The Billion Dollar Secret

Rafael Badziag interviewed 21 billionaires for his book “The Billion Dollar Secret” and found that six shared habits helped lead to their success. Badziag spent five years conducting face-to-face interviews with 21 self-made billionaire entrepreneurs around the world (defined as those with a net worth of at least $1 billion) and researching their lives and companies. He found that they share the same six habits, which created the foundation for their businesses and financial success.

BusinessInsider published six habits that the author claims are shared by all the billionaires he interviewed.

Here they are:

1. Billionaires wake up early .

2. Billionaires keep healthy.

3. Billionaires read. 

4. Billionaires contemplate. 

5. Billionaires develop routines and rituals. 

6. Billionaires practice discipline.

Source :

https://www.businessinsider.my/billionaire-study-six-habits-success-building-wealth-2019-6/

http://thebilliondollarsecret.com/

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To be Kind or Clever?

Below is from the transcript of Jeff Bezos’ commencement address to Princeton’s Class of 2010:

As a kid, I spent my summers with my grandparents on their ranch in Texas. I helped fix windmills, vaccinate cattle, and do other chores. We also watched soap operas every afternoon, especially “Days of our Lives.” My grandparents belonged to a Caravan Club, a group of Airstream trailer owners who travel together around the U.S. and Canada. Every few summers, we’d join the caravan. We’d hitch up the Airstream trailer to my grandfather’s car and off we’d go in a line with 300 other Airstream adventurers. I loved and worshipped my grandparents and I really looked forward to these trips. On one particular trip, I was about 10 years old. I was rolling around in the big bench seat in the back of the car. My grandfather was driving and my grandmother had the passenger seat. She smoked throughout these trips, and I hated the smell.

At that age, I’d take any excuse to make estimates and do minor arithmetic. I’d calculate our gas mileage or figure out useless statistics on things like grocery spending. I’d been hearing an ad campaign about smoking. I can’t remember the details, but basically the ad said “every puff of a cigarette takes some number of minutes off of your life.” I think it might have been two minutes per puff. At any rate, I decided to do the math for my grandmother. I estimated the number of cigarettes per days, estimated the number of puffs per cigarette and so on. When I was satisfied that I’d come up with a reasonable number, I poked my head into the front of the car, tapped my grandmother on the shoulder and proudly proclaimed, “At two minutes per puff, you’ve taken nine years off your life!”

I have a vivid memory of what happened next and it was not what I expected. I expected to be applauded for my cleverness and arithmetic skills. “Jeff, you’re so smart. You had to have made some tricky estimates, figure out the number of minutes in a year and do some division.” That’s not what happened. Instead, my grandmother burst into tears. I sat in the backseat and did not know what to do. While my grandmother sat crying, my grandfather, who had been driving in silence, pulled over onto the shoulder of the highway. He got out of the car and came around and opened my door and waited for me to follow. Was I in trouble? My grandfather was a highly intelligent, quiet man. He had never said a harsh word to me, and maybe this was to be the first time? Or maybe he would ask that I get back in the car and apologize to my grandmother. I had no experience in this realm with my grandparents and no way to gauge what the consequences might be. We stopped beside the trailer. My grandfather looked at me and after a bit of silence, he gently and calmly said, “Jeff, one day you’ll understand that it’s harder to be kind than clever.”

What I want to talk to you about today is the difference between gifts and choices. Cleverness is a gift, kindness is a choice. Gifts are easy — they’re given after all. Choices can be hard. You can seduce yourself with your gifts if you’re not careful, and if you do, it’ll probably be to the detriment of your choices.

This is a group with many gifts. I’m sure one of your gifts is the gift of a smart and capable brain. I’m confident that’s the case because admission is competitive and if there weren’t some signs that you’re clever, the dean of admission wouldn’t have let you in.

Tomorrow, in a very real sense, your life, the life you author from scratch on your own, begins. How will you use your gifts? What choices will you make? Will you be clever at the expense of others, or will you be kind?.

In the end, we are our choices. Build yourself a great story. 

Thank you and good luck!

 ‘It’s harder to be kind than clever’- Jeff Bezos

Source: Transcript of Jeff Bezos’ commencement address to Princeton’s Class of 2010

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New law of productivity

Deep Work is about the science of productivity, the best way to get more meaningful work done is by working deeply – working in a state of high concentration without distractions on a single task.

The new law of productivity is:

High-Quality Work Produced = (Time Spent) x (Intensity of Focus)

“Deep Work: Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.”

“Shallow Work: Noncognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted. These efforts tend to not create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate.”

Deep Work Is Rare, Yet Highly Valuable

“The Deep Work Hypothesis: The ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare at exactly the same time it is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy. As a consequence, the few who cultivate this skill, and then make it the core of their working life, will thrive.”

 For starters, shallow work is easier. In addition, shallow work seems to be encouraged by most businesses. Think: constant connectivity, expectations of fast response times, or open plan offices. Employees, choosing the path of least resistance, will simply adopt to this type of shallow-work-inducing environment by, well, working in a shallow manner.

According to Cal Newport author of the book “Deep Work”, most workers today succumb to something he calls increasingly visible busyness or busyness as proxy for productivity. In the absence of clear indicators of what it means to be valuable and productive at work, many knowledge workers turn toward an industrial indicator of productivity: doing lots of stuff in a visible manner.

Cal Newport sums it up: “Deep work is hard and shallow work is easier and in the absence of clear goals for your job, the visible busyness that surrounds shallow work becomes self-preserving.”

The Rules of Deep Work.....

Rule #1: Work Deeply

Rule #2: Embrace Boredom

Rule #3: Quit Social Media

Rule #4: Drain the Shallows

As the world advances, three kinds of people will survive and prosper:

I-Owners of capital or people with access to it

II-Those who can work with intelligent machines and technology

III-Superstars in their field of work

Deep Work focuses on the third type. To become one, you need to develop two skills: the ability to quickly master hard things and the ability to produce at an elite level, in terms of both quality and speed. Deep Work is the concept that interlinks these two skills.

Source:”Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World” by Cal Newport

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The Power of a Positive No

Saying no is an important skill to develop at any stage of your career because it retains the most important asset in life: your time. As the investor Pedro Sorrentino put it, “If you don’t guard your time, people will steal it from you".

You need to say no to whatever isn't leading you toward your goals. You need to say no to distractions.The great art is to learn to integrate the two – to marry Yes and No. That is the secret to standing up for yourself and what you need without destroying valuable agreements and precious relationships.

Saying No positively means first of all saying Yes to yourself and your own deepest needs and values. When one executive in a family business had to say No to his father and boss’s demand that he take care of the business over the Christmas holidays for the Nth year in a row, he drew on a deeper underlying Yes to his family and his self-respect. He told his father: “Dad, my family needs me and I intend to spend the Christmas holidays with them.”.The executive, in a respectful tone, set a clear limit: “I will not be working this Christmas.” He did not end with a No, however, but with a Yes, a positive proposal. “Here’s my proposal for how we can get the necessary work done in the office while I spend the time I need with my family.”

A Positive No in short is a Yes No Yes. The first Yes expresses your needs and values, the No asserts your power, and the second Yes furthers your relationship. The key is respect – for yourself and for the other person.

No is the key to defining your strategic focus and every important Yes therefore may require a thousand Nos.

Source:”The Power of a Positive No: How to Say No and Still Get to Yes ” by William Ury

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