Top 10 Rules for Success From World's Richest People

Some of the richest people in the world didn't become billionaires overnight. They built habits, mindsets, and principles that created extraordinary results over time. Jeff Bezos learned that failure is the price of innovation.

You have to have a willingness to fail. You have to have a willingness to be misunderstood for long periods of time.

Jensen Huang believes success starts by believing you can learn what you don't know.

There are a lot of things in life that I believe you can learn, and you just have to be given the opportunity to learn it.

Elon Musk Knows that building something great means surviving incredible pain.

Trying to build a company and have it succeed is like eating glass and staring into the abyss.

Mark Cuban built businesses by finding advantages that everyone else missed.

Whatever you do, you have to ask yourself, what's your edge? What is the one thing that gives you a competitive edge?

And Warren Buffett never stopped learning from his mistakes.

I've made a lot of mistakes.

So today we're breaking down the top 10 rules for success from the world's richest people. If you want to think bigger, achieve more, and create your own success story, This video is for you. Need motivation?

Watch a top 10 with the Believe Nation.

If you've been here before, drop a hashtag believe in the comments below so I can feature you here in a future video. And if you're new, welcome to Believe Nation, the only channel that helps you believe in yourself daily, one video at a time. Okay, let's kick it off with rule number 1, don't be afraid to fail with Jeff Bezos.

There are a couple of other things that are essential for innovation and invention that are not as fun. One of them is you have to have a willingness to fail. You have to have a willingness to be misunderstood for long periods of time.

That's it.

If you do something in a new way, and I don't care what it is, people are initially going to misunderstand it relative to the traditional way. And they will, there'll be well-meaning critics who, you know, genuinely want the best outcome, but they're worried about this new way. And there'll also be, of course, self-interested critics who have a vested interest in the traditional— they have some profit stream tied to the traditional way. But doing things in— if you want to— if you never want to be criticized, for goodness' sake, don't do anything new. So it's okay though, if you have a willingness to be misunderstood for long periods of time, if you have a willingness to fail, then what you can do is you can ramp up your rate of experimentation. So successful invention— successful invention is inventions that customers care about. It's actually relatively easy to invent new things that customers don't care about. But successful invention, if you want to do a lot of that, you basically have to increase your rate of experimentation. And that you can think of as a process. How do you go about organizing your systems, your people, all of your assets, your own daily life and how you spend time? How do you organize those things to increase your rate of experimentation? Because not all of your experiments are going to work.

Rule number 2 is be innovative with Steve Jobs.

The whole premise for Apple's existence is to come up with better products, highly differentiated better products that then the third-party software developers can develop new and exciting and different applications on that they can't develop on other types of personal computers. And if Apple gives that away by giving away their future system software, then I'm not sure that that the market needs Apple. So my whole question in this is, what is Apple's differentiation if this is successful? And if it's not successful, what is Apple's innovation which is going to propel it through the '90s like Macintosh did through the '80s? I'm not, I'm not sure. I'm sure that there are a bunch of bright people there, and I'm sure they have some, some good ideas.

What do you think that we'll be able to do with, with this field called personal computing, where you are in control?

Sure.

That we can't do today?

Well, what's happening right now with our industry is it's bifurcating. All current generation personal computers, all IBM PCs, all— most of the current Macintoshes are all going to go portable. They're all going to be smaller, all portable. Within 2, 3 years, everything will be portable. And yet customers are also demanding at the same time more power. And more power falls into 3 or 4 areas. People want large color screens that they can put photographs on. Ask anyone in, in the upper part of desktop publishing as an example. People want motion video. People want to be networked with very high-speed networking, at least Ethernet speeds. And people want to be sending all of this rich media around the network. Unfortunately, this second class of product cannot be made portable. So what I see is I see our industry bifurcating where the current generation of products are going to be portable and the next generation of products, these very powerful, highly networked color machines, are going to be desktop machines. And that's where I think we're going. Now, what is going to be the new breakthrough that causes the next spurt of growth in our industry? Just like spreadsheets did in the early '80s, desktop publishing did in the late '80s. And again, I come back to interpersonal computing. I think personal computing, which we mastered in the '80s, its mission was to improve individual productivity and at best creativity. And with over 50 million personal computers shipped in the '80s, it worked. The next thing for the '90s, though, needs to be more. Improving individual productivity isn't enough anymore. The real competitive advantage in the '90s is going to come from improving group productivity and collaboration. Improving group productivity. And that is going to be achieved through interpersonal computing, using the same desktop tool that revolutionized analysis and planning with spreadsheets, that revolutionized publishing with desktop publishing, using those same tools to revolutionize human-to-human communication, collaboration, and group productivity. And I think that is going to be the 3rd revolution of the desktop computer in the first half of the '90s.

