This is a story of a highly improbable, if not impossible, project... a project that has been driving me for the last 4 years of my life and changed it beyond recognition.
Back in the 90ies, after graduating from an American university, I came back to Europe from the States. It was early internet times, several years before the dot-com bubble and even before Google existed.
In Europe, the Internet was a playground for scientists and enthusiasts. No e-commerce existed at that time. But I could see first online shops in the States going online (no, I hadn't noticed Amazon yet) and for me it was clear where the future of commerce would be.
So in my youthful ardor, I pioneered e-commerce in Germany. Generally, I built the first fully functional online shop for sports goods in the German speaking market. And indeed, it became a multi million dollar company Raddiscount.de. It's still in operation.
HUNGER FOR SUCCESS
But with time, I realized I wasn't really the perfect entrepreneur. I founded the company out of the dorm and I didn't have any business knowledge nor experience. I am a mathematician. I was just a tech guy. And I realized there were much better entrepreneurs than myself, people who started later, became a greater success and built better companies.
If you are an entrepreneur, you want to be a good one. You don't want to be frustrated with what you do. You want to have success, right?
I had the same problem. I had a lot of stress, a lot of frustration in my company. Objectively speaking, having built a multi-million dollar company, I was reasonably successful. But I didn't feel like it was the success I was thinking about. It's something about competition, about being better in business than others, outperforming, outcompeting others.
I realized I needed to learn more about entrepreneurship, about how to become a successful entrepreneur. So I started to read all the books about entrepreneurship, about success and motivation and went to all these crazy American courses.
SEMINAL MOMENT
Do you know T. Harv Eker? Eker's Book made it clear to me that I misunderstood a very important thing about business. Before reading it, I thought, I just needed to find the best business model, the best business idea and realize it. And if I only do the right thing, it will become a great success. But the book made me realize the importance of how you think as an entrepreneur. It's all about your attitude, about how you approach problems, how you deal with people and so on, and so on. There are a lot of things that are deep in your mind that are decisive for your entrepreneurial success. And this is why Eker's conference Millionaire Mind Intensive was so interesting for me. And it was one of the conferences I attended.
But then I went to this event and at this event people were enthusiastically high-fiving each other. This was one of the exercises. And they were saying: "You've got a millionaire mind!" It was a high energy exercise. Everybody was jumping, shouting and so on. I don't have anything against that American excitement. I used to study in the States so I understand that culture. But what I realized was that, having built a multi-million dollar company, I was a millionaire myself already. So learning from millionaires wasn't really the thing. Because in business nowadays, if you are a millionaire, you're just an average entrepreneur. So I would rather have a billionaire mind in order to be better than I was already, right?
I started high-fiving other people and saying "You've got a billionaire mind", in that course. And they started high-fiving back, and saying "you've got a billionaire mind". So everybody wanted to have a millionaire mind and I was addressed with "billionaire mind".
MOMENTOUS REALIZATION
And I came up with this idea:
In business, it is like any other discipline. It's like in sports: If you want to be really good in soccer, you don't go to the local hero and learn from a third league player. You would like to learn from Ronaldo, or from Messi, or from the world champion, right? Because the amount of work, of time and effort you invest will be the same, but the result will be completely different. And this is the same in business. You should always learn from the very best in business.
But who are the best people in business? There is only one objective measure of business success. It is net worth. It is the value you have created throughout your business career. So the most successful entrepreneurs are simultaneously the wealthiest people in the world. Namely: billionaires.
There are a lot of books about millionaires. And everybody is telling you: "think like a millionaire". There are a lot of books about millionaire thinking. But this is actually entrepreneurial average. These books actually promote entrepreneurial mediocrity!
So I had this dream to learn how billionaires think.
FIRST STEPS
How would you learn how billionaires think? How can you extract their knowledge, their mentality, their thinking?
I started with reading books. Biographies are good. You certainly read biographies of successful people. But in biographies you never know if the character became successful because of some personality trait, because of some principle or despite of it, right? You never know.
The only way you can know it is when you compare many people. And then you can draw the common denominator. But the thing is there are no books with original research comparing billionaires. Because until now nobody managed to get to so many billionaires and to get the first hand knowledge.
There is a very small percentage of the books comparing billionaires. But all of them are third party material. Meaning, somebody read several books and wrote a compilation together but he never met these people, he doesn't know these people and this book actually shows how he thinks and not how they think.
IMPOSSIBLE IDEA
So I realized I needed to write such a book myself, to interview 20 billionaires and get their mindsets together, and this way I learn how billionaires really think.
But as you can imagine it's quite a challenge. Only one in 5 million people in the world is a billionaire. The chance of meeting a billionaire on a street is comparable to winning the main pot in the national lottery. And now, for a comparison book you would need at least 20 billionaires.
