15 Billionaire Beliefs That Made Them Billionaires

Sure. Okay. Luck, location, and timing play an enormous part in the outcome. But we've been deconstructing billionaires for over a decade now, and the amount of overlap in the way their brain works is crazy. Here are 15 ways billionaires think differently.

We're going to start this list off with a little hint of the lulu. I deserve it because I know I'm better than everyone else at this. Now, they might not say this out loud, but across thousands of self-made billionaires and center millionaires, there's this superiority complex underneath it all. All of them knew they were destined for it. They had it in them. And it's just a matter of time until reality catches up to their potential.

People often look at them as delusional in their early days. They laugh, they mock, they judge, and then watch in eyes. They bend reality to their own wishes. When looking at billionaires, they all start off just wanting to be rich and making a name for themselves. But as things progress, they realize they might just have a shot at making it big. So they take it. What else are they going to do with their lives? And who knows if they'll get this opportunity again.

This delusional belief that they can achieve anything is their fuel. The more they're able to overcome the obstacles the world throws at them, the more it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. I want to sit at the adults' table. All of them are hyper-competitive and want to be taken seriously. When you're poor, the adult stable is the one where people have money. You get some money and then you realize, well, the adult table is the one with businesses valued at over 100 million.

You build a $100 million business, and the adult table is the exclusive one for billionaires who own mega yachts. There's always another adult table that they want to sit at. This keeps them motivated. And in the game, the mental breakthrough is being able to see the table and the people who sit at it. Not only do they serve as proof that it is possible, but it allows you to monitor the people who sit at the table and realize they're not that much smarter than you are, but the scale at which they play the game is so you will level up.

I will try again and again because I only need to get it right once. This will break your brain. Not one person became a billionaire through diversification. They all focused on one thing exclusively until that thing was worth over $1,000,000,000. Diversification and not putting all your eggs in one basket is the exact opposite of what every billionaire has done. If you get your thing to work, you put as much gas on that fire as possible. You don't care or have time to look at anything else. Since they carry the internal belief that they are meant to be successful, and they know it's possible, they will pursue it relentlessly.

The great thing about getting rich is you only need to get it right once. It doesn't matter if you're first. Six businesses failed if the seventh creates generational wealth. They're still doubting me, so I'll take it personally. Not only do they want to sit at the adults' table, but they look at this as an ongoing war. Everyone who dares to question their greatness is labeled as an enemy and needs to be destroyed. It starts with the high school colleagues and teachers, then their ex-partners, maybe their dad, and then other entrepreneurs, journalists, and CEOs that scoffed at them at some point.

They're petty in their behaviors, but this keeps them engaged. If they don't have a clear enemy, they'll invent one just to feel that they are cornered. The ultra-successful operate with a sense of urgency and danger. They're paranoid and have a list of people they have to prove wrong. They're basically in a constant measuring contest. That's why the house needs more bathrooms than the other guy who has a yacht that's like five feet longer.

Somebody has the answer. I just need to get them to help me. They know that every problem has a solution, and they know they can pay someone who has dealt with the problem to either fix it for them or advise them on how. And this right here is the primary difference between millionaires and billionaires. You can get to $1,000,000 on your own, but to get to multiple billions, you need to crowdsource expertise, especially if you're looking to get there fast.

Every big CEO has multiple advisors and business coaches around them. This is how these tech companies are able to have these exponential growth phases. They pay these people ridiculous amounts of money for their expertise. They advise the founders on exactly what they need to do to see as much progress as possible in the shortest period of time. The same way a fitness trainer can get you in movie shape in less than six months, or a tennis coach can elevate your game almost immediately. Billionaires become billionaires because they have these money coaches all working their brains to make them as successful as possible.

This is why they're winning. They have professional brains working on the problems they're facing. But look, okay, if you don't have $50,000 per month to pay an executive coach, well, what do you do? Well, you go to alux.com/app and you install it on your phone. You get yourself a yearly subscription and have access to the same level of executive coaches as they do for a fraction of the cost. How do we know? Well, because we're paying them their fee on your behalf. No bullshit, just measurable value. Start a free trial today and just see what it does for your life.

Priority number one is the value of the pie. Here's something poor people get wrong. Billionaires don't earn $1 billion. They own something that is worth over $1,000,000,000. Most of them become billionaires when they sell that something or a portion of that something to someone else. That's what an exit to what an IPO is. Listing your business on the stock exchange with the stock exchange. Instead of selling to one buyer, you sell tiny parts to a lot of people. And millionaires focus on owning a big percentage of a small pie. That's why you see founders retaining 100% of the business. Billionaires are okay with owning a smaller percentage of a much larger pie.