Rule number 3 is have a high pain tolerance with Elon Musk.

There's a friend of mine who's got a great saying about creating a company, which is, trying to build a company and have it succeed is like eating glass and staring into the abyss. So, I mean, what tends to happen is it's sort of quite exciting for the first several months of starting a company, and then reality sets in, things don't go as well as planned, customers aren't signing up, The technology or the product isn't working as well as you thought. And then that can sometimes be compounded by a recession, and it can be very, very painful for several years. So I think, frankly, starting a company, I would advise people to have a high pain tolerance.

Rule number 4 is find a competitive edge with Mark Cuban.

I was never the one to, like, chase a sector, oh, this is hot, because you have to ask yourself, who are you competing with? And whatever you do, you have to ask yourself, what's your edge? Right, what is the one thing that gives you a competitive edge? If you don't have an answer, you can't start that company. You're going to lose, right? I said it before, if you're trying to compete with me, you better know a whole lot more than I do about whatever business we're in. 'Cause otherwise, I'm gonna kick your ass, right? So you have to ask yourself, what is your competitive advantage? And with that competitive advantage, what's the best way for me to get customers who are willing to write me a check? One of my skill sets has always been, I've been able to walk into any type of business and understand their company. You know, understand how they make money, understand how they compete. So I can walk into a shoe store, I can walk into a hospital or whatever and say, All right, here's my technology, here's how it gives you an advantage. And I try to do the same thing on Shark Tank. You hear us say it all the time. What is your competitive advantage? Just saying it's my passion— did you ever walk into 7-Eleven and say, wow, I'm shopping here at 7-Eleven because they're really passionate? No, right? And when, when you go and you make your— think about your own buying decisions. What makes you decide to buy? Now, you might want to support veteran-owned businesses. I always, when it's a toss-up, yes, right? But at some point, you have to grow beyond the community, and you have to be able to say, you can walk into any situation and know without any doubt in your mind, this is why you are the best product or service, and you are the best company to provide that product or service. Period, end of story. If you can't do that, you have to ask yourself, who is doing it? What are they doing that gives them that edge? What allows them to compete or help their customers better than you can? Right, because that's what it's all about. We all, as consumers, make buying decisions. And we, the people who are buying our stuff, product or service, use the same thought process for those buying decisions. So, always put yourself in your potential customer's shoes. What is it that I have that makes it a no-brainer for them to buy from me? If it's, I'm nice, I'm passionate, you're in trouble, right? There's got to be something, because even if you can get some customers, how are you going to grow it? How are you going to sustain it? And what's going to keep the next person from coming in and doing the same thing? Because look, with success, comes additional challenges. The more you succeed, the more people say, damn, okay, that's an opportunity. I think I can do that better. And so, success isn't, look where I'm at. Success is go, go, go, go, right? I mean, people say, wow, you've done this. I'm still going, right? To me, business is the ultimate sport. And there's nobody on the face of the earth that's more competitive than I am. I've said that to Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan, Larry Bird, you name it, right? Any athlete, any business person. It is the ultimate sport, and we're competing all the time. What is it that gives you an edge that allows you to compete? How do you sustain that? And how do you find more people that say yes to buying that? That is going to be the key to your business. And how do you sell it?

