The Common Traits of Billionaires

The Rich

As per the Oxfam, just 8 people own the same wealth as 50% of the world’s population. Even though a lot of people love to hate these billionaires, not many of us try to study these successful people to learn from them and then implement. The first person who studied and interviewed the rich to write a book on the secret recipe was Nepoleon Hill in his famous book “Think and Grow Rich”. I happened to read some of these famous books including Rich Dad Poor Dad, Cash Flow Quadrant, Master key to Riches, Money Master The Game etc. During the last 15 years of my journey as an entrepreneur, I had the opportunity to meet and network with some of the most successful entrepreneurs in different industries. It is very interesting to know, how common is their thought process, in spite of their different upbringings and values. Lets see some of the commonalities of these successful entrepreneurs.

Visionary

While most people live in this world accepting the life around them as the way it is and sometimes complain about certain things, entrepreneurs are the ones who challenge and strive to improve things around them. They see an opportunity in every problem around them, while others don’t. In short, entrepreneurs are visionaries. When Walt Disney envisioned an amusement park for families to come together and enjoy, where his cartoon characters would come to life, he didn’t have many believers in his dream. Now, Disney amusement parks attract families from around the world. In 1894 when John Harvey Kellogg started selling toasted flake of corn as breakfast cereal, he was the only person who believed in the idea, not even his family members believed him. Now, Kellogg is a household name and synonymous to breakfast cereal all around the world. The billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk’s vision of “Anywhere on earth under one hour” or “Human being becoming multi-planet species” may seem far-fetched now for a lot of us, just like Motor car was when Henry Ford dreamed of it. Its just a matter of time before the world sees space tourism.

Dominant Thought

Successful entrepreneurs think about their business all the time. And often people call them day dreamers. As a child, Elon Musk (Founder of Tesla, SpaceX) was taken to a doctor by his mother, thinking him as deaf. Elon would often get into a state of trance — visualizing the future, may it be space travel or battery operated cars. Sam Walton, the founder of Walmart, the world’s largest company by revenue, and the richest man in America when he died, was often seen kneeling on the shop floor measuring the distance between the isles or even criticized for driving a pickup truck in spite of his wealth. He was a man who was always deeply engrossed in thoughts about his business. In the book, “Master Key to Riches”, Nepoleon Hill has beautifully narrated this trait of the rich.

Big belief and massive action

Belief and action go hand in hand, as you won’t take action unless you have the belief and some argue that belief comes from your success which comes from taking action. These successful entrepreneurs, think and visualize their success so much that, they see themselves already successful mentally, before it happens physically. Because they see themselves already successful, they have huge belief and hence they take massive action.

It is often seen that, these successful people have so strong sense of positivism and energy around them, that there is no room for doubt and disbelief.

Early Starter

Even though there are exception to this assumption like Colonel Sanders, founder of KFC or Noyce, co-founder of Intel, most of the self-made billionaires started their business venture very early in their lives. Bill Gates started coding at 13 and founded Microsoft when he was 20 year old. Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google when they were 25. Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook from his dorm at the age of 20. The list goes on. Starting early does give these billionaires an edge over their older counterparts in terms of lesser responsibilities, ability to take risk and openness of mind for new ideas.

Taking Risk

Though a lot of us may argue that these entrepreneurs were born talented or had some circumstantial advantages as Malcolm Gladwell outlined in his book Outliers, I would say they were ready to take action on their ideas while others were only thinking and planning. Jeff Bezos could see the wave of internet coming, while working full-time at New York. So, he quickly got started with the idea of an online book store, turning down his lucrative career as an investment banker. Had he not taken that risk that time, he would not have seen himself as the richest man in the world and Amazon as a Trillion Dollar company. When Elon Musk, out of his $180M proceeds from PayPal, invested $100M in Spacex, $70M in Tesla and $10M in Solar City and then, borrowed money for his rent, his critics quoted him as a man of unsound mind. Its clear that entrepreneurs think very differently than others and are always willing to take risk while their risk averse non-entrepreneur counterparts are happy with an assured income of 9 till 5 job.

Reading

It is also seen that these Billionaire entrepreneurs have hunger to learn. Bill Gates, in his interview in 2016 to New York Times, mentioned about him reading 50 books a year. He also reviews these books on his blog Gates Notes. Warren Buffett spends 80 percent of his day reading and he also suggests others to read 500 pages a week. Jeff Bezos credits books as the source of his leadership style. He also has a list of suggested books for Amazon employees called “Jeff’s Reading List”. Elon Musk, credits a list books that shaped his thinking and imagination. The book- “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” which he read as a child had a deep impact on his mind which later inspired him to found a multi-billion dollar company called SpaceX.

Mentor ship

Bill Campbell, who was the former CEO of Apple, was very well known to be “The coach of Sillicon Valley”, who mentored some of the big names including Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, and Eric Schmidt. Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook had Steve Jobs as his mentor. Even Bill Gates credits Warren Buffet as his mentor from who he learnt a lot of life lessons. So, these billionaires, don’t shy away to pick the brain and thought process of other successful entrepreneurs.

So, what do the above traits mean to someone reading this article ? All the above traits can be practiced by anyone to be on track to financial riches.