Top 10 Rules for Success From World's Richest People

The world's richest people didn't get to where they are by accident. They developed habits, ways of thinking, and principles that helped them build some of the most successful companies in history. They never stopped learning.

I encourage people to read a lot of books. Basically, try to ingest as much information as you can.

While others stopped growing.

Don't sleepwalk through life.

They chose their path intentionally.

I love my work.

And committed themselves to work they cared about.

I was a true fanatic. All I believed in was working on software.

They learned through failure.

Failure and invention are inseparable twins.

Questioned conventional wisdom.

The thing that caused problems for me in school are the same things that helped me succeed in the world. I always question conventional wisdom.

Adapted when the world changed.

The only thing is you embrace, you change yourself.

And embraced new opportunities before everyone else saw them.

If we keep doing what we were doing before, we're going to be in serious trouble.

They valued creativity.

To me, creativity is very important.

And protected their time.

You have to prioritize your time really carefully.

Today we're breaking down the top 10 rules of success from the world's richest people. If you want to think bigger, achieve more, and learn the principles that help these billionaires build extraordinary success, this video is for you. Need motivation?

Watch a top 10 with 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: never stop learning with Elon Musk.

When you think about education and self-education, what do you recommend?

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, um, so you at least have like a rough lay of the land of the, the knowledge landscape. Like try to learn a little bit about a lot of things. 'Cause you might not know what you're really interested, how would you know what you're really interested in if you at least aren't like doing a peripheral exploration broadly of the knowledge landscape? And you talk to people from different walks of life and different industries and professions and skills and occupations. Like just try, you know, Learn as much as possible. I would encourage people to read broadly in many different subject areas and then try to find something where there's an overlap of your talents and what you're interested in. So people may be good at something, or they may have skill at a particular thing, but they don't like doing it. So you want to try to find a thing where you're— that's a good combination of of the things that you're inherently good at, but you also like doing.

Rule number 2 is don't sleepwalk through life with Warren Buffett.

If you were to do it all over again, you're in our shoes, what industry would that be in? Where would you start your own business today?

I'd do the same thing. Yeah, I mean, for one thing, I'd be a failure at anything else, probably. I'm not gonna— no, I mean, I've had I had fun when I was in my 20s, my 30s. Now I'm 86 and I'm having fun. And so I advise students, as much as possible, look for the job that you would take if you didn't need a job. I mean, don't sleepwalk through life and don't say it's all going to be great. You know, I'll do this and I'll do that. And, you know, I'm just marking time to get to be older. That's— I've told people, that's like saving up sex for your old age. I mean, it just is not a good idea. Yeah. Yeah.

What are you urging them to do?

I'll explain just what I'm talking about. Now, it, it just— yeah, you really want to be doing what you love doing, and you can't necessarily find it on your first job, right? But don't give up before you find it.

Rule number 3 is love what you do with Bill Gates.

Most people over the last 200 years or so, whoever the wealthiest person in the world was, didn't usually work that hard when they got to be 60 or so. They kind of took life easy. You seem to be working pretty hard. What motivates you to still work so hard?

Well, I love my work. The work of the foundation is super interesting. I get to meet with the scientists. I get to go out in the field. I do think your habits are sort of set in your 20s and 30s. And by my standards of the '20s, you know, I didn't believe in weekends back then, not to mention vacations. So I'm, you know, fairly lazy compared to myself in my 20s where I was a true fanatic. You know, all I believed in was working on software night and day. And for my 20s, that was perfect. I didn't have a wife or family at all, and my role was very hands-on role.

Rule number 4: Learn from trial and error with Jeff Bezos.

Failure and invention are inseparable twins. You know, it's— everybody wants to be inventive. You know, if you go talk to corporate America or any institution, actually government agencies and so on, innovation is something to be proud of. People like invention. But the problem is they don't like failure, and you cannot have invention without failure. If you, uh, to know where— if you already know it's going to work, it's not an experiment. And only through experimentation can you get real invention. The most important inventions come from trial and error with lots of failure. And, and the failure is critical, and it's also embarrassing. And so that's why people— and when we're kids, we always are doing trial and error, and we're never embarrassed. You know, if you watch a little toddler, and they will try for hours to put a square peg in a round hole, and it never works. But does it keep them from trying. And they try things like that, and that's how they learn. And, and we all have that when we're little. And then as we get older, somehow it's not as cool as you get older to fail and to fall down. It looks clumsy. And so we get in our grooves, we have a set of expertise and skills, this kind of comfort zone. And you have to constantly push yourself to say, no, I don't care about failure. In fact, if you're— I say at Amazon, we have to grow the size of our failures as the size of our company grows. We have to make bigger and bigger failures because otherwise none of our failures will be needle movers. And so I would see it as a very bad sign over the long run if Amazon wasn't making larger and larger failures. And if you do that all along the way, that is going to protect you from ever having to make that big, you know, kind of Hail Mary bet that you sometimes see companies make right before they fail and go out of existence.

