Once upon a time, I had a 14-hour continuous conversation with a multi-millionaire in his early 40s trending toward billionaire status.
I was shocked by how normal he was. I didn’t expect someone so powerful to be that kind, attentive, and earnestly interested. But he was. What I learned from our time together changed how I think about business to this day.
That’s what I want to share with you in this piece.
What I Learned
Our conversation took place three months before he received a $100,000,000 for ten percent of his company.
If you’re struggling with the math, that’s a billion dollar valuation, also known in the biz as a unicorn. And here he was fully engaged in our discussion for a full 14 hours. No phone and no distractions. Just two guys engaged in dialogue.
I let the questions fly and he had answers for them all.
Somewhere toward the end of the conversation, I asked how he had learned so much about business and money.
He said he read 60 books per year minimum. That was his only secret. He knew a lot more at the end of each year than he did the previous year.
About that time it dawned on me like someone flipped a switch in my mind.
The only difference between the two of us, or him and anyone else for that matter, is how he thinks. It became clear rapidly. Results are created by behavior. Behavior is downstream from thoughts. And where do thoughts come from? Thoughts are downstream from the information you consume.
Therefore, if you put better information in, you get better thoughts out.
How to Apply It
Entrepreneurs are professional thinkers.
The value we bring the world comes through our ability to think through problems, design solutions, and implement the solutions to solve the problems. For our purposes, we will say thinking comes in two forms: self-directed thinking and guided thinking.
Popular practices for self-directed thinking include writing, reviewing affirmations, and meditation.
In stark contrast, for most of human history the only form of guided thinking available was other people in the immediate vicinity.
Literally other human beings had to be in the specific geographical location you were who had knowledge you didn’t. Then the printing press allowed for mass market production of books, which led to steeply increased literacy rates across all classes of society. Reading was the only guided thinking practice available from the 1470s when Gutenberg did his thing until the internet gained popular use around the year 2000.
Since then, incredible resources have emerged in all shapes and sizes in the audio and video mediums.
YouTube is the largest learning platform in the world. There are podcasts that cover pretty much every topic under the sun. Reading is no longer the only guided-thinking practice.
But it still might be the best.
It all depends on how you learn.
My only concern is that you get to learning regardless of what medium you choose. What matters is that you’re learning, not necessarily how you’re learning. My billionaire founder friend doesn’t believe in consuming information other than books and other written resources like shareholder’s letters. He never watches any TV. He never uses any social media.
He just reads and reads and reads.
Conclusion
There is something comforting in knowing the only difference between the results I’m currently getting and the results that the best in the world are getting is in how I think.
And all I have to do to improve my thinking ability is learn from others who already possess the knowledge I want by purchasing their knowledge in the form of courses, workshops, masterminds, books, and 100 other mediums for learning. What message could be more hopeful than that? Thanks for reading.
Happy learning.