BILLIONAIRE BRIEFS
A Monthly Research Brief That Helps You Think Like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, & Other Self-Made Billionaires so you can learn faster and decide smarter
WHAT HAPPENS EVERY MONTH
- Curation. We study a self-made billionaire who changed the world forever.
- Extraction. We spend 100+ hours listening to, watching, and reading every shareholder letter, interview, and book by and about them.
- Extraction. We extract that person's practical wisdom into a brief you can immediately apply.
What's Inside Each Research Brief
- Unique "thinking processes" so you can understand the mental models they use to make decisions.
- Case studies & hacks you can use to apply the ideas to every area of your life and career.
- Exercises & templates that you can use daily to integrate lessons in the brief and get results in your life.
- Top clips and excerpts so you can easily go deeper on your own.
Origin Story
Since I started my first business at 16 years old in 1998, I've always been fascinated by people who seem to create more impact in their careers than thousands of other people combined.
I was that "cool" kid who used to go to Barnes & Noble on weekends and buy a bundle of biographies on people like Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Michael Dell. I wanted to know their secrets. More specifically, I wanted to know how their minds worked so that I could apply their lessons learned to my life, business, and career. And more than anything, I wanted my life to make a dent in the universe.
This curiosity hasn't left me. I still wonder...
How is it possible that Elon Musk came to the United States with nothing when he was a teenager and then went on to build four world-changing, multi-billion dollar companies in completely different industries by just his mid-forties?
Or what does self-made billionaire Ray Dalio really mean when he says...
- I’m very much stepping back. I’m much more likely to go to what I describe as a higher level. There’s the blizzard that everyone is normally in, and that’s where they’re caught with all of these things coming at them. And I prefer to go above the blizzard and just organize.
Over many years of experience and research, I developed a knack for:
- Modeling how self-made billionaires think, learn, and make decisions.
- Applying the lessons learned to my life and creating incredible results.
- Teaching those lessons to millions of others.
As a result, my businesses generated millions of dollars in revenue by the time I was 30. Our worldwide road tour helped tens of thousands of college students start their first business. My articles on the learning secrets of Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Oprah Winfrey, Thomas Edison, and Warren Buffett have been read millions of times.
How We Study Success Is Broken
I invest about 100 hours per month in deliberate learning and research studying and interviewing the top entrepreneurs, investors, researchers, and psychologists in the world. This comes to about 1,200 hours per year, which is over 25,000 hours in the last 22 years, which is when I started. I’ve read over 1,000 books about network science, decision-making, learning how to learn, habits, expert performance, communication, entrepreneurship, investing, and mental models. I’ve personally interviewed hundreds of top experts in these fields.
About 10 years ago, I started to switch more of my focus to the skill of Learning How To Learn. My logic was simple... if I'm spending so much time learning, why don't I just study it. When I started I thought that maybe I could double my learning speed. This alone would be huge. I would get double the value from my next 25,000 hours of study. I now believe I have at least 10x'd my learning speed. And, I've been teaching thousands of professionals to learn faster too through my courses and 150,000+ through our free Learning How To Learn Facebook group.
One of the big jumps in my learning abilities came from realizing that there are big holes in how we collectively study success and who we choose to learn from. Chief among them...
- Many of the books written about successful entrepreneurs and people are written by journalists who have never started businesses. As a result, there is too much of a focus on juicy parts of their story and not enough focus on specific takeaway lessons.
- Many autobiographies end up being too general. After someone has had a 50-60 year career, they often have forgotten a lot of the specific stuff that got them to where they are because it became automatic and unconscious for them.
- Many "successful" people were just lucky. Many people were in the right time and in the right place, made up reasons for how their brilliance led to the success, and then wrote books about it. This is called the narrative fallacy.
- And many more...
It is when I narrowed down my research to a specific group of self-made billionaires and got specific on primarily studying their thinking skills that my life really changed. I saw a unique pattern of thinking, copied it, and immediately got way better results than I ever had before. I now had models and systems, rather than an ad-hoc approach.
Featured Self-Made Billionaires
To narrow down the group to the right people to study, we very deliberately selected for people who are successful because of skill, not because of luck, inheritance, network, or celebrity. We identified the top handful of entrepreneurs, investors, and business people in the world, and then we studied their learning patterns.
To my surprise, the criteria actually worked way better than I expected. The group of people we chose had a very unique approach to learning and making decisions. Furthermore, copying their approach has made me smarter than anything else that I've done.
Below are the criteria we used...
- They have had a huge impact on the world. I wanted to learn from role models, people that inspired me to make a dent in the universe with my short time on this planet… Founders who started with nothing and made something that improved other people’s lives or used their earnings to improve other people’s lives.
