Everything I Learned at MIT (That Made Me a Multimillionaire)

Today, I'm going to share every single

thing I learned at MIT that made me

become a multi-millionaire. I've been

the CEO, board member, investor at tech

companies that created billions of

dollars in value. And this success is

due to five principles I learned at MIT

that shaped how I work, learn, make

decisions under pressure. So, if you

want to shortcut $350,000

of tuition, and learn how the top 1%

elite thinkers operate, let's dive in.

The first framework I learned at MIT

didn't come from classrooms. It came

from pranks. One day in 1994, MIT

students and the city of Boston woke up

to a police car siren echoing from the

top of the MIT's great dome. And when he

looked up, there was a full-size police

car sitting up there on top of the dome.

And when the campus security rushed to

the top of the dome, they found a

mannequin dressed as a fake cop and a

box of real donuts in the backseat of

the car. And the surprising fact was

that the student hackers had not lifted

the car to the top. It was an

engineering masterpiece. They had built

it up. They had assembled it up there

piece by piece all through the night

without getting caught. They use

fiberglass, steel framing, other

materials, and they had made sure that

the car would stay perfectly steady

because they had to calculate the dome's

exact curvature. There was not a single

scratch on this structure. Total

precision. And that wasn't the last time

the dome got hacked. A few years later,

it turned into R2-D2. Perfect colors,

Star Wars theme playing and all. Another

year, I remembered the dome was

transformed into Captain America's

shield, 28 ft across, perfectly centered

to the inch. Same mix of genius and

mischief. That's the magic of MIT.

Engineering precision with a tinge of

light-hearted humor. These MIT hacks are

legendary and they started from 1950s.

You know, they represent a mindset.

understand the system so deeply you can

have fun with it without breaking it and

you have to pull it off without anyone

knowing about it. To this day, no one

knows which students were involved and

MIT authorities never hunt down the

student hackers because the hack is

never seen as a mean-spirited rebellion.

It's about respectful rulebreaking.

Smart doesn't have to be serious. Smart

doesn't have to be stressful. As Clint

Eastwood once said, I take my work

seriously, but I don't take myself

seriously because the moment you lose

your sense of play, you lose your

creativity. So, how do you use this

principle in real life? First, start

acting like a hacker, not like a hammer.

Understand the system deeply before you

can fight it, before you can change it,

before you can improve it. And second,

don't forget to have fun while you're

doing it. You want your sense of

innovation and sanity to survive in this

world. The second principle I learned at

MIT is that doing more isn't the goal.

And MIT has a brutal way of making sure

you learn it. The fire hose test. From

the first week of the semester, they

turn on the fire hose. three problem

sets, two lab reports, a research paper,

and a career fair all in the same day.

Google is on campus, a Nobel Prize

winner is giving a lecture, a great

startup founder is hosting office hours,

and somehow you're supposed to attend

everything. And that's just your week

one at MIT. By the end of that week,

most students realize something very

uncomfortable. you realize it is 2:00

a.m. at night and even if you decided to

stay up for the next 72 hours, you still

couldn't finish all the work. It is

mathematically impossible. And that's

when panic sets in. You lose your

confidence because every single day,

you're making impossible choices. And

for the first time, you realize effort

alone won't save you. Every choice you

make is going to feel like a loss. But

here's what I didn't see coming. The

fire hose was never meant to be drunk

from. I stopped asking how can I do

everything and started asking what

actually matters. That's the real point

of the fire hose. MIT wasn't testing for

capacity. It was testing for clarity. We

all must learn how to decide and where

to focus. You have to learn to choose.

Not between good and bad, cuz that's an

easy choice, but between valuable and

more valuable. And that skill keeps

everyone around you focused on the right

thing. Years later, when I was CEO, I

used to tell my team, when I look to my

right, I see 50 things that are amazing

about our company, and when I look to my

left, there are 50 existential fires

burning. So, what should we do? We look

straight ahead and keep going. When

you're building a company or building a

product or managing your own life, the

fire hose never shuts off. There's

always more to do, more to chase, more

to prove. If you don't build a filter,

you'll mistake activity for progress.

And when that happens, the fire hose

will win. Here's how you pass the fire

hose test. Ask three questions before

you say yes to anything. I call it the

three eye model. First eye, is it

important? Will it matter a year from

now? Second, is it impactful? Does it

actually move the needle or is it just

looking like busy work? And three, is it

irreversible? If it breaks, can it be

fixed later? Those three questions saved

me when I was the CEO, and they will

save you, too. The third principle is

the secret behind every single grand

invention in humanity's history. At MIT,

every student faces an impossible

challenge, and it's called the P set,

short for problem set. Now, these

problems aren't exercises that you can

memorize or go through your class notes

and figure out or look at the lectures

or go to chat GPT. They are multi-step,

open-ended, very complex challenges

designed to test your reasoning, your

creativity, and your endurance from day

one. And they are hard. Some of those

could take me 15 hours of work. I

remember staring at a whiteboard for

hours surrounded by failed attempts and

empty coffee cups, thinking maybe I

didn't belong there. But everyone feels

the same way because MIT wants you to

learn something very different. You

don't want to just solve the problem.

