Top 10 Rules for Success From World's Richest People (Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos)

Some of the world's richest people didn't accept that's just the way it's done. Steve Jobs questioned conventional wisdom.

I'd always ask why you do things, and the answers you invariably get are, oh, that's just the way it's done.

Elon Musk took big chances when the opportunity was worth the risk.

If the outcome is exciting enough, then, then taking a big risk is worthwhile.

Jeff Bezos fought to keep the mindset that built Amazon.

It's great to have the scale of Amazon, but the downside of that is that you can lose your nimbleness, you can lose your your entrepreneurial spirit.

Bill Gates moved quickly when opportunity knocked.

We grabbed on to it to be the very first.

And Mark Zuckerberg focused on building a great company, not chasing the startup hype.

There's this culture in Silicon Valley that kind of makes startups seem glamorous, and I never really believed that.

Today, we're breaking down the top 10 rules for success from the world's richest people, featuring powerful lessons on challenging conventional thinking, taking calculated risks, and building companies that stand the test of time. So if you want to think differently, make better decisions, and create lasting success, this video is for you. Need motivation?

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Okay, let's kick it off with rule number 1: Question everything with Steve Jobs.

Throughout the years in business, I found something, which was I always ask why you do things, and the answers you invariably get are, "Oh, that's just the way it's done." Nobody knows why they do what they do. Nobody thinks about things very deeply in business. That's what I found. I'll give you an example. When we were building our Apple IIs in the garage, we knew exactly what they cost. When we got into a factory in the Apple II days, the accounting had this notion of a standard cost where you'd kind of set a standard cost and then at the end of a quarter you'd adjust it with a variance. And I kept asking, "Well, why do we do this?" And the answer was, "Well, that's just the way it's done." And after about 6 months of digging into this, what I realized was The reason you do it is because you don't really have good enough controls to know how much it costs, so you guess and then you fix your guess at the end of the quarter. And the reason you don't know how much it costs is because your information systems aren't good enough.

So—

but nobody said it that way. And so later on when we designed this automated factory for Macintosh, we were able to get rid of a lot of these antiquated concepts and know exactly what something cost. To the second. So in business, a lot of things are— I call it folklore. They're done because they were done yesterday and the day before. And so what that means is, is if you're willing to sort of ask a lot of questions and think about things and work really hard, you can learn business pretty fast. It's not the hardest thing in the world. It's not rocket science. It's not rocket science.

No.

Rule number 2 is take big chances with Elon Musk.

I don't really like risk for risk's sake or anything. It's— and I do think that a lot of things are very risky with a low chance of success. But if you want to try to come up with an innovative breakthrough, that's kind of— that's going to be how it is. Anything which is significantly innovative is going to come with a significant risk of failure. And, but, you know, if you've got to take big chances in order for the potential for a big positive outcome. And, you know, just, and if, I mean, if the outcome is exciting enough, then taking a big risk is worthwhile. That's really how I approach it. But then, Once executing down a path, I actually do my absolute best to reduce risk, you know, because— or to improve the— another way of saying it, to improve the probability of success, because when you try to do something that is very risky, you have to spend a lot of effort trying to reduce that risk as you embark down that path. I mean, when— Um, when I started SpaceX, the— I thought the odds of success were very low. Um, I thought we'd most likely fail, but I thought, well, we should give it a try.

Rule number 3 is maintain a day one culture with Jeff Bezos.

Now that you have about 600,000 employees, I calculated you're adding about 250 people a day. Um, you've mentioned that you're trying to fend off day two. Yeah. And you've said that day two is stasis followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciatingly painful decline, followed by death. That is why it is always day one.

Yeah.

Yeah.

How's that work?

Well, so day one, and this is a phrase that we use at Amazon all the time. I've been using it in my first annual shareholder letter from 20 years ago. And we say it's always day one and it needs to be day one for the reason that you just mentioned. And how do you— so the real question for me is how do you go about maintaining a day one culture You know, it's great to have the, the scale of Amazon. We have financial resources. We have lots of brilliant people. We can accomplish great things. We have global scope. We have operations all over the world. But the downside of that is that you can lose your nimbleness. You can lose your entrepreneurial spirit. You can lose your— that kind of heart that, that, that small companies often have. And so if you could have the best of both worlds, if you can have that entrepreneurial spirit and heart while at the same time having all the advantages that come with scale and scope, think, think of the things that you could do. And so how— the question is, how do you achieve that? The scale is good because it makes you robust. You know, a big boxer can take a punch to the head The question is, you also want to dodge those punches. You'd like to be nimble. You want to be big and nimble. And I find there are a lot of things that are protective of the day one mentality. I already spent some time on one of them, which is customer obsession. I think that's the most important thing. If you can— it gets harder as you get bigger. When you're a little tiny company, say you're a 10-person startup company, every single person in the company is focused on the customer. When you get to be a bigger company, You've got all the middle— you've got middle managers and you've got all these layers. And those people aren't on the front lines. They're not interacting with customers every day. They're insulated from customers. And they start to manage not the customer happiness directly, but they start to manage through proxies like metrics and processes. And some of those things can become bureaucratic. So it's very challenging. But one of the things that happens is the decision-making velocity slows down. And I think the reason, one of the reasons that that happens is that people, all the junior executives inside the big company, start to model all decisions as if they are heavyweight, irreversible, highly consequential decisions. And so even two-way doors, you could make, you make a decision, it's the wrong decision, you can just back up, back through the door and try again. Even those reversible decisions start to be made with heavyweight processes. And so you can teach people that these pitfalls and, and traps, and then teach them to avoid those traps. And that's what we're trying to do at Amazon, so that we can maintain our inventiveness and our heart and our kind of small company spirit, even as we have the scale and scope of a larger company.