Also, if you want to take real action after this video, I made a free worksheet just for you. It covers the top lessons from today, gives you space to write your biggest takeaways, and helps you build a simple action plan. It's 100% free. Just click the link in the description below to go grab it, and I'll see you there. Rule number 5 is care more with Mark Zuckerberg.

Steve Jobs cared a little bit too much about how perfect the edges of some polygon were, right? Um, what is it that you care too much about?

Connecting everyone. No, seriously, if you think about, I mean, it's like this aesthetic sense of the world that I have is that you can, communities of people can channel their energy to do great things, and having connections between people is the infrastructure for the world to do that. And, you know, I mean, that's why at each step along the way when there was always all this uncertainty about, you know, whether it would be profitable or whether it would make sense or be good or whatever, to do these things, we always were doing it because we just cared more. And I mean, to this day, I mean, you could say that that was a startup thing, but it isn't because now we're here and we connect more than a billion people. But I mean, we're pouring tons of money and resources into connecting people who can't even afford internet access, right? So I mean, that's like, there's no way that that's going to be profitable in the near term or medium term, but we're doing it because we think it's the right thing to do. And over the long term, I do think that there's something there and it's going to be fundamentally important for the world and maybe we'll get rewarded, maybe not, but we just really care.

Rule number 6 is learn from mistakes with Warren Buffett.

I've made a lot of mistakes. Biggest mistake— well, not the biggest, necessarily the biggest, but buying Berkshire Hathaway itself was a mistake because Berkshire was a lousy textile business and I bought it very cheap. I'd been taught by Ben Graham to buy things on a quantitative basis. Look around for things that are cheap. And that— I was taught that, we'll say, in 1949 or '50. Made a big impression on me. So I went around looking for what I call used cigar butts of stocks. And the cigar butt approach to buying stocks is that you walk down the street and you're looking around for cigar butts, and you find this on the street, this terrible-looking, soggy, ugly-looking cigar, one puff left in it. But you pick it up and you get your one puff. Disgusting, you throw it away, but it's free. I mean, it's cheap. And then you look around for another soggy, you know, one-puff cigarette. Well, that's what I did for years. It's a mistake. Although you can make money doing it, but you can't make it with big money. It's so much easier just to buy wonderful businesses. So now I would rather buy a wonderful business at a fair price than a fair business at a wonderful price. But in those days, I was buying cheap stocks, and Berkshire was selling below its working capital per share. You got the plants for nothing, you got the machinery for nothing, you got the inventory and receivables at a discount. It was cheap, so I bought it. And 20 years later, I was still running a lousy business, and that money did not compound. You really want to be in a wonderful business because the time is the friend of the wonderful business. You keep compounding, it keeps doing more business, and you keep making more money. Time is the enemy of the lousy business. I could have sold Berkshire, perhaps liquidated it, and made a quick little profit, you know, one puff. But staying with those kind of businesses is a big mistake. So you might say I learned something out of that mistake. And I would have been way better off taking— what I did with Berkshire is I kept buying better businesses. I started the insurance business, See's Candy, the Buffalo, all kinds of things. I would have been way better doing that with a with a brand new little entity that I'd set up rather than using Berkshire as the platform. Now I've had a lot of fun out of it. I mean, everything in life seems to turn out for the better, so I, I don't have any complaints about that, but it was a dumb thing to do. I went into US Air, I bought a preferred stock in 1989. As soon as my check cleared, the company went into the red and never got out. I mean, it was really dumb. I mean, it— I've got an 800 number I call now whenever I think about buying an airline stock. I call them up any hour that— fortunately, I can call them at 3 in the morning and I just dial and I say, my name's Warren, I'm an aeroholic, you know, and I'm thinking about buying this thing. And they talk me down. I mean, it takes hours sometimes, but it's worth it, believe me. If you ever think about buying an airline stock, call me and I'll give you the 800 number because you don't want to do it. But we got lucky in terms of how we eventually came out on it, but it was a dumb, dumb decision.

Rule number 7 is be patient with Bill Gates.

