How Billionaires Think: Decoding The Billionaire Mind

every one Sam ovens here and in today's video I want to decode the billionaires mind and what I want to do is take you inside the mind of a billionaire and

really show you what it is how it works and how it is fundamentally different in pretty much every way shape and form

from the average person's mind now Wyatt this has been a point of interest for me is because personally I've been trying to learn like how to become more

successful and how to function at a higher level because you know behind success isn't really magic it's it's always cause and effect and there are

actions that people have taken in their life that have had like profound impacts that have allowed them to become successful it didn't happen just by chance it it happened by taking specific

actions now what causes somebody to take an action is thinking by its analysis its rationalizing and it's viewing things and making trade-offs every

single day and the piece of you that is responsible for that is the mind and so if we reverse engineer this thing back you know actions create success thoughts

create actions then the mind creates the thoughts then you know really what's lying at the base of success is your mind and your mental function and how

your mind works and so that's why it's been a real point of obsession for me to study billionaires and not just billionaires but really successful

people in every different field from you know athletes to musicians to military leaders to all sorts of different people

from all different eras and to really pull apart their mind and really decode their mind and figure out how it worked and why it enabled them to see things

more clear than the average person and make better decisions and take better actions which is how they came to get to where they are so that's why it's been a

real point of a focus for me to really study the billionaires mind and really successful people so that I could then assemble one of

those mines inside my own mind and so that's what I've been trying to do for the past six years and I'm not a billionaire yet but you know so far I've been able to go from living in my

parents garage and with zero dollars at all I didn't even have a college degree or anything to start in consulting calm my company and growing it to the point now where it's making around thirty

million dollars a year and all that happened in about five six years so you know I'm by no means billionaire but I have studied these people's minds a lot

and I've been able to reverse-engineer it back to specific things that not only myself but you can do like starting today so that you can dramatically

improve the decisions that you make the trade-offs that you make and the actions that you take every day and that's going to have an impact on your success in life and in business or you know

whatever your field is now the reason why I really wanted to dig into this and study it is because this thing has always interested me you know why if you

take one person and you put them into contact with some information and this information could be an online course it could be a university degree it could be

a book it could be anything but let's say you have a person they come into contact with information and that results in like massive success let's say this person becomes a billionaire

right but then they say we have another person and they come into contact with

the exact same information so the information variable here is identical right so two different people but very

similar come into contact with identical information one output is you know be linear the other output is you know

complete failure right so why is that why can two people come into contact with the same information and get

inverted dramatically like it streamit results why is that and why that is is because it's not about the

information you know the information plays a role but it's not the main part the main part of this is actually the

human's mind that is you know the main piece here and what's fascinating is the way we look at education and online courses and and everything is we just

look purely at the information side we think ok let's just get these people to learn this information and they should get this result because someone came into contact with this information the

output was this so therefore we should just force this upon everyone and that output should be the same or to varying degrees the same but what we see in the world and what we see you know every day

is this we don't have the homogeneous output we have wildly varying outputs and it's because you know we've never really looked inside these people's

minds and how that works and what I've really tried to do is dig into this I've studied other people's minds my own and I've even you know been my business

consulting com what we do is we help people start their own businesses from scratch so we take people who have no experience with business or anything and we have to teach them everything and

help them make that dramatic transformation into starting a business and being successful with it and that's a huge shift and so I've observed twenty

thousand people over five years go through this and I've observed what happens and the people who have trouble with it the people who do okay with it and the people who get extremely good

results with it and it's fascinated me and I've really dug into this and looked at it and what I've found is that there

are layers to like every humans mind every humans brain there are layers and what's fascinating is that when we go to

learn a specific skill like let's say the specific skill is is going to be you know how to run Facebook ads right so that specific

skill is going to be up here on this processors layer or this process layer and beneath this we have like a business

discipline layer and so this layer here is so I'll write this on so you guys can

see it so here we have like processors

and then on this layer here we have business disciplines and then on the

light on the layer beneath it

we have business principles and then on

the layer beneath this one we have this

one here is mental cognition and then the layer beneath it we have mental awareness