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: Be creative with Mark Zuckerberg.

I think like to me creativity is very important and Having a sense of here's what you want to make in the world and having an idea of how you— I mean, it's some of the themes that we just talked about. How do you decompose that? What are the steps to do that? What are the tools that are going to be most helpful in doing that? I think is part of the job of a creator or a builder is to be a kind of master of the tools that are available to them. If you're not, then you're not going to— kind of be at the edge of your work. You know, it's a competitive world. So yeah, I kind of think, I don't know, I think all of the AI progress I think has been very fascinating because people have sort of conflated intelligence with like, an intent or like a desire to do something. And I think part of what we've seen so far from the AI systems is that you can actually separate those two things, right? Like the AI system has no impulse or desire to create something. It just, it's kind of, it sits there, it waits for, you know, you to give it directions and then it can go off and do a bunch of work. And so I think the human piece at the end is gonna be, well, what do we wanna do to each make the world better? And I think some of that will be around like a personal kind of creative manifestation of what you wanna build. But I do think some of it, and I think in our industry, we probably underplay this a bit, is just like caring about other people and taking care of people and spreading kindness. And like, so I think that that stuff is really important too. And I think AI will help with that as well.

Rule number 6, prioritize your time with Jensen Huang.

What is something that you believe today that 40-year-old Jensen would have pushed back on and said, no, I disagree?

There's plenty of time.

Hmm.

Yeah, there's plenty of time. If you prioritize yourself properly and you make sure that you, you, you don't let Outlook be the controller of your time, there's plenty of time.

Plenty of time in the day, plenty of time to achieve things.

Like, to do anything. Just don't do everything. Prioritize your life. Make sacrifices. Don't let Outlook control what you do every day. Notice I was late to our meeting. And the reason for that, by the time I looked up, I, oh my gosh, you know, Ben and Dave are waiting. You know, it's already—

We have time.

Yeah, exactly.

That's a—

Didn't stop this from being a great chat.

No, but you have to prioritize your time really carefully. And don't let outlook determine that.

Rule number 7: Question everything with Larry Ellison.

What is it about Larry Ellison that made Oracle what it is?

I think the, the thing that caused problems for me in school are the same things that helped me succeed in the world. I always question conventional wisdom. So, um, just because someone says it's so doesn't mean it's so. They have to explain why it's so. Mark Twain has a great line, "What's an expert? Just some guy from out of town." So, you know, your teachers are your experts. So people doesn't respect authority. I respect ideas and arguments and reasoning and facts. But just because someone says, you know, this is true doesn't mean it's true. You got to be able to explain it. So when I started, or, you know, so I would question teachers in school and that got me in a lot of trouble. I just didn't shut up and do what you're told. I wasn't very good at shutting up and doing what you're told. And again, that creates problems in grammar school and high school. However, in the technology world, if you can find errors in conventional wisdom, if you can, if everyone says this is true, that relational databases can never run as fast as conventional commercial databases. That was the conventional wisdom. And I studied the papers from IBM and others and studied relational calculus and relational algebra and decided that conventional wisdom was wrong. You could build a relational database management system that ran at least as fast as the current commercial systems from IBM, and we went out and built it, and it did run as fast, and, and, uh, turned out that was worth a lot of money.

Rule number 8: Adapt and overcome with Jack Ma.

When you do business, my rule is never be afraid, never worry about a competition, never worry about, um, you know, the, the, the pressures. If you worry about the pressure, you will worry about a competition. If you worry about this, don't do business. Don't be a businessman. And today, the good thing is the whole world worries. Everywhere, people worry about data, people worry about privacy, people worry about security, people worry about anything. That normally means great opportunity comes. Because you know you cannot stop this. The internet time is coming, mobile time is coming, big data is coming. You cannot stop worry with— the only thing is you embrace, you change yourself and start to do it. And is there any system? No. If you have a system, you never worry. Nobody has a system. Ask your president. He doesn't have a system. He worries. Right? If you're a human being, you worries, you doubts. But the only difference when you doubt, you fix the problem. You change yourself, you fight again tomorrow.

Rule number 9: Embrace change with Michael Dell.

You made this essentially talk to your entire company and you said, I'm just gonna read this quote. I stood up and told the company that 5 years from now, I love this so much. I stood up and told the company that 5 years from now we will have a new competitor and that new competitor is going to be in every business that we are in except they're gonna be faster, more efficient, and more capable, and they're gonna put us out of business. And the only way that we're gonna prevent that is we are going to become that company. It's got, wrenching stuff to reinvent and reimagine your business. But if you don't do it, you go out of business.

