff, you know, until 1, 2, or 3 o'clock in the morning and then just start the routine all over again. And my classmates were so jealous of me that I remember like taking my little $115 paycheck and, um, at the time I thought it was really a lot, but taking $115 and trying to appease them. I would like, anytime anybody needed money, I was always offering, "Oh, you need $10?" Or taking them out for pizza, ordering pizza for the class and things like that. Trying to, that whole disease to please, that's where it was the worst for me, I think, because I wanted to be accepted by them and could not be. Because first of all, I didn't have the time. They wanted me to pledge and I didn't have the time to pledge. I didn't have the time to be a part of all the other college activities or a part of that whole, lifestyle, and it was very difficult for me socially. Really one of the worst times of my life, 'cause I was trying to fit in in school and be a part of that culture, but also trying to build a career in television. It's very difficult for me to even see myself as successful, because I still see myself as in the process of becoming successful. To me, successful is getting to the point where you are absolutely comfortable with yourself, and it does not matter how many things you have acquired. The ability to learn to say no and not to feel guilty about it, to me, is about the greatest success I have achieved. The fact that I have, you know, in the public side done whatever is fine. It's all a part of a process for growing for me. But to me, to have the kind of internal strength and internal courage it takes to say, "No, I will not let you treat me this way," is what success is all about. It's the same thing that prevents you from being abused as a child, that prevents you from being abused as an adult, that allows you to build success for yourself. I will not be treated this way. I demand only the best for myself. You are worthy to say no. You're worth it. It's okay if you say no. It's okay if you say no and then people don't like you. That's really okay. The important thing is how you feel about what you're doing. How you feel about yourself. It's a long struggle, though. It's a long struggle. And I'm just hoping that, you know, in the work that I do on the show and the speaking that I do around the country, and that young people who are watching this can get the lesson sooner than I did. 'Cause it's painful, 'cause you keep repeating it over and over and over until you get it right. And what I found is that every time you have to repeat the lesson, it gets worse. Because it's, you know, it's— I call it God trying to get your attention, the universe trying to get your attention. So we didn't get your attention the first time, so we're gonna have to hit you a little harder this time. So I'm still doing it, I'm still learning.

Number 4 is assign yourself the right story with Warren Buffett.

Well, in 1973, uh, the Washington Post company had gone public in 1971, right about the Pentagon Papers type time. But in '73, uh, the Nixon administration was through B.B. Rabozo, who was a pal of Nixon's. They were challenging the licenses of two of the Florida television stations the Post owned. So the stock went from $37 down to $16. Now at $16, there were about 5 million shares outstanding. So the whole Washington Post Company was selling for $80 million, and that included the newspaper, four big TV stations, Newsweek, you know, and some other assets, and no debt to speak of. So the Washington Post Company, which was intrinsically worth $400 or $500 million, was selling for about $80 million in the market. We bought most of our stock at about the equivalent of $100 million in the market. And it was, it was ridiculous. I mean, you had a business that unquestionably was worth 4 or 5 times what it was selling for, and Nixon wasn't going to put them out of business.

When you're doing these analyses then and now, do you have computers that help you, or how did you actually read all— what, you just get printed materials, or how did you in those days get the materials to read about the Washington Post. And how do you do it today?

Well, same, pretty much the same way, except there's fewer opportunities now. But I met Bob Woodward back, and he'd just come out with all the president's men. And all of a sudden, as a below-30-year-old, he was getting quite wealthy. And we had, we had breakfast or lunch over at the Madison Hotel. And he said, what do I do with this money? And I said, I said, investing is just about assigning yourself the right story. I said, imagine Ben Bradley this morning said to you, What is the Washington Post Company worth? What would you do if you have to write the story in a month? You'd go out and interview TV brokers and newspaper brokers and the owners, and you'd try and value each asset. I said, that's what I do. I assign myself the right story, and it's nothing more than that. Now, there's some stories I can't write. If you ask me to write a story on, you know, what is some glamorous but nonprofit-making business worth, I don't know how to write that story. But if you ask me to write a story on what is Potomac Electric Power or something like that. I can write the story and that's what I'm doing every day. I'm assigning myself a story and then I go out.

And so you get number 5 is Solve Problems with Peter Thiel.

