Habits of Billionaires

              Habits of Billionaires

 

They’re open to learning from others’ mistakes

Billionaires know it is important to learn from history. We should learn more from other people’s mistakes, not only from their success stories.

Aside from learning from our personal failures, we also learn from others’ failures. We use those learnings to know how to deal with those mistakes and make us do a better implementation.

“We should keep in mind that there is a big chance that our ideas and solutions were already used and executed in the past,” explains Chris Von Wilpert, Founder of Content Mavericks.

“That’s why we have to dig deeper about the idea (research history). Was the idea or solution already used by people before? Did that person fail? What can you learn from their failure?”

They wake up very early—and follow a strict routine

“As we all know, having a ‘billionaire mindset’ is not an easy task, otherwise, nobody would be struggling financially in life right now. However, anyone can try and harness it, as long as you are willing to commit to following a strict morning routine,” says Neil Grant, Director at Dalvey.

Most billionaires commit to waking up early (5 AM) every single day to do some workout, meditation, read and learn new stuff. From there, they plan out everything and stick to it no matter what—year in and year out, every single day.

They recognize that criticism is part of the journey

Billionaires are used to being in challenging situations. They keep in mind that criticisms and mistakes are a normal part of the journey. They understand that there will always be people who will criticize their work, ideas, and decisions. They accept that there are people who will say no to them. They challenge themselves and push forward.

“Billionaires have high tolerance to pain,” says David Stellini, Co-founder atAllFront. “They take bets and risks no matter how many times they fail.  When they fail, they get hurt but eventually pick themselves up and experiment more.”

They’re comfortable with taking risks

Taking risks and venturing the chances of failure is not always a bad thing—we opt to learn to continue every day, expanding our wings to explore what we can do to turn our defeats into possible victories.

“Harnessing that mindset is not as easy as it sounds, but staying within the right path makes it more comfortable. Being genuine in your actions and true to yourself is also highly advisable,” shares Marcus Clarke, Founder of Searchant. “It takes months or years to become a billionaire, if you’re lucky, but it’s vital to keep our feet on the ground and our eyes set on our aspirations.”

They only seek mentors whose success they’d like to emulate

“Always seek mentors who will guide you on your goals,” says  Michael Hamelburger, CEO of The Bottom Line Group. “Is it a business guru you’ve been following all these years? Is it your organization’s leader who exemplifies leadership? Is it a startup entrepreneur who launched a book on achieving success? Reach out to them, live their ideals, replicate their strategy… but learn to listen to your own voice.”

They know how to manage their mood and mindset

Billionaires manage their mood. Most don’t get to see this, but it’s happening nonstop. They wake up and make sure it’s on the right foot. Something bad happens during the day? They immediately take time to reset or shift gears. An obstacle or frustration crops up? They don’t “push through it”, they adjust their plans and solve it so it never frustrates them again. “They do whatever they have to to elevate their mood,” says  ason ‘J-Ryze’ Fonceca, CEO of Ryze. “They do it so often it’d make your head spin.”

They really, truly, believe in themselves

“Most people think they believe. Most people have convinced themselves they believe. But the truth is they’re not even close to the level of belief billionaires have,” shares Fonceca. They believe they have the heart to pull off their dreams. They believe they have a winning product/service/investment. They believe others are hungry for what they offer. They believe in the economy, abundance, and prosperity. They believe their wealth is growing regardless of ups and downs. They believe they attract the right people and get discouraged practically never. “We need to admit we don’t have the belief-level of a billionaire and get to work on ours,” he adds.

They obsess over what they love

According to Fonceca, obsession is just a word for ‘extreme focus.’ Michael Jordan had extreme focus on basketball. Elon Musk had extreme focus on navigating space. If you want to be a billionaire you’ll need to have extreme focus (obsession) as well.

“How can you tell if you’re ‘obsessing’ properly on what you love? If you are, everyone knows about it. Everyone knows you’re obsessed with something. They describe you as hyper-passionate about it, obsessed with it. If everyone isn’t telling you this, you aren’t obsessed enough.”