Yeah, exactly. So, you know, when ChatGPT came out in November of '22 or so, looking at this and going, wow, this is a big deal. This is, this is pretty interesting. And you started to see the rate of improvement in the LLMs. And you, you know, in technology you can, you can sort of look at the rate of improvement and the learning curve and you can sort of plot, well, where's this thing going, right? Where's it gonna be in a year or 2 years or 3 years? And you look at, okay, we're gonna have agents and multi-agent systems and we're gonna be able to reason over incredible amounts of information. Well, what does that actually mean for the way knowledge work gets done and the tools that humans are gonna have. So you think about that, you go, wow, this is a big, big deal here. We need to totally reset how we're thinking about the business and reimagine it, reframe it, and understand what the processes are gonna look like in 5 years. And so you do all that and you say, if we keep doing what we were doing before, we're gonna be in serious trouble because some new company's gonna come along and yeah, they're gonna have all these new tools. They're not gonna have this legacy of crap from the past, right? And old ways of doing things and they're just gonna do it the new way. And so, We have to change or we're gonna go outta business. You know, I also believe in this idea that if you don't have a crisis, make one, right? You know, you get people excited, motivated, and to drive the necessary change. I mean, in one sense, this is not a technology problem. The technology's there whether you use it or not. It's a question of how do you organize the team and people to actually go and get this thing done? How do you motivate them? How do you give them the right tools? How do you structure, you know, the ways people work together so that you can do it quickly? And it's very hard for people to, you know, if you've been doing something for 10 years or 20 years or 30 years the same way, and all of a sudden it's like some new thing comes along, you're like, no, I don't wanna do that. You know, people don't like to change, but you have to. And so that's what we've been doing.

And rule number 10, the last one before a very special bonus clip, is pick the right direction with Steve Ballmer.

How did you view that balance between vision and execution?

Let me say the most important thing in leadership, I say it in a simple phrase, ideas matter. If you're a great leader and you have great accountability and incredible charisma and you pick the right people and you send them the wrong direction, forget about it. I like to think of that movie Thelma and Louise, they were charismatic, brilliant people and if you followed them, you'd still be dead. When they drove off the cliff at the end. So I think the most important thing is really picking the right direction. Picking the right people, I'll put that second on the list. Strong sense of accountability, that'd be probably the third thing I would say. And the ability to see the playing field. I mean, in some sense, that's part of leadership. Not just the vision on where we're going now, but you see what's coming at you. You see what things are going to change. Because the leader can almost do that more uniquely than anybody else. Because everybody's focusing new information on the leader. So the ability to see things and have the— whether it's court vision in basketball or the kind of vision quarterbacks need to have in football— I think you have to have that to be a great leader of a company as well.

I'm not smarter than anybody else, but I can outwork you. And my key to success for you or for anybody else is make sure you're the first one in there every day and the last one to leave. Don't ever take a lunch break or go to the bathroom. You keep working. You never know when that opportunity's gonna come along. And at Salomon Brothers, the managing partner of the company, Bill Salomon, was the second person in. I was the only other one in the big trading room. So if he had needed to borrow a match, in those days people smoked cigars, And if he wanted to ask something about a newspaper or a stock, he came over, and so we became buddies. I would never have gotten to talk to the managing partner of a big company on a first-name basis if it wasn't for the fact that the two of us were there. "Billy, I'm getting coffee. Would you like some? Yeah, I can bring you that." And at the end of the day, the number-two guy, John Goodfriend, he was the last one to leave, except for me. And we'd share a cab going uptown or take the subway train going uptown together. And, you know, every opportunity I ever had, it was, I think, a lot of them was because I was there at the time. And that's the one thing you can control. You can't control your luck, but the harder you work, the luckier you get. You can't control that you're the smartest guy. There'll always be somebody smarter. But if you're there, then you absorb things, you put things together in a ways that if you didn't have all that experience, it's like skiing. I've said reading a book on skiing doesn't teach you how to ski. You gotta go and you gotta ski and get lots of miles under your skis. And incidentally, if you don't fall, you're not skiing hard enough and you're not learning anything. So if your career has ups and downs, I got fired, didn't turn out so bad, but you know, you can start a little business and maybe it doesn't work and after a while you gotta be smart enough to say, hey, I tried it. Don't let your ego get in the way. I can't keep doing this. I've got to earn a living. But, you know, a year from now, I'm going to come up with a better idea and then I'll go back and do it again.

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

Believe.

For 10 more 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. Some of the richest people on the planet didn't just get lucky. They followed rules most people ignore.

Let me tell you a secret.

And they started before they felt ready.

You just have to get started.

They stayed curious when others got comfortable.