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CONTENTS INTRODUCTION BY JAMES ALTUCHER 3 THINK LIKE A BILLIONAIRE 11 TONY ROBBINS 12 MARCUS LEMONIS 68 PETER THIEL 107 TED LEONSIS 155 MARK CUBAN 184 OTHER BOOKS BY JAMES ALTUCHER 213 CONNECT WITH JAMES 213 Introduction By James Altucher Money is not everything. Everyone knows this. The fastest way I’ve ever lost track of my goals and passions was when I focused on the money. But we do know that money is nice to have. It helps us support our families. It helps us feel relief in many situations. But before you can make money you have to help others make money. I’ve been very fortunate with my podcast. I’ve had the opportunity to talk to many entrepreneurs, artists, billionaires, athletes, and other people from all corners of success. In this particular book I’ve put together the interviews I’ve had with five different billionaires. They all came from wildly different backgrounds. They’ve all had very varied careers. But they also had many things in common. - They all had crazy ideas. The important thing to remember is that an idea always seems totally insane right up until the day before it works. Then it becomes clear it was a good idea. - They all leveraged small successes into greater successes. It’s very rare that a person just ends up with a billion dollars in his lap. Mark Cuban is a great example of this. He went from selling a bar, to selling a software company, to running a hedge fund, to starting broadcast.com, to have Yahoo shares (his first billion) to owning the Dallas Mavericks (many billions). Peter Thiel is another example. He went from being a top lawyer. To running a small hedge fund. To starting PayPal (he made $55 million there when they finally sold to EBay for $1.5 billion), to funding Facebook (he made about a billion there) to co-founding Palantir (many billions). Learning to leverage small successes into bigger ones is the key to abundance. - They all recognize the importance of being healthy in other areas of their lives. As an extreme, you can’t have great ideas if you are sick in bed all the time. - They are all believers in “Ready. Fire. Aim.” Or, as Richard Branson puts it, “Screw it. Let’s do it.” - They believe in big visions. Ted Leonsis believed everyone would have a computer in their home that would be online. Peter Thiel believed that everyone should pay for things online. And so on. - They are all believes in modeling the success of people who have come before them. Tony Robbins described what I call his “Tony Robbins” method. Without every teaching sharpshooting before he was hired to teach a group of Marines to be successful sharpshooters. I’ll let him tell the story in the later chapter of what happened next. By the way, is Tony Robbins a billionaire? Who knows? I do know that he is at least worth several hundred million so I’m not going to try and guess how many hundreds of millions. I also know that he is a mentor and guide to many billionaires. So he’s included in this book because he has many valuable lessons to teach. - Failure versus Hard problems. I’m sure many of these people have had failures in their lives. But one thing I noticed consistent among them and others that I’ve spoken to is that they don’t view failures as stopping points, they view them as opportunities to solve hard problems. When you get good at solving hard problems, you get better and better at dealing with the obstacles that arise in EVERY business opportunity. These guys are the masters and the ones that I want to model my own business efforts after. I’m including an extra chapter in this introduction. I haven’t interviewed Richard Branson but I’ve gone over everything he’s written and pulled out my favorite quotes. The rest of this introduction is ten things I’ve learned from Richard Branson. And then I turn it over to the billionaires. 10 THINGS I LEARN FROM RICHARD BRANSON Richard Branson is the perfect example of "Ready. Fire. Aim." He starts something. He does it. Then he looks to see if he hit the target. If not, he starts something new. I love the story of how he started Virgin Airlines. He was already successful from Virgin Music. Note that now he has nothing to do with Virgin Music. I don't even know if Virgin Music still exists. All that is left is Virgin Air. A plane had gotten cancelled. Everyone was upset. But Branson wasn't upset. He found a plane that would take him. But he didn't have the money. One good thing to start with always is to imagine the obstacles gone. Imagine, "if I wasn't worried about money, would I still make this trip." I call this IDEA SUBTRACTION. Subtract the perceived obstacles to an idea and (BAM!) you find that many more ideas are born from that. First, he arranged to rent the private plane, even though he still had the obstacle ("no money"). Then he put up a sign: "$29 for a plane to Puerto Rico." And everyone signed up. Suddenly he had the money for the plane. That was his proof-of-concept for an airline. Now that is his main business and it's worth billions. Here are ten quotes from him that I think are valuable. A) Richard Branson: "Listen more than you talk. Nobody learned anything by hearing themselves speak." B) Richard Branson: "Start making suggestions for how to improve your workplace. Don’t be a shrinking violet, quietly getting your job done adequately. Be bold, and the sky is the limit." Note he's not suggesting start a company. You can always create inside ANY surrounding and you will be infinitely rewarded for that. The first employee at Google is now a multi-billionaire even though nobody knows his name (Craig Silverstein). He was an employee and he created and blossomed. C) Richard Branson: "Age isn't as important so long as you are surrounded by people you love, doing things you passionately believe in." I truly believe this. We all have things we love to do. And it's the people around us who love us that help us unlock these dreams. It's ONLY when you find the people you love, you can create and flourish. Henry Ford was 45 when he started his third car company and created the assembly line. He did this once he eliminated all the people who tried to control him at prior companies. Colonel Sanders was 65 when he started "Kentucky Fried Chicken". Laura Ingalls Wilder was 65 when she wrote her first book. The book that would turn into the TV series: “Little House on the Prairie". This was after she had been totally wiped out in the Great Depression and left with nothing but she started to surround herself with people who encouraged her and pushed her to pursue writing to make ends meet. D) Richard Branson: "What I personally know would make up a dot so minuscule it couldn’t be seen. What humanity has collectively learned so far would make up a tiny mark within the circle. Everything we all have to learn in the future would take up the rest of the space. It is a big universe, and we are all learning more about it every day. If you aren’t listening, you are missing out." The other day someone asked me if I believed in "God". There's no answer. Always have reverence for the infinite things we will never know. Our brains are too small. This next quote I slightly want to change: E) Richard Branson: "To be a real entrepreneur you always have to be looking forward. The moment you rest on your laurels is the moment your competition overtakes you." I think 'entrepreneur' can be changed to 'human'. We all have to survive and succeed first as humans. And the job description changes every day. Every day there is room to finish this sculpture that began the moment our mothers released us into the world. F) Richard Branson: "There is no such thing as a boring person: everyone has stories and insights worth sharing. While on the road, we let our phones or laptops take up our attention. By doing that, we might miss out on the chance to learn and absorb ideas and inspiration from an unexpected source: our fellow travelers." Every day has stories hidden inside of them, like a treasure hunt. When you find those stories, you get rewarded. Not by money, but by...I don't know. Something. You feel it when it happens. G) Richard Branson: "It can be easy to find reasons not to do something. However you might be surprised by how much help is at hand if you put yourself out there and commit to a project. It doesn’t have to be a case of struggling along by yourself." We live in a world of connection. The barriers we've erected by storytelling (religion, nationalism, corporatism) are breaking down. You can crowd-source a revolution with a single tweet now. There are a million ways to ask for help and a million people who want to help you. But it's hard to ask. There's the old fears of rejection. Fears of people viewing asking as weakness. Fears of infringing on someone by asking.