They are their own cheerleaders

If you could hear the thoughts that run through a billionaire’s mind, what you’d notice is a near-constant stream of self-praise and self-love. A billionaire has to solve a new, unfamiliar problem?

Their self-talk goes something like: Well, I’ve solved many unfamiliar problems in the past. I’m confident I can solve this one too. The internet is full of solutions, and it’s only a few clicks away. I’m sure I’ll figure out the right words to Google. And hey, if that doesn’t work, I’ll at least discover some experts I can reach out to. And I’ll pour my heart into it. I’ll write 25, 50, 100 experts to make sure at least one of them answers me, I’ve got a handle on this, it’s as good as solved…

“Most people do not have self-talk like this when they encounter a roadblock, but billionaires do,” notes Fonceca.

Digital Marketing Success Quotes

“Content is not king, but a president elected by the votes of those whom it aims to rule.” –Raheel Farooq, Teacher, Writer and Voiceover Artist

This quote has such power. Many digital marketers think of content as a king, ruling everything else. Success of content is rather something that the community and audience decide.

“90% trust peers on social networks (even strangers); only 15–18% trust brands.” –Danny Brown, Award-Winning Marketer and Author

Google buys UK Artificial Intelligence Start-up Deep Mind for £400M

A former child chess prodigy and computer game designer from London has sold his company to Google for around £400m in one of the Internet giant’s largest European acquisitions.
Demis Hassabis, a computer scientist, is understood to have struck the deal with Google for his secretive start-up business Deep Mind Technologies, which specialises in artificial intelligence (AI) for computers.
Hassabis, 37, has built the company by bringing together neuroscientists and computer engineers in an effort to use technology and medical research to help machines to mimic the brain’s ability to improve performance. He previously led a study at University College London in 2009 that scanned human brains and found “just by looking at neural activity we were able to say what someone was thinking”.
Google founder Larry Page, who has expressed interest in making search commands easier by having an implant in the brain, is understood to have led the move to buy Deep Mind. Google is exploring smart technology that will enable it to go into space travel and create self-driving cars.
The website The Information claimed that Google had beaten Facebook to the acquisition and had sealed the deal after agreeing to set up an ethics board to ensure that the AI technology was not abused.

IBM recently pledged billion to fund Watson (above) - its own 'cognitive computing' machine that its hoped will one day understand the nuances of human language.

Hassabis is known within the computer gaming industry for having “a brain larger than a planet”. He began playing chess when he was four years old, reached Master Standard by the age of 13 and represented England.
He did his first work in the games industry only two years later when he entered a competition to design a clone for Space Invaders. Going into the industry seemed like “the perfect marriage between games and programing”, he has said.
By the age of 16 – having already completed his A-levels – Hassabis began working at games company Bullfrog and co-wrote the successful game Theme Park – which was based on an amusement park and released in 1994 - in his year off before going to the University of Cambridge. His student friends struggled to believe he was the author of such a successful product until they saw his name on the packaging.
After graduating with a triple first in computer science from Queen’s College, Hassabis quickly returned to the games industry and became a lead AI programmer at Lionhead Studios, the Surrey-based company founded by British computer games pioneer Peter Molyneux. Very soon afterwards the young graduate went off to set up his own business, Elixir Studios, where he was executive designer of a game called Republic: The Revolution, which attempted to recreate a “living, breathing city” and was nominated for a BAFTA.

Joe Mc Donagh and Demis Hassabis, in the green shirt, in 1999 (david Sandison)

Although he has accepted that the project was over-ambitious, he told games website CVG that he had always been prepared to take chances. “I’m actually more worried about not taking risks and playing safe, not pushing myself enough,” he said. “It’s a bit perverse I suppose, and asking for trouble. I’ve always been prepared to jump in at the deep end and see if I can swim or not.”
For many years, Hassabis was a successful competitor in the London-based Mind Sports Olympiad, taking part in its elite Pentamind contest – a sort of mental pentathlon. Hassabis was Pentamind champion in five of the first seven years after the Olympiad was founded in 1997. His success meant that he was described as “probably the best games player in history”. Hassabis is an expert in the Japanese board game Shogi and an accomplished poker player.
His next computer game Evil Genius, which was based on a Bond-style villain in an island lair, was more favourably received by critics. After selling the rights to publishers, Hassabis sold the studio and went into medical science in order to further pursue his interest in AI technology. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts for his game designs.