Rule number 4 is trust your ideas with Bill Gates.

The key thing was that Paul Allen and I had loved working on software since we were lucky enough to be exposed. Literally, I was 13 in 8th grade when this timesharing terminal came in, and we just did it day and night and, you know, got better. And we could see that the magic of software combined with this miracle of the microprocessor subject to Moore's Law exponential improvement, that that was a magic combination. And we'd look around and say, hey, how come everybody's not saying this is amazing? I mean, we're going to dethrone IBM. And why doesn't Digital Equipment get it? Why is the guy who runs it— this is a company that's long gone, but dominated many computers at the time— why isn't that guy up there saying it's wrong? We know it's right. And so the key event for us was, it was a very cold Boston winter. And a kit computer came out on this Popular Electronics magazine, and we said, "Oh, damn, this is happening without us." I mean, here we are doing nothing. And so we called the company up and said, "Hey, we're ready." And then we called them back. We actually did the work, and then we called them back and said, "How do you make the stuff go in and out of the computer, the I/O?" And they said, "Well, that's interesting. Nobody else has ever asked that. You must really be doing something." Anyway, our very first customer, and so we grabbed onto it to be the very first, and we were the first to say there should be a software industry and come and do it. In a sense, it was one of the lower risk things I've ever done in my life because I could have always gone back. My parents, my dad didn't say, "Hey, if you go away for a few years, I'll stop paying for your education." They were nice and said, "Okay, go learn your lesson down there in the desert." and you get back to the serious stuff. And, you know, we're still, we're still waiting.

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. I'll see you there. Rule number 5 is study success with Mark Zuckerberg.

There's this culture in Silicon Valley that kind of makes startups seem glamorous and I never really believed that, right? I never had a goal of starting a startup. And my goal when I realized that I had a company was to get it to be a good company as quickly as possible, right? And kind of get out of what you'd call the, like, risky startup phase where you are just, like, constantly about to die and where you could get to a point where you can actually do some interesting things and make, make a lot more interesting bets. And, um, So I don't know, I never read a lot of the literature on this. And I mean, maybe if I had, then I wouldn't have made so many mistakes. But so I don't know if like if learning for me is the right way to go on this. But I mean, but it did.

I think your model must have come from somewhere, though, even if it was, even if it was unintentional.

Right.

Like, were you influenced by Peter Thiel or Sean?

Well, yes, I was influenced by all these people once I met them. I actually, I hadn't really heard of Peter Thiel before. I'm talking about like, yeah, right.

Yeah.

But I mean, he was massively influential on my thinking. I mean, like a lot of the early lessons that I took on how to think about strategy came from Peter and Sean. And I did pay a lot of attention when I was growing up to Microsoft. I thought, I mean, I grew up using Windows 3.1 and then Windows 95, and I just thought that those were like the most unbelievable things.

And—

In a sense, they are.

Yeah, they really were awesome, right? Well, I don't know if you meant that positively, but I did. And I thought, you know, building this ecosystem was really neat, and that kind of inspired me, right? In the way that they built a platform, I kind of thought, okay, well, maybe one day, you know, the tools that I'm building can be part of a broader ecosystem as well.

Rule number 6 is think long-term with Warren Buffett.

If you buy a business, if you buy a farm, you know, do you go up and look, you know, every couple weeks to see how far the corn is up? And, you know, do you worry too much about whether somebody says this is gonna be a year of low prices because exports are being affected or anything like that? You know, you buy a farm and you hold it for— I've got one farm that I bought in the 1980s and my son runs it, but I've been there once, you know. I mean, it doesn't grow faster if I go and stare at it. You know, I can't cheer for it, you know, more effort, more effort, or something like that. And I know there's gonna be some years when prices are gonna be good and some when the prices aren't gonna be good. I know there's years when yields will be better than others, but I bought the farm and It just doesn't— I don't care about economic predictions on it or anything of the sort. I do care that over the years it's well tended to in terms of rotating crops and I hope yields get better, which they generally have. In fact, that farm 100 years ago would have probably produced 30 bushels, maybe 35 bushels of corn per acre. Now in a good year, you know, it'd be 200. We really made progress in this country. That's one reason commodity prices, if you go back a couple hundred years, they've moved so little, is because we've just gotten better and better at whether it's cotton or whether it's corn or soybeans or all kinds of things. And you and I have benefited from that.

