Transcription
Most people think you need to work harder to get richer, but every billionaire I've studied has taught me the opposite. I discovered that success isn't about how many hours you work. It's about learning the principles and secrets from people that are miles ahead of you. So, today I want to show you the seven lessons I stole from seven billionaires that allowed me to build massive wealth and a business that runs itself. Let's get into it.
Lesson number one, you are the asset.
"I got 99 lbs, but a ain't one." Hit me. As we're becoming the artist that we looked up to. Jay-Z went from drug dealer to billionaire. And it wasn't because he started building all these companies. He started building his own brand. You know, there's this line that I love in one of his songs. It's, you know, "I'm not a businessman, I'm a businessman." You know, there was this innate understanding early on in his career that it was him, you know, his own brand, you know, his own voice, his message, his struggle, his story that was the ultimate moat, right? That's what allowed him to build Title, alcohol, clothing, you name it, and all these other billion-dollar brands. But it wasn't just their logos that caused those billion-dollar brands to blow up. It was the fact that Jay-Z, you know, the GOAT was behind it.
And so I've experienced the same sort of thing in my career. You know, early on when I built my first business, Bitmaker, all of a sudden one day we were raided by the government. Now that's a whole other long story, but to cut to the chase, I realized that I needed to go and mobilize the Canadian tech community. And so I went and sent 3,200 emails. And within 24 hours, it was blowing up on Twitter in Canada and the number one trending story across Canada and the US on Twitter. Sure enough, one week later, we got the only exemption of its kind in Canada, and we were able to operate and I was able to exit this business for a life-changing sum. And so, I've learned over my career as well, you know, from that date that it wasn't just the companies I was building that was the most impactful. It was my energy, my story, my own grit and might that people were attracted to. You follow people, then you follow brands. You know, when you think about going and trying to build a massive brand, one of the most important things you can do is build distribution. And Jay-Z understood this from day one. Your face is the funnel. Your story is your strategy. So, stop hiding behind the logo. You know, it's time to actually go and put your own brand out there. Telling, you know, your struggles, your wins, your challenges, the obstacles along the way. Being insanely generous and sharing the blueprints you've learned, the systems, the different strategies that you believe could have helped you 5 years ago in your journey. You know, don't worry about being perfect out the gate. Just get going and then get good.
"We have a chance to make these things beautiful and we have a chance to communicate something."
The next lesson is extreme, but it's essential. Raise the bar or burn the bar down. And it all started with just an idea.
"And we are calling it iPhone."
People talk about Steve Jobs' genius as if it's some polite thing. But honestly, after reading over eight books on Steve Jobs, that is a crock. Steve was violent when it came to his standards. You know, it was almost like complexity and things that, you know, were not beautiful almost created a rip in his soul, right? He just couldn't stand it. You know, Steve was relentless in his pursuit of excellence, of quality, and of simplicity. You know, he believed that, you know, when it came to even marketing these products, it came down to the values.
You know, I've had to learn this over the years myself, right? I think early on in my career, I let my standards slip, right? I thought I constantly had to compromise on things like design, on beauty, on the artistry that I wanted behind the products. At a certain point, you know, when you hire certain people, I think that it's quite likely that you revert to the mean, right? You revert to just being average and mediocre unless you keep on establishing the bar you have. Your culture is essentially what you do and what you tolerate. And so, Steve is a shining example of violently holding up a bar and not allowing anyone to go below it. And that's why Apple has become one of the most beloved brands that has ever been created.
You know, an example of this is at one point while building the iPhone, Jony Ive had come to Steve Jobs and he let Steve Jobs know that they had finally transformed the mobile phone. You know, while Blackberry at the time had a phone with about 200 buttons on it, you know, Jony had finally invented the iPhone and it had just one button. And so he went to Steve and pressed and thought that Steve would be elated. And when Steve saw it, he couldn't help but think, "Why is there one button on it? Can't we do less?" And this is just an example of going and making a product insanely simple, right? One of the core values of Apple is simplicity. And Steve was relentless in his pursuit of these values.