Hassabis co-wrote 'Theme Park', which was released in 1994

As a cognitive neuroscientist he specialised in autobiographical memory (combining personal recollection and general knowledge) and amnesia. He investigated whether patients with lesions to the Hippocampus parts of their brains suffered damage to their imagination process as well as their memory recall. He completed his doctorate in cognitive neuroscience in 2009 at University College London and became a fellow at the college’s Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit and a visiting scientist at MIT and Harvard.

'Evil Genius' was received favourably by critics

In 2012, he left academia to set up Deep Mind Technologies, developing technology for e-commerce and gaming and creating computer systems capable of playing computer games. The company, which was based in central London’s Russell Square before moving to Fenchurch Street, has a reputation for secrecy. Its aim is said to be to develop computers that think like humans. It is said to employ 50 people including co-founders Shane Legg, a 40-year-old New Zealander, and Mustafa Seleyman, a 29-year-old Briton.
Deep Mind’s investors include US Tesla car mogul Elon Musk, early Facebook investor Peter Thiel and the family of London app creator Nick d’Aloisio, who are all set for windfalls following the sale to Google. D’Aloisio, from south London, sold his news based app Summly to Yahoo! for a reported £19m early last year.

Embracing the Power of the Internet(Network Neutrality)

The internet is arguably the most powerful communication tool invented and certainly has had the greatest impact on society and business since the advent of the telephone.  As society transitioned from the telegraph to the telephone and radio to television, technology improved and grew more sophisticated.  However, issues of ownership and control were relatively straightforward.  Even if the electromagnetic spectrum for television transmission can be government regulated and divided up, those divisions are discreet and once allocated issues of control and ownership have been decided.  Further, regulation of the telephone industry has been economic; focused on concerns of monopoly power, but not due to any inherent uncertainty about who is providing a service on who’s transmission lines.

The internet is far different.  In fact, “one of the greatest things about the internet is that nobody really owns it” (Tyson).  The internet is essentially a collection of all connected computer networks and once information is transmitted from one point to another across these networks, its actual path is not predetermined.  Once leaving a user’s terminal, information or a request for information is eventually routed to and through the internet’s “backbone” of large fiber optic lines.  All of this data traffic is managed without human intervention incredibly effectively by routers (Tyson).  Public and private entities have cooperated over the years to build up the backbone lines and the current state of the internet is “a gigantic, sprawling agreement between companies to intercommunicate freely” (Tyson).

However, after investing billions of dollars in fiber optic lines and seeing billions of dollars of equity evaporate in the dot com and telecom stock market crash, cable and telecommunications firms are becoming dissatisfied with the aforementioned “sprawling agreement”.  Companies such as Bell South (now part of the SBC owned AT&T) “are considering "pay-as-you-go broadband" plans in which a consumer would pay more for streaming video, for example” (Searcey).  The internet has not traditionally embraced such price structures and heavy competition might limit the changes internet service providers (ISPs) can charge customers.  More importantly, “phone companies are also discussing ways to bill Internet content providers for premium delivery of their services” and “Yahoo Inc. and Time Warner Inc.'s AOL [have considered placing] a small fee on [bulk] email to guarantee its delivery” (Searcey).  These proposed fees on providers of internet content have been met with vocal opposition from those who embrace the concept of “Internet/Network/Net Neutrality”.

Network Neutrality is “a term devised by Columbia Law School professor Tim Wu to support an open access theory of network regulation that holds that packet data networks such as the Internet access as common carriage should be just like traditional railroads and telephone networks” (Network Neutrality).  What this term means in practice, is that once a packet of data is on the internet, it should have the same access to the backbone lines as any other packet of data regardless of source, content, or owner.  It is highly likely that either some form of Network Neutrality will become law, or private owners of the internet backbone will begin charging some content providers for access or guaranteed delivery.