And so Apple is kind of like a farm.

Well, it's a long-term investment. And if you owned the best auto dealership in town, the best brand, and had a somebody good running it, you wouldn't drop by every day and say, you know, how many people have come in today? Or, you know, I think interest rates are going up a little, maybe it'll slow down our sales or anything. No, you buy it knowing there's 365 days a year and you're going to own it for 20 years, so that's 7,300 days. And you know, they're going to— things are going to be different from day to day and year to year. You shouldn't buy it if the day-to-day stuff is important.

Rule number 7 is follow your dreams with Jack Ma.

In my apartment where we started, 18 founders, and we aim high, we have a dream. We say we want to make— become the top 10 internet companies or websites in the world. Guys, at that time we are ranking several million name, but we want to be number 10 or the top 10 of the world. We want to make this company last 102 years and we don't know where is our pay next month. Well, when you are poor, if you have dreams, you never feel poor. You know what we are doing? So after, we never say we will win next year or we win tomorrow. We say we will win in 10, 20 years. 19 years passed. Today we are the top 10 websites, internet companies in the world.

Rule number 8 is think outside the box with Jensen Huang.

I heard from someone that there were pro—

that you could—

that there was never a problem you couldn't fix.

Do you think that's true? Or was there a problem that you couldn't fix?

There's some problems you can't fix. I don't recall one. And the reason for that is because either you find a solution for it or you change the problem so that you can find a solution for it. And I think in a lot of ways. Some people call that thinking out of the box. If you can't solve something, you know, either sometimes it's not meant to be solved, or you can change the problem, you know, in a way that is solvable. Now there are some problems that if you try to solve it in the most literal sense, it would take a long time to solve. It might take a lot of money to solve. It might take an enormous amount of cost, you know, in time or resource or whatever it is, or materials. But if you change the problem and you truly understand what is it— what is the person really trying to ask, you know, what is— what is at the core of that problem, maybe you can express that problem in a slightly different way, and as a result it becomes solvable and a solution can be found. Maybe you can simplify the problem. Maybe you can break the problem down into 10 pieces and that you would solve it over time. There's a lot of different ways to look at the problem. Smart thinking about a problem is really at the beginning of engineering. It's asking the question, what is this problem really about? What is this problem really about? Oftentimes, by asking that question, what is this problem really about? You know, what is— what are they really asking? What are we really looking for? How can I express this problem in different ways? You know, if you think about it that way, all of a sudden the number of solutions really, really expand.

Rule number 9 is keep experimenting with Larry Ellison.

Throughout my 20s, I continued experimenting, trying different things, racing bikes and boats, and constantly changing jobs. It didn't take me long to discover that the most interesting and rewarding programming jobs were found at a cluster of companies located south of Stanford University and north of San Jose. Silicon Valley was in its infancy. I was still in my 20s when I went to work for my first Silicon Valley startup, Amdahl, where we developed the world's fastest mainframe computer —faster than anything IBM had. Next stop was Ampex, where we built the world's largest digital data storage system. Then on to Precision Instruments, where we built an even larger data storage system, this time using lasers. I was the vice president in charge of software development. It was all very cutting-edge and challenging and cool. I liked my work most of the time, but I didn't love it. I searched and I searched, but I just could not find a software engineering job that I loved as much as I loved sailing. So I tried to create one. I put together a plan to start my own company. That way I could completely control my work environment. I would hire the most talented programmers I knew, and we would all work together on the most interesting and challenging software projects. My goal was to create the perfect job for me, a job I truly loved. I never expected the company to grow beyond 50 people.

And rule number 10, the last one before a very special bonus clip, is understanding your point of impact with Michael Dell.

You have to think about the point of impact. If you're running a business with 100 people, the point of impact for the leader is very different than if it's 1,000 people or 10,000 or 100,000. And so that's the frame of reference that I've always used, is to say, okay, if I'm leading this organization, what are the things that actually I can do to cause it to be successful? If it's 1,000 people, it's very, very different than it is for me today. So today I'm a lot more focused on strategy because that's the point of impact on a 110,000-person company. On a 100-person company, you're sort of doing any job in the organization. You're doing every job in the organization, potentially. And that might be OK at that point.

Whatever your field, volunteer to take on some new assignments, even if they are outside your comfort zone. Take the initiative on your own to learn and develop new skills, and to build contacts with people who can help you down the road. When you— when you have learned enough? Let me put it this way: I know of no Nobel Prize winner who has stopped studying. And the— in the information economy, everyone in both white-collar and blue-collar jobs will have to keep deepening their knowledge and adapting to technological change.

And congratulations, you're one video closer to who you're meant to be. Believe. To learn the 10 billionaire secrets for building wealth and success, check the video right there next to me. I think you'll love it. Continue to believe, and I'll see you there.

If it's long-term for a company, then you can say like, well, does that— is that— do you like the products or services of that company? And is it likely to— do you like the product