You know, when you look at your career, you know, what are the kind of opportunities you're surrounding yourself by? And the people that you're surrounding yourself by, are they raising your standard or causing it to drop? You know, what are the habits you're tolerating around you? Right? Do you have a high bar of standard in terms of the daily habits you do or are you reverting to just a bunch of substandard that's causing you to be a low performer? On the same side, when it comes to, you know, the relationships around you, are you surrounding yourself with amazing people that you're learning from, that you're growing from, and that cause you to have insane ambitions? Or, you know, when you go and you audit the community around you, you feel like they're just, you know, causing you to play small. Be careful of what you tolerate.
Now, the next lesson comes from Star Wars, one of the most lucrative pieces of intellectual property ever created.
"Cross trackless voids to unknown worlds."
Before releasing the first Star Wars movie, George Lucas already had the scripts, the characters, everything already designed for the next three movies, right? So, this was, I think, one of the ultimate bets on himself. The insane thing too is that when he was making the first Star Wars movie, he knew that he needed to create all these worlds, right? All these planets, these galaxies, right? But the thing was that special effects didn't even exist. So, he created his own special effects studio, right? So that he could go and execute on this insane vision he had for these insane worlds. The crazy thing is that when he finally had released the first movie, right, he already had the next two ready to go and that first one ended up hitting box office records and hitting the number one spot in history for, you know, most ticket sales ever.
When you're going and you're building your own worlds, I think the things that you can do just to kind of bring this down to ground floor is first off, think about your business as big as you can. If you need to even go and upload your company vision and strategy to ChatGPT and then get it to go and make your vision 10 times bigger. I think just a simple exercise of going and seeing how big your vision could be allows you to start expanding your mind more. Right? So that's number one. Number two is to start going and thinking about the different pieces of your vision. For me, I know it's, you know, insanely amazing systems, unparalleled support for founders, having epic retreats worldwide, going and having the greatest team ever, getting our content onto streaming platforms, having an amazing publishing business. Right? These are the different worlds that we're building. And when I'm clear on those worlds, I'm able to attract top talent that wants to come on board to help make this all come true.
This one is hard to put into practice, but it makes billionaires. Conviction beats consensus.
"It was a success. It is a recognized success."
In the 1980s, Dior wasn't Dior. You know, it was this wounded animal limping around Paris. But there was one man that saw the potential in it. Bernard Arnault. You know, Arnault had this vision that, you know, Dior could be a part of this stable of luxury brands. And he thought that over the next 50 years, right? This, you know, luxury brand portfolio could be something incredibly special. But the thing was, everyone thought he was crazy. You know, Dior was a failing brand and no one could understand why Bernard even wanted this brand. And the same thing happened when I was building Founder OS. People told me that personal branding was just some fad, right? That systems aren't even sexy. But I knew that the future of founders would be that, you know, every entrepreneur should have their own media company around them. That distribution was the ultimate moat. That your story is the ultimate strategy. And that more and more founders would build founder-led brands. The reality is is that in most businesses' early days, what you're working on, it's not that obvious, right? Because you're often times piecing together different insights, different sort of systems, and random secrets that you know that the rest of the world doesn't, which is why you're probably building something different. You know, be okay with working on something that people don't understand in the early days. Just make sure you have that compelling 50-year vision.
5 4 3 2 1
I learned the next lesson from Elon Musk. Delete before you optimize.
"Like, why do you want to live? What's the point? What inspires you? What do you love about the future? If the future does not include being out there among the stars, it's incredibly depressing if that's not the future that we're going to have."
While most founders ask, "How do I improve this?" Elon asks, "Why the hell does this exist?" Elon has an algorithm that he uses across all of his businesses. And the first part of that algorithm is delete. Not automate, not delegate, not add more things. It's delete. Because the truth is, you shouldn't automate or delegate something that shouldn't even exist in the first place. Now, you can imagine, right, as you know, you're building a rocket, you're trying to send this thing up into orbit. If you just keep on adding more and more stuff, well then you're gonna have to have more and more jet fuel to get all that up into space. And so the first rule is how can we reduce this thing to its simplest form, like down to first principles? And it's that obsession around deletion.