now you're probably thinking what are these things why are we talking about these things well let me explain all of them so if somebody and I see this happen every single day you know somebody will come in and they want to

start a business or be an entrepreneur and they think okay well what do I need to learn all right the hot topic is like Facebook Ads and so I'm gonna come right in and just learn all about Facebook Ads

and so they go in and they do that and what they're doing is they're they're acquiring a specific process skill like this one little block here and they're

acquiring the skill but it's operating on top of all of these layers and the best way to think about this is you know you've got like an operating system on

your computer like Windows or Mac operating system and then on top of that you can install applications like Microsoft Word or keynote or different things and then within those you know

you can create different files and create different things like that now if you install like a specific software application on a bad operating

system like let's say you try to install a Microsoft Windows application on Mac OS it's not even going to install all

let's say you install like a real memory hungry application like some sort of graphics heavy graphical interface sort of application on top of an operating

system that's outdated with not much RAM and not much available memory and hard drive space well that application is going to be running very poorly it's going to be

extremely inefficient and it's not even going to really function and this is what I see happen in business every single day is people are just trying to

learn these processes in these specific things but their foundations of their mind are like in serious like in

seriously poor condition and basically what they're doing is trying to install like how to run Facebook ads on top of really no knowledge of business

disciplines no knowledge of business principles and poor mental cognition and poor mental awareness and when this happens it's just like building a house on top of

sand you know it doesn't matter if you get like a multi-million dollar house with the fanciest design and everything if you lay that thing on top of sand it's going to fall over and it's going

to be completely useless and people don't look at these layers beneath and they don't work on these layers beneath and then they wonder why these things up

here don't work for them and they wonder why things are glitching up here and this is why two people can come into contact with the same information and

get different results because it depends on the layers of the person's mind somebody who's more aware with bitter sharper cognition and with better

business principles and a wider array of business disciplines is going to learn information and perceive information in

an entirely different way and let me give you a perfect example of this let's say that somebody you know is much more aware and has much better

problem-solving abilities and much better critical thinking abilities and lots of different mental models to run things through and then on the business principles layer this person has a

really solid kind of paradigm and ideology of how they how they like to run their business and they've got some values and some principles they like to follow and then up here on the business

disciplines layer they say this person understands accounting they understand tax and they understand sales and they understand marketing and product development and they understand

management as well and looking after teams and all of that well now if that person if they learn how to run Facebook Ads when they're going through that information they're going to see all of

these connections all over the place that the other person can't see because they don't have this base foundation so the person who's got all that and

they're learning Facebook Ads they're gonna think oh this is how Facebook Ads would affect the P&L this is how Facebook Ads would affect the balance sheet or this is how Facebook Ads would make

that thing work or this is how sales kind of comes in and interrelate with Facebook ads and this is how product development comes in and connects with

Facebook ads they're starting to connect all of these different dots between all of these different layers and then their style and their method in their way of running Facebook Ads

is going to be massively influenced by these lower layers because every single layer of your mind you the layer above it inherits everything from the layers below so if

you have really poor awareness and self-discipline you know if you're at this awareness layer if you are not able to catch things if you're like attention

span is really short and you know if you've got really destructive behaviors and habits and if you also have a poor sense of identity and you've got a lot

of delusions and false beliefs and things like this then if you if this person tries to learn anything it's game over you know this person has problems just sitting in front of the computer

for an hour and watching a video that's longer than two minutes let alone starting a damn business you know so this person here it doesn't matter what

they learn they're screwed and the person with bad mental cognition it doesn't matter what they learn this group so these layers down here of

extreme importance and so this is how we can get these massively differing results you know the person who becomes a billionaire from this information they're able to see all of the different

interconnections and they have really solid foundations that they're able to just like take this information apply it between all these different things and then execute it as a functioning

business or executing it as you know are functioning anything and making a massive difference whereas the other person just sees words because all that is to them is words and an a classic

example of the other person is when they learn Facebook Ads they're thinking we'll like how do how does this work financially like how does this