I actually think you should think twice before starting certain types of businesses. So I think there are probably too many bad businesses getting started and not enough good ones. So that's it. You know, I don't think there's— I don't think there's anything about entrepreneurship per se say that is good. You know, I was talking to one of my friends a few years ago. I was asking him, what do you want to be doing in 5 or 10 years? Oh, it's really clear. I want to be an entrepreneur. That's like saying I want to be rich, I want to be famous. And I don't think— I don't think those are good things, being rich and famous. They're not good as direct goals. Like, if you have that as your sole goal, you're unlikely to, I think, really really succeed. And so I think you become an entrepreneur because you're working on an important problem nobody else is working on. I think you should start a business if you have something— if you're working on a problem that otherwise would not get solved.

Number 6 is Keep On Going with Mark Zuckerberg.

It wasn't so long ago that, you know, I was a student and, you know, sitting in a seat in an auditorium like you guys are here today listening to— I remember very specifically this time when Bill Gates came to talk at Harvard, and I'm just like, "Wow. How do you do that?" And— but, you know, the trick is, is that the media likes to sensationalize this as if you have some eureka moment or you are some singular person who can build something on your own, and that's just not how the world works. You know, when I was in school, I built a lot of stuff that I just liked building. There was not a single moment when I had some revelation that Facebook was gonna be awesome. That's not maybe how the media or movies or whatever would like to— portray things. It's not— it's much less exciting. But the reality is I think most services in the world that reach the scale that Facebook has, you start off building something that you care about. And, you know, you don't necessarily think it's gonna be that big. I didn't. You know, I built Facebook, the first version of Facebook, for my college community because I wanted to be able to connect with the people at my school. And I remember very clearly talking to my friends at the time and saying, you know, "How cool is it that we have built this community for our school? You know, one day it's going to be awesome when somebody else builds this for the world, because something like this needs to exist for the world." But it didn't even occur to me that, you know, my friends and I might be able to play a role in doing that, right? Because we were college students, right? I mean, we didn't have any, you know, engineers to work with or software engineers servers or resources or anything like that. And, you know, there are these huge companies that deliver products for hundreds of millions of people, right? There's— I always assumed that it was gonna be like Microsoft or Google or someone would build this for the world. And what basically just happened is, um, at each step along the way, we just kind of kept doing the next thing and growing from there. And, you know, there were teams inside these other companies that— that thought social media was important and were working on it. But there were all these different memes and narratives in the world. You know, people would say, oh, well, you know, this is just a fad. People are going to use it, but then they're going to stop. So, you know, so a lot of the teams who were working on it didn't take it that seriously, or, you know, the higher-ups in those companies didn't care, so they didn't get resources, and we just kept going and going. And then people would say, all right, well, all right, fine, so maybe people are using it, but It's never gonna make any money, right? I mean, social media doesn't make any money. And we just kind of kept going and going, and then pretty soon we had a service that was bigger than any of these other ones, and that kind of is how we are here where we are. There's no magic. A lot of times I think people just get afraid because, you know, often your dream is— it seems like it's so— so far off, But if you just kind of focus on building stuff that you think is good and you keep on going at each step along the way and don't let people deter you from that and you just really care about what you're doing and kind of don't give up at each step along the way, then, you know, I think that's how you build something good.

Number 7 is Focus on the Efficiency with Jack Ma.

In the future, you will not make money by the service you offer, how good service you you do, it's going to be how efficient you are. And Alibaba, we are company right now have 20, that's not including the financial group, we have 25 units, 25 different business units. Maybe in the future we might have 50, I don't know, right? We have that many units and we are almost in everywhere. We control our headcounts by efficiency we have. We only have 24,000 people. I tell you a story. The thing I feel proud of, that 2 years ago we start to have a budgeting meeting and I ask my team, "Well, year 2012, if we want to double all the numbers we have, how many people we need?" And people say, 7,800 new people. I said, no, no, no, check it again. And then they say 6,800 people. I said, no. And they, my people ask me, how many you want? I said, 200. They said, no, impossible 200. My answer is that for years we discuss we should hire more people for future. I've heard this for 10 years. Now, let's just do the efficient thing. And I told all the management, if we have net income, net headcount over 200, even 1 people, we should have no bonus for whole year for year 2012. And then we started the plan. Year 2012, we net lose 1,000 people.

People.

All the number doubled. And I say, if we want to create more jobs for the others, let's keep our headcounts. Make sure— because right now we have over 500 million registered users on Taobao. No matter how many people we hire ourselves, we cannot be— it's always not enough people. So we can focus on technology, focusing on making sure the Platform is efficiency. Focusing everybody makes the difference in the platform. That will make the difference.