And so for me inside of Founder OS these days, I have one core focus. Everyone across my entire team knows their one critical function. And this allows us to move with intention, with speed, and with velocity, right? Doing the right things and aiming at the right direction. And so you need to go and ask yourself right before you even start automating or hiring anyone, what can you delete? Now, from there, what I like to do is implement the A.E. system. I've helped thousands of founders with this, and it's genuinely transformed their life and business. Go and look at your calendar, your to-do list over the last month, and write down every single thing that you're working on. What you can do next inside of this Google Sheet, which I've also gone and linked in the description below so that you can go and implement this today, is you're then going to go and mark the tasks that you can automate, eliminate, and delegate. Now, aim to delete as much as you can, and then automate and then delegate.
The invention that sparked a revolution. Lesson number six, beginner energy builds empires.
"Well, if you're doing things exactly the way everyone else is, there's not going to be a really meaningful potential breakthrough."
Sara Blakely built Spanx without investors, without industry knowledge, really without knowing what she was doing. And I think this mindset came back from her childhood. She talks about being at the dinner table. And one of the key things her father would ask her and her sister every single night at the kitchen table was, "What did you fail at today?" It was this question being repeated to them every night at dinner that started to increase her comfort level with just pushing the envelope and 80% of the time just falling flat on her face. So sure enough when it came to building Spanx, you know, she didn't know what she was doing. Prior to that job, she had been selling fax machines as a door-to-door saleswoman. Now, was she qualified to build some clothing business, to build some billion-dollar empire? I mean, many would say no. But she knew that her naivete and her beginner mindset were actually her advantage.
I know in my first business, Bitmaker, I didn't have that much technology experience. I had no experience building a boot camp, no experience running companies, building teams, and the list goes on. But to be honest, it was that naivete, that beginner vibe that allowed me to build that business. I just started to think about what is the boot camp around tech that I would want to go through. I would want legendary instructors. I'd want it to be super easy for me to learn. I'd want to be surrounded by amazing people. Um, I'd want it to be a really amazing brand that I can trust and have amazing mentors around me that would allow me to learn and then eventually get my dream job at an amazing tech company. And so that's exactly what I went and built. I think that experience is overrated. And if you're a beginner at something, don't use that as an excuse to not just get after it. You know, beginner mindset mixed with obsession, with taste, with systems, and the right team that allow you to blast through all these so-called experts.
The last lesson came from Walt Disney. Draw the dream and then build the machine.
"But there's a lot of satisfaction in developing ideas into realities."
Here's what most people miss. You know, Disneyland didn't start as some sketch file or start as some, you know, pitch deck. It started as a drawing, a simple drawing on pen and paper. And as I've gone and dug through the files, right, Disney's been someone that I've been super obsessed with for the last 20 years of my life. You know, my mom is an avid Disney fan and I've probably been to Disney like 12 times too many, okay? And so it was natural for me to then want to study like what the hell was it that has allowed Disney to build such a cult following over the last, you know, 80 years, right? And it showed Disney not at just some theme park, but you could see the grand vision for what he was creating.
You know, when I talk to entrepreneurs inside of Founder OS and over my career over the last 16 years building businesses, I think that around 97% of founders don't take the time to actually draw up what they're looking to build. When I first built Founder OS, right, I knew I wanted to build this entire founder ecosystem like a founder theme park, right? This idea that, you know, founders needed an aspirational brand that stood for something greater. You know, my belief is that most founders get into business in the first place for freedom. Freedom to control the four W's in life. Control where you work, control when you work, control what you work on, and control who you work with. Right? Right. And so what we've tried to create is this, you know, magical founder journey. I've always thought to myself, you know, what is it that I wish I had when I was first getting started building businesses when I was 20? Go and take time for a second to be an artist, right? I think too many founders go and lose the artistry of building and they pay a price. And it's really valuable to take a step back for a second with just a pen and paper, right? Put on some nice music, get your nice Americano, whatever you like to drink, and start to just go and sketch up the vision for what you're trying to build over the next 20 years. And from there, start to share it with people. You know, I'll go and take my drawings, and I'll go and share them on your LinkedIn, onto X, onto Instagram. I think this is a great part of kind of manifesting this imagination, this vision that you have and going and mobilizing people around it.
I've synthesized all of the secrets and lessons from billionaires inside of my billionaire decision matrix, which you can go and get right now via the link in the description. If you want to go and learn how I've grown my audience to over 14 million people around my companies and 3.2 million people around my personal brand, you can go and check out this next video and I'll see you over there. Be sure to like and subscribe and let's win.