I get to, when I, you know, say, okay, we're going to build a TB drug team, we're going to build the TB vaccine team, we're going to build the, you know, kill all the mosquitoes in the world gene drive CRISPR team, I get to, in terms of how we fund that, organize it, how many locations, Do we wait till they have this result before we scale it up? I get to use the same or 80% the same type of thinking that I exercised in terms of, okay, let's go do Windows, let's go do Excel. So it's backing engineers, it's getting a sense of the team, what needs to be added to that team, are the IQs on the team adding up as opposed to subtracting from each other. And it's very comfortable because the most intense period of Microsoft was where these teams were about size 30. And for our diseases, typhoid, rotavirus— there's a lot of diseases that hopefully you'll never hear of again, most of which don't exist here in the US.

Yeah.

So it is very, very similar. It takes a decade generally. from start to finish. The AIDS vaccine, actually we're on year 14 and it'll probably be another 8 to 10 years before that one is completely done. So some take as long as 20 years because there's many dead ends and you have kind of a portfolio of approaches. But yes, I feel like my working with governments, hiring smart people, managing teams, it did prepare me well for this very operational— organization that's a lot like a business, except that we're— our profit is lives saved as opposed to a monetary measure.

Rule number 8 is lean into your dreams with Oprah Winfrey.

So it is my intention, my intention to fulfill the dream of the Creator. It is my intention to live to the highest calling and be pressed to the mark of the highest calling that I have come to do. And when you can ask the Creator, ask that which made you you, what is your dream for me? I guarantee you, instead of you trying to define the dream, what is your dream for me. If you're able to lean into the dream that the universe and all the forces of, of, of, of light and love and power and grace, by all the names that we call God, has for you, nobody can touch you. Nobody can touch you.

Win number 9 is Never Look Back with Michael Bloomberg.

There's never been a day that I haven't looked forward to going into work, even the days I knew I was gonna get beaten up, even the day I knew I was gonna get fired. I'd never been fired before. I wonder what it's like. Okay, let's go find out.

Yeah.

And I've never looked back. I find it fascinating. People spend— and we're doing this in this country— we're spending all our time trying to blame people and figure out why we got to where we are now, rather than focusing on how you get out of where we are now and make it better. And successful people look to the future, and unsuccessful people look to the back, look behind them.

And rule number ten, the last one before a very special bonus clip, is see challenges as opportunities with Jack Law.

This world today is full of challenges and opportunities. Two thousand years ago, full of challenges and opportunities, and I'm sure two thousand years later. full of challenges and opportunities. There is always— it depends on how you look at somebody. Look at this challenge as opportunity. Young people always say there's no opportunity. I complain a lot when I was young because I think Bill Gates took all the opportunities for the Microsoft, Steve Jobs, all these guys. There's no job, there's no great big stuff left for us. But I think opportunity always lies in the challenges, always lies in the complaints. If you can solve the challenge, you have the— you will be successful. The big challenge you solve, the big problem or the big opportunity you have.

You once told me that you really didn't like firing people and very seldom did it.

Can you elaborate on that?

Well, I'd rather improve you than give up on you. You know, when you fire somebody, you're kind of saying, well, you know, a lot of people say, well, it wasn't your fault, or I made the wrong choice, or— there are very few jobs. Look, I used to clean bathrooms, and now I'm the CEO of a company. I think you could learn it. I'm pretty certain you can learn this. And there are a lot of things in life that I believe you can learn, and you just have to be given the opportunity to learn it. I had the benefit of watching a lot of smart people do a lot of things. I'm surrounded by 60 people. They're doing smart things all the time. And they probably don't realize it, but I'm learning constantly from every single one of them. And so, I don't like giving up on people because I think they could improve. And so, there's a— it's kind of tongue-in-cheek, but— I'm going to steal that. But people know that I'd rather torture them into greatness.

Congratulations, you're one video closer to who you're meant to be.

Believe.

For 10 more amazing rules from the world's richest people, check the video right there next to me. I think you'll love it. Continue to believe, and I'll see you there.

I'd encourage people to read a lot of books. Just read, like, I mean, basically try to ingest as much information as you can, uh, and try to also just develop a good general knowledge.