Number 8 is get out of your comfort zone with Richard Branson.

It looks like you always go out of your comfort zone, right? Coming onto an island that was completely deserted, no fresh water, you didn't even have the money to buy it, and now you're sleeping on a tent on the beach trying to figure out how to get fresh water here. You do that often. You did it with the airline.

I mean, I was just somebody that experienced bad experience of traveling on airlines. I was actually trying to get to the BVI, the British Virgin Islands, one day from Puerto Rico, and the same lovely lady was waiting for me, and I'd been away for 3 weeks, and American Airlines bumped the flight. And, and so I went to the back of the airport, I hired a plane, I hired a blackboard, I wrote Virgin Airlines one way, New $29 to the BVI and went around all the people who'd been bumped and I filled my first plane. And that got me thinking, you know, that airlines do bump people. They don't care about you or me particularly in the air. And so we— so I then rang up Boeing and said, do you have any secondhand 747s?

Okay. I mean, it was literally that you just sat in the airport and said, I'm starting an airline right now because I'm frustrated.

Exactly.

And I think most, most of the best entrepreneurial ideas come out of frustration. I think, you know, if you're frustrated about something, the best way of sorting it out is get out and do it, and you've got yourself a business.

Number 9 is Simplify Complexity with Jack Dorsey.

My goal is to simplify complexity. I just want to build stuff that really simplifies our base human interaction. Twitter was around communication and visualizing what was happening in the world in real-time Square was allowing everyone to accept the form of payment that people have in their pocket today, which is a credit card. So we've built the simplest way to accept credit cards, and it's just this little tiny device that we give away for free, and you just download some software from the App Store, and you plug it in to your mobile phone or your iPad, and suddenly you can take credit cards. So if you're a tax accountant or a lawyer or a doctor or you know, even a hairstylist, you can now accept credit cards.

And number 10 is Trust Yourself with Robert F. Smith.

Running your own race demands trusting yourself even when others don't. Because guess what? There are a lot of people, good people, people who love you, who trust you, and who you love and trust, who want the best for you. And you'll come to them with some ideas about what you want to do and how you want to do it, and they're going to say, That's crazy. Just like when I left my first engineering job at Kraft and was telling my grandfather I was going back to business school, and he said, "That's a great-paying job. That's crazy." And when I finished business school and decided to join the tumultuous world of investment banking, my friends and my family spoke up with concerns about my sanity. And when I left Goldman Sachs right after we'd gone public, to set up a private equity firm called Vista, my mentors and colleagues at Goldman Sachs thought I was crazy. And to top it all off, when I told them I'm gonna start a firm, we're gonna focus on enterprise software and not be diversified like all other private equity firms, I was gonna hire a team of smart, young, talented people who'd never done this before, everyone knew I was certifiable. And I did this, of course, in the spring of 2000, about 2 months before before the entire tech bubble crashed. Well, all I can tell you is I've never been mad at these folks. In fact, I'm grateful for their advice and their concern. Because in their caution I found my courage. In their doubts I found my resolve. And in their warning— warnings I found my voice and chartered my own journey. And I'm proud of the Vista story. We take risks, we do things differently, and we listen to our own voice. We run our own race, and it has worked. We are now considered to be the number one private equity firm on the planet and have been so for the last decade.

Thank you guys so much for watching. I hope you enjoyed. I'd love to know what was the single biggest takeaway that you took from this video that you're going to apply immediately somehow to your life or to your business. Leave it down in the comments below.

Below.

When you do that and you write it down, it's much more likely to stick up here as well, which is what we want. I also want to give a quick shout out to Dilip. Thank you so much for picking up a copy of my book, The Top 10 Rules of Success, and posting it to your Instagram account and tagging me. I really, really appreciate it, and I hope you enjoy the read. So thank you guys again for watching. I believe in you. I hope you continue to believe in yourself and whatever your one word is. Much love.

I'll see you soon.

So let me give you the one word secret to happiness.

One word.

This is all you need to be happy.

The most important word ever.

If you had to think of one word that's most important to you or that sums you up or that would be kind of like a little beacon.

Hey, Believe Nation, if you want to know what the most important one word is for Tony Robbins, Gary Vaynerchuk, Oprah Winfrey, Will.i.am and Howard Schultz, I have a very special secret video for you. Check the description for details.