if I spend money on ads how does this come back does that is that like going to be a profit or a loss they they they're already breaking down mentally and then you know they're because their

awareness and everything is so bad they're not even going to be able to sit down in front of the screen and write Facebook ads for an extended period of time because their attention span is so

horrible and then they're going to have no mental cognition skills they're not going to be able to problem-solve things when problems arise and problems always arise you know one thing we can

guarantee is that problems are coming they come every day all the time it's non-stop and so if you're not good at solving problems and thinking critically then you know none of this is

really going to work and this is what nobody is really teaching anyone anywhere ever like people are just teaching skills these days now when I look outside and I

look at by entrepreneurs and in these different things they're learning they're learning specific skills processes or tools and they're installing it on top of you know of

nothing and that they're just results in nothing and they don't want to look at these layers beneath because they think oh that's just some like we will crap or something that doesn't really matter I just want to learn the technical like

nuggets oh I'm gonna get those gold nuggets well these are we the gold nuggets sir and you can have a lot of these but if you don't have these base foundations you ain't gonna make anything happen

or if you do make something happen it's gonna be short-lived it's going you're going to self-sabotage it and it's going to crumble and the moment you face a problem because you don't have this stuff down the bottom you're going to

you're just going to fold you know you're just going to completely crumble in the heat of the moment and that's why billionaires you know the billionaire

mind is really well built it has these layers really dialed in now what I'm going to do is just walk through each one of these layers and describe it to

you so that you can understand what it is and how you can start like working on your mind to make it full stack like this and that's the kind of term I've

I've I've come up with to describe the this billionaire mind it's like a full-stack mind and it's when you work on every single layer in the stack and every single different interconnection

on the stack and you master the whole thing instead of just the part because if you just have a good part installed on a rotten foundation the part will rot

right so it mental awareness what is that and I'll write these things down

fear so mental awareness is really the

first layer and what it's all about is basically how am I going to fit this in

I'll just fit it in here what it's all about is your self-awareness so how will

where you are of yourself and your own thoughts and your own actions and your behaviors and your habits and your tendencies and the patterns that seem to

you know repeat in your life and your existence you know so someone might be like will self-awareness I I know I'm myself is here and I'm aware of that so I'm self-aware yep like it this is

different this is being incredibly aware of yourself and your thoughts basically you know when you have got a higher level of self-awareness is when you

focus on your the patterns of your thoughts instead of the thoughts themselves so you're kind of taking a third a third what's it called it's

called a third person view of yourself you're really looking from a bird's eye view on yourself and how you're interacting instead of being kind of stuck in it yourself

now just close then something's popped up on my phone so you've got self awareness you've also got your identity

and your identity massively shaped zebra thing in the stack and what I mean by this is it's your self image of of who you are so you know this who you are physically and

everything but then there's who you think you are and who how you see yourself and what your self-image is and this massively shapes everything because if you think I'm not good at math and

I'm not outgoing and I'm not able to do that or I don't have much energy or work ethic then you're going to carry that into everything you do and so as soon as you come across some math anywhere in

this stack or anywhere in your business journey they're going to be like open oh that's not me I'm not a math person and I see this happen all the time I see it with people often say math or technology

I see it a lot especially with the older generation they say oh no technology that's not me That's not me and honestly guys it's 2018 if you think technology

isn't you then you are right because so you need to stop saying that because it's not true like you can't show me this like this imprint in your

DNA that proves that technology isn't you you made it up it's a delusion you cooked it and you're believing it and you have to be the one that pops it

because it's not true you can learn technology if you think you're not good at math you can learn math right and

it's also like your ability to to belief systems so what you believe is true and not true about the world a lot of people

have a lot of these like making money as evil or making money as bad or you know all of these different things you have to fix all of these before you can really have any success anywhere else in

the stack everything you learn on top of the space here will get these things inherited into it right it's like having a virus in the operating system of your

machine and then installing applications on top of it the virus is just going to just string its way right through

everything and so that's you know mental awareness and I'll put out here well I'll just rub out that one here so I've

got some space now let's talk about the second layer and there's more things to mental awareness than just this right there's a

