Some of the most successful and richest people you know today have great stories about how they made it, what they did right and wrong and the sacrifices they made to become rich. Just so you know, most of the World’s Billionaires (Forbes list) are all entrepreneurs. Getting started on your entrepreneurial journey may just be the best way to riches. There is no reason why you shouldn’t start your own business. Take the risk. You may fail, but at least you tried. Take a chance on yourself.
With an upvote of 4.5k, here is Evan Asano’s (Startup founder, bootstrapper) answer to the question: What is the most effective yet efficient way to get rich (Quora).
1. Start a company. Name a billionaire who didn’t start a company. Yes, there are a few. But they ended up running the company they joined (Sheryl Sandberg, Steve Ballmer, Eric Schmidt). Starting a company may seem completely out of reach and unfathomable, but when you’ve done all the preceding steps, it will be the most logical next one. Successful companies don’t start out with 50 employees and a $10M in revenue, they start out small, tiny and scrappy. They start out in their dorm rooms or their parents garages or spare bedrooms.
The founders beg, borrow and steal to get what they need. Michael Dell started his company by hacking together computers in his dorm room. Walmart started as a single variety store in Newport, Arkansas. Ever hear of Newport, Arkansas? Yeah, me neither. Richard Branson started out selling records by mail, one at a time. Don’t look at the most successful people and companies and see where they ended up or you’ll be overwhelmed. Look where they started and you’ll see how it’s achievable.
2. Learn relentlessly. Read books and books on success, people skills and anything that might have some inkling of strand of wisdom about success and wealth. Especially read the biographies of successful people. In his autobiography, Mark Cuban talks about how we would buy and read any book on business that he thought might help. The $15 he’d spend was a fraction of the wisdom he picked up was worth. Drew Houston of Dropbox talks about how he would spend every weekend reading books on business, sales, marketing, all day long. Every weekend.
3. Become a people person. This is a learnable skill or skills. No one is born a great salesperson. There may be people (like athletics) with better inborn abilities (outgoing, etc). But the best learn, they read, they study, and they practice, relentlessly. A lot of times, those with the best given talent, don’t end up being the top in the field, because at the start, it comes easy to them. The ones that have to work at, work relentlessly and don’t ever get complacent. And then one morning, they wake up and the effortlessness at sales or marketing or leadership that they never thought they would achieve, they now embody.
4. Work hard. As an employer, one of the things that stands out the most with employee is a good work ethic. It’s worth it’s weight in gold. Drop your expectations and ego, and put your nose to the grind and good things will happen.
5. Take risks. Not dumb, fickle risks and not gambles. But smart, calculated risks where you have a good chance at succeeding. You won’t always succeed, but you will learn a huge amount in the process and you will garner an enormous amount of respect from people in doing so.
6. Create multiple income streams. Start writing, consulting, tutoring, fixing things, just get busy with a second source of revenue. This will get you hungry for more and you’ll double your learning. You’ll see that a job tutoring on the side, can lead to starting your own tutoring company on the side. Your marketing consulting job can lead to writing Amazon books on marketing.
Quotes from the billionaires
1. You have to have success and failure. Both make you better, both help you learn and both will help you fail less often. But you have to have both.—Darwin Deason
2. You have got to experience setbacks. A few years after I’d started by own hedge fund, I had a terrible year. I was down 23% in 1994. I had to work hard, persevere, move ahead. By the next year I was back up 30%.–Leon Cooperman
3. Rule No.1: Never lose money. Rule No.2: Never forget rule No.1.–Warren Buffett
4. I don’t look to jump over seven-foot bars: I look around for one-foot bars that I can step over.– Warren Buffett
5. When you live for others’ opinions, you are dead. I don’t want to live thinking about how I’ll be remembered. -Carlos Slim Helu
6. We’re going where no one has gone before. There’s no model to follow, nothing to copy. That is what makes this so exciting.– Richard Branson
7. Vision is perhaps our greatest strength… it has kept us alive to the power and continuity of thought through the centuries, it makes us peer into the future and lends shape to the unknown.–Li Ka-Shing
8. If you want to succeed you should strike out on new paths, rather than travel the worn paths of accepted success.-John D Rockefeller
9. Whether you’ve found your calling, or if you’re still searching, passion should be the fire that drives your life’s work.–Michael Dell
1 comment
Love this list, especially the quote from Rockefeller! I would suggest you use something like Tweetable Link (http://tweetable.link) to make the quotes easily tweetable though, that would be helpful :D
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