33 Secrets of Billionaires: How to Make More Money
Are you tired of living paycheck to paycheck? Do you dream of becoming a billionaire? Well, you’re in luck because I’ve studied the top 100 billionaires, including Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Bill Gates, and I’ve found 33 secrets that you can use to make more money. The richest 1% of billionaires own almost half of the world’s wealth, but more importantly, 80% of billionaires and 70% of millionaires are self-made. So, if all these people can do it, you can do it too. In this article, I’m going to share with you the 33 secrets that billionaires use to create their wealth.
Secret #1: Gratitude
Dr. Andrew Huberman says that the practice of gratitude leads to more dopamine and serotonin in your brain, which gives you the ability to think and get things done. The more dopamine and serotonin you have, the more success you’re going to have. Studies show that a regular gratitude practice leads to 15% higher optimism and a 25% boost in sleep quality.
Secret #2: Follow Your Bliss
Joseph Campbell studied thousands of different cultures and their stories and found that the common thing that every single culture was trying to teach through their stories was that you should follow your bliss. That’s going to lead to ultimate success. When you’re doing things that you’re passionate about, your dopamine, your serotonin, and all those brain chemicals spike, which means that you can effortlessly do work.
Secret #3: Passive Income
Billionaires understand the concept of passive income, and that’s what I teach here on this YouTube channel. If you want to make a billion dollars, you can’t do it through pure effort alone. You need to create systems and machines and companies that can make you money while you sleep. You can make money by having a job, which is not passive and requires your time, or you can make your money by creating a business that will make you money on autopilot, buying property and renting it out, investments, lending your money out and getting interest, selling assets, or one of a number of different income streams. But the most important thing is you don’t want your time to be directly tied to your money; otherwise, it’s going to be very hard to become a billionaire.
Secret #4: Think in Decades and Centuries
Billionaires don’t think in weeks, months, or years; they think in decades and centuries. Bill Gates famously said that most people overestimate how much they can get done in a year and underestimate how much they can get done in a decade. Making your first million or billion dollars won’t happen overnight, but it’s exponential, and billionaires understand exponential returns.
Secret #5: Escape Velocity
Billionaires understand the idea of escape velocity. When we send a rocket to the moon, which is 200,000 miles away, 90% of the fuel used for that rocket to get there is used within the first 62 miles. This is because it takes a ton of energy just to escape Earth’s gravity. The same thing is true for any business that you start. You’re going to spend more energy making your first $1,000 from a business than you are making the next $100,000. As someone that’s done it, I’m going to tell you that it’s harder to make $100,000 than it is a million because once you’ve created a business that can make $100,000, getting to a million dollars isn’t that much harder.
Secret #6: The Pareto Principle
Billionaires use the 80/20 principle to get there, known as the Pareto principle. 20% of the work that you do leads to 80% of the results that you get. I use this principle to make my first million dollars. I analyze what was I doing that was leading to results, and then I cut out everything else that wasn’t making me money, and this led to me doubling my income every year since I quit my job.
Secret #7: Success is an Emergent Property
Billionaires know that success is an emergent property. This is a crucial concept to understand. You have a bunch of car parts scattered on the ground; they don’t really do much. But if you assemble those parts together perfectly, you create a new thing called a car that has emergent properties. It can now drive, it can go, it can move you forward, but it’s not just because of the individual parts; it’s how you put them together. The same thing is true when you’re assembling your business. Good entrepreneurs know how to find the right pieces and assemble a machine that’s going to make them money.
Secret #8: Create a Funnel
The way to create passive income is to create a funnel. This is how one of the funnels for one of my Amazon FBA businesses works. There are about 10,000 people per month searching for high caffeine tea or something related to that. Of those 10,000 people, only about 10% of people will click on my product listing. Of the people that click on my product listing, only about 20% of people will actually purchase. And since this product is around $25 per unit, that means that this product will be making $5,000 per month.
Secret #9: Speed of Implementation
When billionaires have an idea, they don’t wait. This is one of the big differences between you and me and billionaires: speed of implementation. How many people do you know that had an idea, they don’t do anything with it, and then a few years later, they see that idea turned into a multimillion-dollar business? You don’t want to be one of those people. When you get an idea, you want to start taking action. Most people get stuck in analysis paralysis, but billionaires create an MVP. MVP stands for minimal viable product. When Facebook, Google, and even Apple first came out, their initial products didn’t look that amazing. But over time, they improved their product and became the trillion-dollar businesses that they are.
Secret #10: Mentors and Mastermind Groups
Mark Zuckerberg had Steve Jobs as a mentor, Bill Gates had Warren Buffett as a mentor, and my question to you is, who do you have as a mentor? The average person tries to do everything on their own, but billionaires understand that other people have knowledge and insights and can help them to achieve success faster. In fact, entrepreneurs that have a mentor increase their revenue by 83% on average. Billionaires also use mastermind groups. Billionaires know that they can grow faster if they surround themselves with smart, successful people.