lot more to it but for the sake of keeping things you know brief I'm just going to mention a few things from each

stack and then the second one is mental cognition and what this is is this is

your ability to problem-solve think critically and prioritize different things it's basically the layer in your mind that receives all of these

different requests well there's all this different information flying into your mind all the time like oh maybe I should do that maybe I should do this thing or do that and this this layer here is

responsible for scheduling things it's like okay how important is this and it weighs it it weighs it's upside and it weighs its potential downside and it

weighs it's like its effect horizon and it also looks at all of the other pieces in the system and then it assigns kind of like a priority witness things should

be executed is it critically important for survival if so then it should run now execute now take the front of the cube go or if it's not so crucial it should just take you know a back

position in the queue and get scheduled later on because it's not that important but also if something is not important at all this this layer here will just discard a bit and just ignore it so this

piece is huge and I see a lot of entrepreneurs who have some good self-awareness and they've got some good top-level kind of skills and principles

and disciplines but the cognition layer is seriously missing it's like lacking

and prioritization is a key one because I see people all the time they delay working on the thing that's most

important and they prioritize and obsess about and spend a huge amount of time on the thing that is useless so when I see this kind of behavior happening again and again and again it tells me that this purse

has a really backwards like cognition layer in their mind and they're not able to weigh things correctly and prioritize things correctly the Slayer of the mind

is also responsible for like planning thinking out into the future breaking things down into chunks scheduling them delegating them to other people and

planning and contingencies like what happens if we if this happens then we should do that or if there happens then we should do this it's like a really

powerful layer of the mind and it's also good at problem-solving so you know problems come up all the time and this

layer of the mind will help you solve it how do you troubleshoot a problem like what are the different mental models that you view the problem through one of the different perspectives that you flip

between and one of the different problem-solving methodologies and frameworks and things that you deploy when you come into contact with a problem all right this is mental

cognition we've also got pattern recognition so how easily you're able to

spot patterns in your own behavior in your life in your business in the data that you see for ads and your accounts in the way your industry is evolving

it's like pattern recognition is very very important and you know when you study billionaires you'll notice that they're hyper aware they are extremely aware they catch things they catch

details and they can see things that other people can't even see about themselves all right it's almost like they have x-ray vision they've got like a clear winds right this hyper awareness

is that you're not born with it it's made you can teach it to yourself it just takes practice and then the cognition layer billionaires are amazing at this their problem-solving abilities

they can just go boom BAM find it done before like you know before anyone else has even processed the information and they're also able to prioritize things

properly like they're able to put things back in queue say no to things you can do lots of things and focus on the key important things and that's why this

layer is of exceptional importance in your business principles so where am I

going to write this one I think we'll

put it we'll just put it here if you can

still see it here business principles what are these so these are your like

your values and your beliefs about how to run a business and these things are crucial and so you know at these base layers we're not even getting into

business so I down here we're not even learning business skills we're learning mental awareness and problem-solving and mental models and cognition all of this and then we're only getting into

business on this on this layer upwards right and business principles are different like beliefs you have about business so I'll give you some of mine

for example like I run an online education company and so I need a central point of focus one thing that I always default on and there is like

student position like the student is the most important person in the equation so whenever I'm whenever I have to make a trade off or anything I think what does the student want if the student was here

and they were listening to this what would they choose what's best for them not what's best for me not what's best for different people in the company nor what's best for

profitability or margin what's best for the student through their eyes so that's like a principal students

obsession another one would be that we focus on on cash flow so you know we're not too concerned about profit margins

or profits or quarterly profits or anything to do with profits or earnings what I'm most interested in is cash flows and specifically long term future

cash flows that is what I'm focused on and so you know this is very different a lot of business people they've just got their eyes fixed on profits all right and all they want is profits but in my belief system may

think profits people who do that a kind of silly because they're leaving themselves open to for somebody to come in and take their market away from them by just simply not making as much profit

that's leaving yourself open to a very easy place to attack and also you have to pay a lot of taxes and it's highly inefficient and you're also not investing a lot back into the business