You want to learn how to look at them

differently. Starting from the first

principles. Instead of asking how do I

solve this, you have to ask what do I

truly know about this? What am I

assuming? What haven't I tested? What

pieces are still missing? Then you build

up from there from the bottom and you

bring all the pieces together one piece

at a time. That mindset in the

foundation of how every breakthrough in

humanity has happened. Elon Musk didn't

accept that the rockets have to cost $65

million. He broke the problem down to

its first principles to raw materials,

aluminum, titanium, carbon fiber. And

you know what he discovered? the real

cost was closer to about 2% of that. So

he didn't just make rockets cheaper, he

rebuilt the idea of a rocket from the

ground up. I applied the same approach

when I joined a large company as their

chief operating officer a long time ago.

We were hurdling forward with several

different products. Resources were very

tight. Products weren't shipping on

time. Everyone was panicking. So what

did we do? We stopped everything for 3

days not to brainstorm solutions but to

deconstruct the problem itself. So we

cut down from four product lines to one

and then we launched that product very

quickly to get a lot of feedback from

customers and that approach worked

wonderfully. We doubled our revenue in

just 18 months not because we worked

harder to find the solution or we were

smarter but because we deconstructed the

problem itself. Remember, every complex

problem in your career, in your

business, in your relationships can be

broken down into small solvable parts.

Here's your framework. Step one, write

the problem down in a couple of lines.

Step two, draw three columns, facts,

assumptions, next step. Step three, pick

one test. Run it this week. Because the

real power of this approach is not in

solving a specific problem. It's about

writing how you think about all

problems. The fourth principle has been

my biggest competitive advantage in life

and in business. It's called the mind

and hand approach. That's the foundation

of how you learn to learn fast. You're

expected to build the thing you're

thinking about. That's how you learn

quickly. Every January, MIT pauses all

classes for 4 weeks. It's called IAP,

independent activities period. And

during that month, there is only one

rule. Build something real. When I was a

student there, we built a startup called

EMIT. It was meant to connect the

venture capitalists to the entrepreneurs

of MIT through a private online

community network. Now, we didn't write

any business plans. We just built the

first version of the product and invited

VCs and founders and entrepreneurs to

just use it. And we ended up getting

over 1,200 people to join and test it.

Now, of course, some ideas worked, some

did not. But that experience taught us

more about startups than any textbook

ever could. That's the spirit of mind

and hand. You want clarity in your mind,

then get your hands dirty. And this is

exactly how it works in the real world,

too. The founder of Dropbox lived the

same principle. He wrote the first

version of Dropbox on a Greyhound bus

ride from Boston to San Francisco. No

team, no funding, just a laptop and an

idea. Now, of course, that first version

did not work perfectly, but it worked

well enough to test the concept and then

build a company that's worth billions of

dollars today. There's a saying at MIT

and everybody believes in it. Nothing

ever works the first time. You learn

faster by failing forward than by

waiting for the perfect plan. That's the

mindset that turns musing into mastery.

So, here's how you apply this. Number

one, build the smallest version of your

idea. Number two, get it in someone's

hands this week. One user, one customer,

one feedback, one honest review. That's

all you need. And number three, rebuild

based on what breaks. Let feedback and

failure help you redraw the map. This

works every time. The fifth principle I

learned at MIT changed everything I

thought I knew about success. And it's

true. Not just in school, but in life.

Everyone loves the myth of the lone

genius. You know, the brilliant mind

single-handedly changing the world from

the mountaintop. But at MIT, you realize

very quickly that it's exactly that,

just a myth. There is even a saying on

campus, you cannot graduate alone.

because you really can't. You find two

or three or four other students who are

just as stuck and as sleepdeprived as

you are and together you fight the

common enemy, the oppression of MIT

itself. And you know MIT knows about

this and they love this idea because

they know the shared struggle against

the impossible builds unbreakable bonds.

If you want to survive, you learn to

trust others, to rely on others, to

collaborate with others. But there's

also another hidden advantage. When you

stop pretending you can do it alone, you

start seeing yourself differently. And

not always in a positive way. You see,

at MIT, everybody arrives thinking

they're God's gift to the world. They

were probably the smartest kid in their

school, the local genius, someone who

always had the answer. And then suddenly

you're surrounded by hundreds if not

thousands of students who are just as

smart or even smarter, way smarter than

you are. And that's when the impostor

syndrome sets in. But then you're

probably wondering, wait, what's the

advantage in that? There has been a lot

of research, recent research from MIT

that talks about the impostor paradox

and it suggests that people who

experience imposttor syndrome often

become better leaders. Why? Because when

you're sure you're not the smartest

person in the room, what are you going

to do? You're going to focus on everyone

else. You listen more. You'd ask better

questions. you collaborate more openly,

more naturally. And in the real world,

that's exactly what separates the high

impact leaders from individual

performers. It's not intelligence alone.

It's empathy. It's humility. It's

knowing when to lead others and when to

lean on others. So, according to this

research, imposttor syndrome isn't a

flaw. It helps you grow something even

more valuable. emotional intelligence.

And in today's era when AI can outthink

all of us, empathy is the thing you're

going to need the most to become a great

leader.

If you like this video, here's another

one I think you'll enjoy. Thank you and

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