In this motivational compilation, host Evan Carmichael presents ten "rules" for entrepreneurial success, each illustrated by a short clip from a world‑renowned billionaire or business leader. The video opens with Evan’s call to belief and then sequentially showcases: (1) Oprah Winfrey’s message that a grand vision shapes reality; (2) Mark Zuckerberg’s advice to start even with imperfect ideas; (3) Bill Gates’s emphasis on building the best possible products; (4) Jeff Bezos’s counsel on persistence, stubbornness on vision, and flexibility on details; (5) Jack Ma’s perspective on working smart and hiring people who believe in the internet; (6) Larry Ellison’s reminder not to chase money but to focus on interesting work; (7) Richard Branson’s story of turning airline frustration into Virgin; (8) Alan Michael Sugar’s disciplined work‑ethic and clear separation of work and weekend; (9) Aliko Dangote’s insistence on consistency despite challenges; and (10) Larry Page’s encouragement to tackle massive, hard problems like organizing the world’s information. Throughout, Evan intersperses calls to action, urging viewers to comment on which rule resonates most. The video’s purpose is to inspire viewers to adopt these principles, believe in themselves, and apply the highlighted entrepreneurial mindsets to their own ventures.
Chapters
If I had to know everything about connecting people before I got started, I never would have built Facebook.
It's easy to have ideas. It's very hard to turn an idea into a successful product.
It's so difficult for us to hire people 15 years ago. People who are not that bad. I said people can walk, still walk on the street. We hired them. Because nobody believed internet. Nobody believed internet.
What's up, Believe Nation? It's Evan. My one word is believe, and I believe in you. I want to see that amazing thing you have inside inside you be unleashed onto the world so you can have a big impact for yourself, for your family, for your community, and for the world. And so to help you on your journey today, we're going to learn how billionaires think, success advice from the top, volume 6. Rule number 1 is my personal favorite, and I'd love to know which one you guys like the best. And as always, guys, as you're watching, if you hear something that really resonates with you, please leave it in the comments below, put quotes around it so other people can be inspired as well. Enjoy! Up first at number 1 is You Become What You Believe with Oprah Winfrey.
Create the highest, grandest vision possible for your life because you become what you believe. When I was a little girl, Mississippi, growing up on the farm, only buckwheat as a role model, watching my grandmother boil clothes in a big iron pot through the screen door because we didn't have a washing machine in made everything we had. I watched her and realized somehow inside myself and the spirit of myself that although this was segregated Mississippi and I was colored and female, that my life could be bigger, greater than what I saw. I remember being 4 or 5 years old. I certainly couldn't articulate it, but it was a feeling and a feeling that I allowed myself to follow. I allowed myself to follow because if you were to ask me what is the secret to my success, it is because I understand that there is a power greater than myself that rules my life. And in life, in life, if you can be still long enough in all of your endeavors, the good times, the hard times, to connect yourself to the source— I call it God, you can call it whatever you want— to the force, nature, Allah, the power. If you can connect yourself to the source and allow the energy that is your personality, your life force, to be connected to the greater force, anything is possible for you. I am proof of that. I think that my life, the fact that I was born where I was born in the time that I was and have been able to do what I've done speaks to the possibility Not that I am special, but that it could be done.
Number 2 is "Just Start" with Mark Zuckerberg.
Ideas don't come out fully formed. They only become clear as you work on them. You just have to get started. If I had to know everything about connecting people before I got started, I never would have built Facebook. Movies and pop culture just get this all wrong. The idea of a single eureka moment is a dangerous lie. It makes us feel inadequate because we feel like we haven't had ours yet, and it prevents people with seeds of good ideas from ever getting started in the first place.
Number 3 is Create the Best Products with Bill Gates.
Well, certainly every product we do is absolutely as capable as it can possibly be. You know, there's no holding back. We are The people at Microsoft come into work every day building the best products they can, and they're very proud. You know, you go out, go into schools and see how kids are using this stuff, go and ask people about how their jobs have changed because of the personal computer. You know, we're sitting there listening to our customers saying how they'd like to make things better. So we're— we do absolutely our best job, and in fact, that's why we've been successful. You know, anybody who holds back in this business isn't gonna be around for long because this is a business where you always have to be moving at a very rapid pace.
Number 4: Execute Your Idea with Jeff Bezos.