Trade stock for resources that allow you to skyrocket. As of 2024, Jeff Bezos owns only 9.03% of Amazon. That's enough to make him the richest or second richest man in the world, depending on how Ellen or Bernard are doing. And look, okay, before you get your pitchforks and torches out and start yelling, "Eat the rich!" left and right. Here's something that most people never realize. Amazon is worth $1.81 trillion. Jeff owns 9% of it, which translates to roughly $160 billion. Please keep in mind he does have other holdings outside of Amazon. The remaining 91% of the company is owned by other people and companies through Amazon. Jeff Bezos has created $1.65 trillion worth of value for others.

My job is to play the orchestra, not the instruments. This is what narrow vision people get wrong in life. If done right, the complete work is more valuable than the sum of all of the individual parts that went into putting it together. This is why people hated Steve Jobs so much. He wasn't a programmer. He wasn't a hardware engineer or a designer. But the experience people have with the product is his brainchild. This is why Kanye is indeed a genius. At least he's got some fleeting moments of it. What's that saying about a fine line between madness and genius, anyway?

Think of it like this. I don't need to be the best executioner. I need to hire the best executioner to bring my idea to reality. Having hard skills is a massive advantage because it allows you to speak the language of the builder. You can more accurately describe what you need them to materialize. Elon isn't the smartest engineer at SpaceX. Zuck isn't the best programmer at Facebook. What billionaires are able to do much better than everyone else is to leverage their own insights into guiding the product to match their vision. It's the material lies the version that's going to change the world in the end. The lines of code. Just build it.

I will use other people's money to make myself and them rich. Spend enough time around incredibly rich people, and you quickly realize it's all about OPM. OPM means other people's money. They raise money, they borrow funds, they sell stock, they partner up, whatever it takes to make themselves exponentially richer using other people's money. It's kind of hard to comprehend when you're broke. That trust and the expertise to pull together a deal is actually more valuable than money. Everyone has ideas, but they lack both trust and expertise. So you're not getting others to invest in it.

Hedge fund managers are some of the richest people in the world, and all they do is invest other people's money and charge a fee out of the profit. Millionaires usually use other people's money to buy something small, like a rental property. You put together a down payment, you borrow the rest from the bank, buy an apartment, and your renters pay your mortgage. At a higher level, you use your Tesla stock as collateral. Bring in some outside investors, borrow the rest of the money as company debt in order to buy Twitter. Yeah, Elon used a little of his own money to take over the tech company for $44 billion. Even more so, the bulk of that debt is actually on Twitter's balance sheet and not on Elon's. He used other people's money to buy himself Twitter, and if there's enough interest, we'll do a detailed video on how leveraged buyouts are actually done.

How can I stack the deck in my favor and increase my luck surface area? If you don't know this already, there are four distinct types of luck in life. First, you've got your blind luck. The most common type of luck that people reference where you are born, who your parents are, winning the lottery. Totally random, and you've got no control over it. Second, there is luck from motion. You work on something so much that you attract luck. You keep going to interviews or auditions. You say yes to every opportunity, and eventually, you build momentum, and your luck starts turning around.

The third kind is awareness luck. You see things other people don't see because you're of specific insight. For example, you find an old watch at a flea market selling for $5. But because you're into vintage watches, you know a collector would pay $100,000 for it. Because of your understanding of the space, you're able to arbitrage value that others are missing. And the fourth kind is luck from uniqueness. Luck finds you because you're the only one able to deliver the desired outcome. Arnold Schwarzenegger played the Terminator because there wasn't anyone who looked and talked like him at that time. It was the perfect fit for the movie.

Personal brands, distinctive voices, unique positioning all build up to luck. Clicking that subscribe button makes it more likely that you'll consume smart content like this one that will trigger better outcomes in your future. What billionaires do is they try to stack their deck in their favor with a specific objective to increase their surface area. If young people think it's cool to work at Google, then Google attracts the best young brains, and thus the likelihood of one of them having a moonshot idea increases big time.

My success boils down to my ability to think clearly. Decision making is the most valuable tool in your arsenal. Decision making allows you to use the resources available to you to get superior outcomes. Millionaires are really good at using resources. Billionaires are masters at making decisions about those resources. One decision can dramatically alter your life for both good or bad. What school you go to can influence who your friends are, what your habits are, who you hang out with, and who you end up marrying.

Stack good decisions, and your life compounds exponentially and good decisions. HELOCs come from one's ability to think clearly. Clarity of thought is the result of deeply understanding the effects of your actions. The clearer you think, the more you're able to see into the future. As with everything in life, the more you do something, the better you get at it. It builds muscle memory and that gut feeling that you've been hearing about.

The snowball builds up, and every percentage point above 50 being right translates to extreme wealth on longer time horizons. Meanwhile, the average person can't even decide what they want to eat today. The better you are at making the right calls, the fewer calls you'll need to make. Warren Buffett makes 4 to 5 decisions per decade, and those calls are so good, he can play bridge for the rest of his time instead of being all over the place. Focus your thinking, and when you know you're right, go all in.

How can I solve this now so I never have to deal with this again? Done and done so forever. Not the moment. The goal is to solve every single problem for eternity and never have to be bothered by it again with every problem. And look on the world as an infinite generator of problems. So it's pretty easy to get caught up in the whirlwind and never have enough time to actually make progress.