Secret #11: Review and Plan Your Success
Tony Robbins says that setting goals is the first step to turning the invisible into the visible. Billionaires spend 90% of their time planning. Jeff Bezos said that his job at Amazon was to just make a few key decisions per day. That’s it. Average people like you and me are often times the soldiers on the battlefields. Billionaires are the generals. They’re looking at the big picture and the strategy. When you’re first starting your business, you’re going to have to be the soldier. You’re going to have to do some of the work, but you also need to make sure that you spend time as the general and take that 30,000-foot view and plan your life accordingly.
Secret #12: Rest, Relax, and Recharge
Billionaires spend their money on yachts, private jets, and private islands to make sure that they can spend their time optimally resting, relaxing, and recharging. Leonardo da Vinci said, “When you go away way far from your problems, your problems seem smaller, and it’s easier to figure out solutions.” Most people spend their time working in their business, and it’s very hard to grow your business when you’re working inside. What billionaires do is they take time away from their business so they can look at their business from a different angle and grow it from the outside.
Secret #13: Lead Domino
Billionaires use the concept of the lead domino to get as much work done in their business with as little effort as possible. Billionaires find the one thing that they can do that will lead to a cascade effect of success. An example of this is when I hired my first virtual assistant. It allowed me to stop being stuck in my business and start focusing on growing my business.
Secret #14: Locus of Control
Billionaires understand that there’s some things that you can control and some things that you can’t. You should not spend any time thinking about, worrying about, or caring about the things that you can’t control. Instead, focus on the few things that you can. When something happens that’s sad, bad, or makes you mad, ask yourself, “Is there anything I can do about this?” And if you can’t, you have to let it go, surrender, and move on. Regular people focus purely on the outcomes. Did I make money? Did I have success? Billionaires know instead you should focus on the process. Are you doing the things that are eventually going to lead to success, even if it means that you lose in the short term? Are you building the habits and patterns that long-term are going to lead to you making more money?
Secret #15: Automate and Systematize
Once you figure out what processes are going to lead to your success, it’s time for you to automate and systematize. Again, billionaires don’t do all the work themselves. They use people and machines to do the work for them at a fraction of the price. This allows them to work on multiple projects and get more done. You can hire a virtual assistant or set up software and apps that will automatically do your work for you. And now with AI, it’s easier than ever to get things done.
Secret #16: The Flywheel
Billionaires spend their money on things that are going to make them more money. Jeff Bezos used the concept of the flywheel to turn Amazon into a trillion-dollar company. He realized that by selling things online, he could lower his prices, which would lead to a better customer experience. This would make it so that a lot of people would want to sell on Amazon’s website, which would lead to Amazon having a ton of products and making the customer experience even better. And this led to a virtuous cycle, meaning that the business would start growing on its own.
Secret #17: Start with Why
Most people start with what they need to do in order to make a billion dollars, but billionaires start with why. The key is most billionaires’ why isn’t that they want to have a billion to buy a private yacht. They want to change the world, and they happen to make a billion dollars along the way. For instance, Apple wanted to bring the power of computing to the masses because they realized that this was going to change the world for the better. And because they really believed in their mission, they’ve since become a trillion-dollar company, the most profitable company in the history of the world.
Secret #18: Throw Your Hat Over the Wall
This is a way for you to get leverage on yourself, for you to make sure you actually do the things you say you’re going to do. Imagine that you saw a wall that you wanted to climb, but it was scary, and you were unsure if you were going to be able to do it. And you happen to be wearing your favorite hat. If you wanted to guarantee that you’re going to climb that wall, you could take your hat, throw it over the wall, which is pretty easy to do, and then you’d have a strong motivation to actually face your fears and climb the wall.
Secret #19: Create Habits
If you want to make success happen, you need to create habits that are going to lead to success. There’s a three-step process to do this. The first step is to understand tiny habits. Let’s say that you don’t currently floss your teeth, and you want to start flossing your teeth every single night. But what’s going to happen is one night you’re going to forget to floss your teeth. You’re going to be laying in bed and say, “Oops, I forgot, but I don’t want to get up because it’s going to be too much work.” But if instead, you have a tiny habit goal of flossing just one tooth, you will easily get out of bed to do that. And while you’re up, you’ll probably end up just flossing the rest of your teeth. The same thing is true if you want to start exercising or start meditating. Don’t say that you’re going to go to the gym for two hours a day every single day. Instead, create the tiny habit of going to the gym for just 5 minutes a day, 3 days a week. Or with meditation, set the goal to meditate for 1 minute or 2 minutes, not for 40 minutes every single day.
Secret #20: Habit Stacking
Billionaires then use the idea of habit stacking. This is where you create one habit, and you use that as a trigger to tell yourself to do the next habit. We are just animals, and you need to train your brain the same way you would train a puppy to sit. You say, “Sit,” that triggers the puppy to sit. And you can use habit stacking so that when you finish one habit, it triggers your brain automatically to start the next habit that you want to include in your routine. And from there, you can stack on more and more habits like exercising, eating healthy, and working for the day.
Secret #21: Reward Yourself
But billionaires know that if you’re trying to train yourself to do a new habit, you need to give yourself a reward. When the puppy sits, you give them a treat. When kids eat their vegetables, you let them have dessert. And when I get done working for the day, I go to the beach. How are you rewarding yourself and making sure that your brain knows that it’s worth doing the work because it’s going to get a reward?
Secret #22: Accountability
Billionaires have investors, boards, and people that keep them accountable for their