- They have a multi-decade track record of success. With the passage of time, markets go up and down. Environments and paradigms change. By focusing on people with a long track record, I removed people who were merely in the right place at the right time at a single point in their life.
- They have spent 5+ hours a week on deliberate learning throughout their careers. In other words, they value knowledge extremely highly. Despite being so busy and having thousands of the world’s smartest people working for them, they still made time to learn.
- They are serial, self-made billionaires. not all billionaires are worth learning from, and money in itself is neither good nor bad ... but I have found that studying people who built incredible wealth from the ground up, more than once, without having inherited it, tend to be some of the most resourceful and innovative people on the planet.
- They have extensively shared their lessons with the world. I narrowed down the list to people who have written books, have been interviewed extensively, or shared their thoughts publicly in other ways.
Through this criteria, I narrowed down the list of 2,000 self-made billionaires in the world to approximately 50 people like:
- Bill Gates (founder of Microsoft, richest person in the world for decades)
- Jeff Bezos (founder of Amazon, richest man in the world)
- Elon Musk (founder of PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX)
- Oprah Winfrey (#1 talk show host in history)
- Charlie Munger (partner at Berkshire Hathaway)
- Reed Hastings (founder of Netflix)
- Ray Dalio (founder of Bridgewater Associates, largest hedge fund in the world)
- Judith Faulkner (founder of Epic Systems)
- Marc Andreessen (founder of the Netscape, world's first Internet browser)
- Steve Jobs (founder of Apple)
- Sarah Blakely (founder of Spanx)
- Jack Ma (founder of Alibaba)
- Thomas Edison (most successful inventor in US history)
- Folorunsho Alakija (woman billionaire based in Africa)
- Peter Thiel (founder of PayPal)
- Drew Houston (founder of Dropbox)
- Patrick Collison (founder of Stripe)
- Tory Burch (founder of Tory Burch)
About Me
My favorite thing to do in the world is to learn, apply what I learn to get a result, and then teach others so they get the same result.
That's why, throughout my whole career, I've read thousands of books and started education companies that have generated millions of dollars in revenue and impacted millions of people. More specifically...
- I'm recognized as a leading entrepreneur (White House, Ernst & Young Entrepreneur Of The Year, Inc. 30 under 30, Businessweek 25 under 25, Bank Of America).
- In addition to being an entrepreneur, I have written dozens of articles on learning for Forbes, HBR, Fortune, Time, Inc., World Economic Forum, and Entrepreneur.
- I've built the largest and most active learning how to learn community in the world (150,000+ people).
Elon Musk
Billionaire Brief #1
I spent over one hundred hours digging through every single interview he did, as well as every single book that mentioned him…
And I discovered 10 rare and valuable ideas he has, which have helped him to :
- Learn faster
- Lake better decisions
- Build billion-dollar businesses
I share these ideas in the Elon Musk Billionaire Brief, and a lot more.
Here’s a sneak peek of this exclusive brief…
- How Elon Musk rapidly masters multiple fields of expertise (turns out, there are two specific steps he takes whenever he learns something new)
- How Elon Musk thinks before he makes any big decisions (in fact, did you know Warren Buffett thinks just like Musk?)
- How Elon Musk developed “disaster-proof” confidence (even after the third SpaceX rocket crashed, and he was on the cusp of personal bankruptcy)
Billionaire Brief #2: Jeff Bezos
To get a deeper understanding of Jeff Bezos’ thinking beyond cliche sound bites, I read every shareholder letter that Bezos has written multiple times, every annual report from Amazon.com, and nearly every interview that Bezos has done over the last 25 years.
As I spent more time studying Bezos, I noticed that there is a deeper level to Bezos’ thinking beyond what is reported in the media.
By the end of this exclusive brief, you will have a toolkit to make dramatically better decisions across every area of your life, so that you can start thinking like Jeff Bezos. Here’s what included:
- How to outcompete everyone else, no matter how smart, rich and successful they are (a famous Stanford professor surveyed over 10,000 people, and came to the same conclusion as Bezos)
- How to find million-dollar skills — way before anyone realizes their potential (hint: it’s a simple three-word question)
- How to avoid career-and-life-destroying mistakes that even the smartest people make (Bezos found this little-known 1976 study, and now recommends it to everyone he knows)
And much more...
Give Billionaire Briefs A Try Now
When you sign up, you will get the Elon Musk research brief for free.
In LESS than an hour: You’ll be making better decisions, understanding the world better, and making better predictions and estimates about what’s going to happen.