Interview with a $5.2 Billion Net Worth Billionaire
“other people’s advice is often from their own unique experience or worse, just an opinion based on limited understandings of your own situation“
I recently interviewed a $5.2 Billion+ net worth billionaire who created his own software company. I sent him my interview questions and he told me how my process was bad, and these questions were not helpful. His point was that your journey is unique, your opportunity set, strengths, roadblocks, etc. He doesn’t believe there is are magic bullet answers, there is only your unique path. I thought this was so helpful, I wanted to share it as one of the interview responses, his “non-response” to my questions as just as valuable as a genuine response by someone who loved the questions.
As we interview more billionaires each month I am finding trends, commonalities, patterns and I’m acting on those in my business. I am finding though the combination of the interviews with also reading all 240 books ever written by billionaires is what is adding up to big progress. The depth gotten from reading a book written by a billionaire (not on one) + these interviews leads to great clarity around certain truths of scaling up to that level.
Please find his thoughts below on the topic, and I hope you find this as valuable as I did.
These 3 questions you are asking 100 billionaires clearly seek some kind of revelation or a “quick fix”, “secret sauce” or “special sprinkle” to create success or avoid failure. There is no such thing. It is a life of continuous learning, study, striving outside of one’s comfort zone and making (survivable) mistakes, learning from those, frequent self-reflection, passion, and drive to get to something meaningful.
I don’t really give advice or mentorship, I actually think it is hurtful noting that I have never had a mentor (plenty have offered) or asked for this type of advice, and I never really received advice or mentorship of any real value, even though some people along the way felt strongly compelled to offer it and/or offered it. Much of that advice was, in hindsight, wrong, and I had to deliberately choose to ignore. If I had not ignored it, My success would not have happened.
Frankly, other people’s advice is often from their own unique experience or worse, just an opinion based on limited understandings of your own situation. It is often wrong or at least much less valuable when applied to your own unique circumstance.