Do you know anybody who won the main pot in the national lottery 20 times?
It's mathematically impossible, right?
But I somehow wanted to do that. And by the way, to interview 20 billionaires, to get their knowledge of course I needed to go internationally, at least.
GREAT PRECURSOR
Actually, 100 years ago, there was a similar project. Do you know the book "Think And Grow Rich" by Napoleon Hill?
In the beginning of 20th century, Napoleon Hill met the wealthiest person on the planet at that time. It was Andrew Carnegie who unified the steel industry in the States. And this Andrew Carnegie introduced Napoleon HIll, a young journalist, to all his friends; to Henry Ford, to J.P. Morgan I think, and several other very wealthy people in the States at that time. He gave him the mission to talk to them and extract from them the philosophy of their success.
With these introductions, Napoleon Hill spent 20 years getting to know these people, interviewing them. And then he wrote the book "Think And Grow Rich". And this book was a big example for me. But the thing is he did it just in the states. And I wanted to do it internationally, globally.
HOW TO START?
So, how would you approach it? Have you ever approached a billionaire or even tried to approach a billionaire? How to start with that?
There are legions of gatekeepers on several levels in the organizations. They have organizations of hundreds of thousands of people, and very private lives, of course. They are usually not that approachable.
For months, I was talking to everybody about my big idea, about this impossible dream, trying to find a way to make it true. To no avail.
But then suddenly, when I was about to give up on my great idea, there was a glimmer of hope.
A friend of mine said, he knew somebody who'd used to work for a billionaire before, in some other company.
This person was an executive on some level. And this friend of mine gave me his phone number in order for me to call him.
PARALYZED BY FEAR
And at that time I was just terrified. I had this idea. I new what I wanted to do. But I was just terrified by the magnitude of the challenge. I was just procrastinating, putting off everything for later, unable to take any action. I was gathering my courage in order to take the phone and call this guy.
Do you know Jack Canfield?
Jack Canfield is a great American motivator. He wrote the book "Success Principles". I read the book at that time and one of the success principles was: "If you want to achieve something you like, you use promise cards."
And promise card is generally a small card. You write your promise, the thing you commit yourself to achieve, on the card, and you sign it with your name and you make 20 copies, laminate it and distribute it among your friends.
And then the friends will keep you accountable for that. So you will never escape from the promise you made. Right?
It puts kind of pressure on you, some social pressure.
And on my promise card I had written more or less: "I will write and publish a bestseller by this and that date" and I signed it. I made it and at the time I was procrastinating with the call and I distributed it among my friends.
TURNING POINT
Among others I gave it to this friend of mine who'd given me the phone number of this employee. And this friend said to me: "What are you giving me here? What is it? It's a piece of shit! Get serious! Do something! Why are you giving it to me? I have given to you the phone number of a guy who could bring you to a billionaire and you are giving me this piece of shit instead of calling him?"
He castigated, humiliated me. I felt ashamed and forced more or less to take a phone and to call the guy.
And then I called this first guy and it went pretty smoothly. And I got this first interview. And then another interview and then another interview.
Fast Forward. Meanwhile, I know 28 billionaires around the world. I have traveled several times around the planet. I meet with the most successful entrepreneurs in the world. I am friends with the wealthiest people on the planet. I get invited to dinners, live on their yachts, get Christmas cards and New Year's wishes from billionaires. It just changed my life completely.
VALUABLE TAKEAWAY
But what I wanted to tell you is just this one thing: Take action!
Because you can have the greatest dreams and ideas. If you don't do anything about this, it will never happen.
I didn't have a plan. I didn't know how to do the rest, how to find, approach other billionaires or how to publish the book. But you just need to take this leap of fate.
Take this first step and then find out the next steps on the way.
Because what I found out by this experience is that the distance between ignorance and knowledge is much less than the distance between knowledge and action.
So it's now enough to know, you need to act, you just need to do it!
That's it for the beginning!
What do you think of that story?
Rafael
I talk a lot about what I have learned from the self-made billionaires on my YouTube channel:
http://youtube.com/TheBillionDollarSecret
Inform yourself about my book "The Billion Dollar Secret", based on my findings from the interviews, here:
http://TheBillionDollarSecret.com
As a mathematician who studied cryptology I have been excited about cryptocurrencies since 2013 and started investing in 2015, when Bitcoin was $200. Read about my thoughts on the crypto world here:
https://medium.com/@BillionairePal
I am also passionate about testing the limits of the possible. I describe my experiences with that on my blog:
http://nolimits.co
Follow me on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/BillionairePal