It's easy to have ideas. It's very hard to turn an idea into a successful product. There are a lot of steps in between. It takes persistence, relentlessness. So I always tell people who are you know, who think they want to be entrepreneurs, it's— you need a combination of stubborn relentlessness and flexibility. And you have to know when to be which. And basically, you need to be stubborn on your vision because otherwise it'll be too easy to give up. But you need to be very flexible on the details because as you go along pursuing your vision, you'll find that some of your preconceptions were wrong. And you're going to need to be able to change those things. So I think taking an idea successfully all the way to the market and turning it into a real product that people care about and that really improves people's lives is a lot of hard work.
Number 5: Work Smart with Jack Ma.
Who works harder, the people at eBay or the people at Alibaba?
Sometimes you have not only have to work how you have to work smart.
So would you say you work smarter than eBay? I'd have to say yes, right?
Well, so far.
Yeah, so far.
So far. OK. Because I think we are pretty lucky people. And people say, yeah, you work very hard. True. In this world, there's so many people work very hard. But they're not that. I told my team when we IPO'd, I asked a lot of people sitting there, I say, you know, all of you guys A lot of our guys are millionaires and so rich. But 15 years ago, who are we? It's so difficult for us to hire people 15 years ago. People who are not that bad. I said people can walk, still walk on the street, we hire them. Because nobody believed internet, nobody believed internet. And they join a company. Those people who believe they're smart, they were headhunted back to the other company. They set up their own company. Those people, nobody go to headhunting them. They stay. Today they're successful. Very key reasons we insist, we persist, we never give up. We believe the dreams together.
Number 6: Don't Chase Money with Larry Ellison.
Our goal was to get— we started with 4 employees, uh, and our goal was to get to 50 employees. And the goal really was not so much to make a lot of money. I might— I wanted— to me, a lot of money in those days was I want to own a house I want to have a nice car, and I wanted to work with interesting people and do interesting things. And I thought if I could control my own environment, have a small consulting company. And Oracle started out as a software consulting company. We worked for Tandem Computer, if anyone remembers those guys. We worked for IBM. We worked for a lot of different tech companies in Silicon Valley doing contract programming, fixed-price contract programming. And we did pretty well. Actually, and again, the idea was just to have a small software contract software company. A bunch of, you know, we thought we were hotshot programmers and we thought we could make a decent living doing just that. And quite by accident, we built a product.
Number 7: Get out of your comfort zone with Richard Branson.
So 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 the 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 so I went to the back of the airport, I hired a plane, I hired a blackboard, I wrote Virgin Airlines one-way, $29 to the BVI, 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?
No kidding, 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 8: Have a good work ethic with Alan Michael Sugar.
When you come from the working-class background that I come from, I feel guilty at 10 to 5 if I'm not in the office. I know that might sound strange to you, but that's— it's a work ethic that I have to be half dead not to not go to work. It's a kind of a work ethic that's built into me, yeah. But nevertheless, Having said all that, the weekends, that was it, it's over. Switch off like a light. Friday night, as you got back from the office or from the work or from the factory or whatever, it doesn't matter what was buzzing around in my head, it was off like a light switch and that's it. Don't let it interfere, very rarely let it interfere with the weekend. And then Monday morning, bang, back on it again as if you flick the switch on again. So I think that was a bit of discipline in that respect.
Number 9 is be consistent with Aliko Dangote.
You must be consistent when you try a business and you start. You might have hiccups here and there, but it does not mean that that business is not going to work. There must be challenges. In fact, what I keep saying is that life without challenges is very, very boring. So if you have challenges, you just have to know how to work work out or how to work around these challenges, and you will be successful once you are consistent. What business doesn't like is for you to try something, and then once you have one or two problems, now you want to change and move into another business. That doesn't work in business at all.
And number 10 is Solve Bigger Problems with Larry Page.
And I think, um, for all of you, there are many areas, uh, where there's leverage available in the world where you know, one or two people, a good idea, a lot of hard work can really make a difference. There's many, many things like that and it's good not to forget that, but it's good to look for those things. Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. And one of the things that surprised me, that's a very broad mission, it's a lot of work, we're not gonna achieve it anytime soon.
Right?
It's almost an impossible task. But it's an exciting task and one that you can get other people excited about and they can help you. And one of the things that also surprised me is it's sometimes easier to do something that's harder because other people get excited about it and you can get much more resource. You can get tremendous resources to solve a hard problem, whereas you might only get minor resources to solve a small problem.
Thank you guys so much for watching. I hope you enjoyed. I'd love to know which rule had the biggest impact on you. What did you learn from this video that you will immediately apply to your thinking, to your life, to your business? Please leave a comment. Let me know down below. I'm really excited to see what you have to say. And as always, guys, 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.
It's 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.