Some of you are trying to play catch-up right now. How many people do you know who've been complaining about the same damn thing for the past five years and have never done anything about it? Far too many, right? The difference in approach here is that you need your brainpower focused on what actually moves that needle forward. Now, although this example coming up is kind of wack, it does get the point across. Okay, so you buy 100 gray T-shirts and ten pairs of jeans. So you remove that decision of what you'll wear from every day. We still give this example because, well, you know, most billionaires actually do this.

The problem of not knowing what to wear is either solved by wearing the same thing every day or by externalizing it, having someone else go and buy all of your suits, all the shirts, and organize your outfits for the month ahead of time. They have calendars in place to specifically remove the need to freestyle or wing your way through the day. This provides clarity of thinking to deal with problems. If you solve them right, you free up plenty of mental capacity for the future.

I only lose if I give up or become incapacitated. They genuinely believe that this is just a matter of time until success is achieved. So the only way to ever lose the game is by quitting. Some might get there sooner, or some might get there later. But if you're in the game for long enough, you will eventually win. In Silicon Valley, there's a common saying: businesses fail, but founders succeed. Everything you go through builds you up. So every additional attempt has a higher chance of being a critical hit.

If there's one secret to take away from this piece, it is this one. If you just keep going, make small adjustments to your approach, you will eventually get it. Whatever it is, we believe in you, and so does the law of averages. What would 100 acts look like, and how can I do it in six months? What makes them successful is their ability to get exponentially more done in the same window of time as everyone else.

If something is going to take ten years to accomplish, what would need to happen to get there in six months? We know you think this is an unrealized stock mental exercise, but this is exactly what happens in think tanks. In order to 100 x your business, you don't necessarily need 100 x the number of customers. Not to mention that most businesses can't handle more people than they currently do. But how many customers could your business handle? What needs to change in the way your business is built that would allow for it? Then you build it that way.

You'll often hear billionaires talk about multiples when talking about growth. If we can cut the production time in half, that's a 2x improvement in productivity. Double the order value per customer, and that's another 2x improvement. If we drop the acquisition cost in half and double our advertising spend, that's another 4x improvement. That's 16x right there. If we do that, we only need to open up six more locations to 100x the business. And this is the part where the VCs ask, "How much money would you need to get there in 6 to 12 months?" Head off. Go.

Thinking in multiples allows businesses to scale because they stack up. They set up specific targets, as you'll learn right now. If I can only get to this point, then I'm done. Billionaires think in milestones. Everyone says if they get to X number, they'll be done and throw in the towel. But it's not the number that's blinding, but the thrill of the game mixed in with the fear of everything you've built going away. Everyone starts off just trying to no longer be poor. Then you try to be rich. Then you go for being even richer. And then your motivation changes to another far-fetched objective.

Once you see yourself being able to hit everything you set your mind to, this concept of being done starts fading away. If the universe gave you everything you asked for, it just begs the question: what can you ask for next? When the family asks, you tell them the plan of being done. But actually, never mind. Okay, I'll dedicate the rest of my life to this, so I might as well make it an incredible journey.

There are three things that are inescapable in life, my friend. They are pain, uncertainty, and constant work. It takes a while for you to mature and have these three sink in to who you are. But once you realize this is true, you start figuring out ways to manage them so their impact isn't as large as it could be. You learn to deal with pain. You learn to deal with the unfairness or uncertainty of life. And then there's work. If constant work will be a part of your life, no matter what, you might as well work on something you care about.

So you change the way you work. You change why you work. You better pick the people that you work with and the impact it has. In order for you to have the kind of impact that you seek, it requires time and resources. So you can't quit along the way. Some people want to move humanity to Mars through reusable rockets. Others want to cure death. Some want to build a technological God through A.I. Once you find your thing, whatever that thing is, everything else falls into place.

So what about you, Aluxer? What is your thing? How are you different? And what are you going after? Let us know in the comments. And since you haven't gone away yet and are still watching, you've earned yourself a bonus, my friend. Does your present lead to your desired future? Okay. All right. Since it's just us here now, let's have a heart-to-heart.

Take this opportunity to look objectively at your life at this pace. If you don't get lucky, because luck isn't a real strategy, will you ever get to the life that you want? Is there a door, a tool, a part of your life that at least has the potential to lead there? If yes, how much of your time are you dedicating to it? How much of your income are you putting into it? How much of your brainpower?

You see, Aluxer, the main reason why other people get there is because they've made it their mission to put everything they have into getting there. Not a day goes by without moving just a little bit closer. So go through this list again and read every one of these beliefs. Hyper-successful people carry on with them and begin making them your own. The more you act like them, the more you think like them. The more you move like them, the faster you'll get to where they are.

If you believe it's time to start moving just a little bit faster than you've done up until now, write the word "move" in the comments. Let's see if we can light a fire under some of y'all's asses. Let's go, my friend.