Do you ever wonder what’s it like to be a billionaire, to have unlimited funds at your disposal and never look at a price tag again?
As it turns out, and the more I learn about this seemingly select group of individuals, being rich is more than about “having” but more to do with a mindset.
The affluence we see is just the byproduct of how rich people think and very little to do with what they own.
Now, I have this theory that if we start thinking in a certain way, we also start making different decisions and change our identities to become more aligned with our new mindset.
What if we started thinking like Warren Buffett or Elon Musk? What kind of decisions will we be making, and how much will our destinies change?
After investigating people like Austin Russell, the youngest self-made billionaire, or Elon Musk who was bankrupt for 25 years before becoming the world’s richest person today, and every wealthy self-made person I could find, I have discovered seven things that all these billionaires have in common:
1. The rich do not use the main entrance. They like to use“the third door”.
Of all the things I will mention in this blog, the “third door” is my favorite.
First of all, I did not come up with this one. Read Alex Banayan’s book to understand the full concept.
Life, business, success…it’s just like a nightclub. There are always three ways to get in: the main entrance with the long line, the VIP access and “the third door”.
Say, for example, there was a job posting for a lucrative role in a company that pays Php150,000 a month. Naturally, all job seekers will create the best resume and hand in their applications through the job portal.
The problem with this type of thinking is that you, a job seeker, will need to stand out from hundreds of applications, and not to mention, get the attention of the algorithm.
This is where the rich think differently.
For wealthy, self-made, successful individuals, the main entrance with the long queue is not the only way to get in. There is always a “third door”.
Believe it or not, many of the world’s wealthiest people today were not born rich.
Steven Spielberg, an award-winning director in Hollywood, was a nobody in the early 70s until he befriended an employee at Universal Studios who he ran into while touring the Universal lot.
He was given a pass to enter Universal Studios repeatedly, and he went inside the lot everyday, carried his father’s briefcase, greeted the guards by name and pretended he worked there.
Long story short, he eventually got a chance to show his work to the vice president of productions at Universal TV, who then offered Spielberg a seven-year contract on the spot.
To use the “third door” is to use unconventional methods to get in.
These are the things they don’t teach you in school.
Instead of applying for jobs at the job portal, what if you took the time to find out who the hiring manager of the company was? What if you decided to follow this person on social media or Linkedin and started liking and commenting on his posts?
What if, instead of handing a resume, you send a business proposal via email? What are the chances that your name could stand out in a stack of resumes?
What if you befriended the messenger of the building of the company you plan to propose a business project to? What kind of information do you think you might find that could be your “third door”?
2 .The rich think about money in non-linear terms. A poor person thinks of money in a linear way.
Without sounding too profound, the notion of the majority is that the money they earn is linked to the hours of service they can render in a day.
This creates the belief that making money is a linear process directly connected to time. The average person believes the only way to earn more money is to work more hours.
A wealthy person has a very different view about money and embraces the philosophy that real wealth comes from ideas, ideas that solve problems and can be monetized.
Since there is no limit to ideas, there is no limit to how much money they can earn.
With this mindset , two and two no longer equal four and anything is possible.
When you hear people like Elon Musk talking, they don’t talk about money. Instead, they talk about ideas, dreams, going to Mars and how they’re building things.
The average person spends the majority of his time worrying about the future because he connects time with his ability to earn.
3. The middle class believe money is about status, while the wealthy believe money is about freedom.
One of the most popular beliefs about money is that getting rich is about being able to buy expensive things.
But for a wealthy person, money is about having more choices.
To put it simply, the rich mostly acquire money for the purpose of attaining personal freedom.
The middle class is controlled by employers, government, and other entities with superior resources that dictate what they can and can’t do.
It’s tough to make a moral stand for freedom when you’re worried about making your next mortgage payment.
4. The middle class believes a formal education will make you rich, while successful wealthy people believe “specific knowledge” is what creates fortunes.
The masses are convinced that master’s degrees and doctorates are the way to wealth.
While the rich respect the power of formal education, they usually don’t think it has anything to do with building a financial empire.
Formal education teaches people how to think and perform in the linear world of commerce, to become employed with a specific salary every month.
But the rich did not become wealthy by trading time for money.
5. The rich are in love with the game of getting richer.
And this is not because they need more money, but because they need to answer the question, “What will I do with all this money?”
When you hear Elon Musk in interviews, it may sound like he has nothing else on his mind but working and getting richer.
But the truth is, the wealthy and successful are in love with the “game” and the strategies and with growing their business.
The goal of accumulating more wealth is not necessarily what drives them, but having a worthwhile goal or a purpose is what gets them excited to wake up everyday.
A person who has billions does not think about shopping.
He thinks about the businesses he can create and the impact he will make in society.
6. The rich focus on earning while the poor focus on saving.
We have always been taught to save and that this is the smart way to ensure we guard limited resources.
But the rich do not share these fears because many of them are self-made.
If they lose what they have now, they know they can always get it back.
What sets rich people apart from the poor is that they like to use their money to earn more money.
And contrary to what you might think, the real wealthy people in the world today did not accumulate their fortune by reducing the rest of society into the lowest common denominator.
This is simply not the mindset they operate from.
Instead, the rich become richer by elevating other people, by bringing value to thousands through either a service, product or an idea, by expanding their network.
7. The poor believe that you will get rich by working hard.
The rich believe in using their “unfair advantage” to create wealth.
If hard work was the secret to financial success, every construction worker and fast food server would be rich.
But we know this is not the case.
The Collison brothers became billionaires in their early 20’s after creating Stripe, a payments processing company.
Patrick Collison invented his own computer programming language when he was 16 and he left school a year early to attend MIT.
His brother John was top of his class, and was accepted into Harvard even without taking the exams.
Of course, work and effort led to the success of their business, but it is fair to say, the Collison brothers’ intelligence was their “unfair advantage”.
Poor people see hard work as a badge of honor. The rich see success as a more important badge of honor.
In conclusion, what I really want to say is that the rich are no longer an exclusive club. Its membership today includes pop stars, fashion designers and models, chefs, actors, footballers, and perhaps, you and me?
While we all have financial goals of our own, this simple list is meant to give you a bit of insight as to how billionaires think and operate.
You might already be on your way to joining the club sooner than you think.
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