into research and development and things like this so this is just one principle so you know I've got a student obsession I'm a cashflow focused or long term

future cash flow focused and also I think about the long term so if something is gonna make my company less money this year but more money in three years five years ten years from now I'll

take the long term one any time right so that's another one and also thinking from first principles so I like to have

in my company like an idiosyncratic kind of method of thinking so I like to think differently and not just follow the crowd and so instead of just doing what

everyone else is doing what we will do is we'll look at it and break it down to its first principles we'll break out this thing into its different constituent parts we'll analyze all of

them weigh all of them and then find the best way to reassemble these constituent parts to achieve an optimal outcome instead of just doing what everyone else

is doing and what this leads to is quite abnormal behavior to be honest you know a lot of the things that a lot of people have really obsessed about I completely ignore and people think I'm an idiot for

doing it and then a lot of the things that people never touch I obsess about and they think that I'm stupid for doing that right this is idiosyncratic thinking and it's the byproduct of

having like a first principles kind of worldview and a scientists worldview instead of just you know like a fashion point of view right fashion is it

follows trends but a scientist looks at the constituent parts in the first principles of everything and so those are a few different business principle

then up here we have business disciplines so what are these so right here

cash flow focused and then student obsessed and then we also had those

principles all right you know pretty sure you can see there but now what about business disciplines what are

these things well how am I going to fit these ones on I should be able to fit it by right here what happens if I go like

that good this will work so then we're up to number four business disciplines here's where the Slayer starts to have different parts so

you can see these layers like this is all blue this is all red this is all green but up here we have different pieces so these are kind of the foundational layers but as soon as we

get to the business discipline layer we can have different disciplines right so if we know accounting that could be one and then if we know like finance or law

or tax there could be like another and then marketing could be a different one and then sales could be a different one product development could be a different one and then management could be another

one right and what happens is our education systems like how universities and everything what they do is they don't teach anyone this parent teaching

on this or this and what they do is they teach people only one of these so you've just learned marketing or you just learn finance or you just learned this one

thing and what this leads to is just single skilled workers right and this is a really fascinating argument it's like should you learn one thing and just

focus on it or should you be a generalist and learn a few like a broader range of things and what you'll notice is if you study billionaires or

really successful people they are pretty much in every single and every single case like full stack and what I mean by there it's not just through here but

multi discipline so they know lots of different things and this has been the case for me too along my journey is you know I've thought all right I'll just learn this marketing piece and then I

learn how to do that and then oh now I need to sell now the now the result of running this marketing thing generates appointments and now I've got to get on these appointments and sell but now I

don't know how to sell so what I do I've got to learn sales now so then you learn the sales part and then you're like what what am i selling well now you've got to come up with a product or a service

right and so how do you do that there's like product development that's like learning how to research and learning how to find problems that market has n craft solutions to them

this is a whole other thing and then once you've done all of these so now you've learned marketing sales and product development and research and things now you're running but now what

you need to learn accounting so that you can manage everything and know how it all works economically and how that all of this outputs on the balance sheet and

the P&L and then you do that and then comes tax season and now you're like Noah now you've got this tax stuff and so it just keeps going like this and the the belief that a lot of people have is

that oh you can just hire other people to do that or just get contractors to do all of that but what you'll end up finding is that they're just not good enough because this single skill workers

like all they know is their little thing and so when they look at your part of your business all they can see is that and they can't see how it interconnects with all the other parts and so they

give you stupid advice right and this this means that you can't really trust these people or fall back on these people and what I've found through my experience in business is that I pretty

much had to learn how to do everything myself so I've learned accounting tax law corporate structures across different countries and internationally I've learned cash and accrual basis

accounting I have had to learn marketing and then I've had to live in sales I've had to learn product development I've also had to learn statistics and like

analytics and things like that and probabilities conversion rate optimisation I've had to learn all of this as well as management functions like you know how to hire people how to

make sure the culture and everything is good and within the company how to you know create incentives and compensation plans you know all of the stuff I've had

to learn all of it and what that that's happened by accident kind of just because I've had to along the way but what that resulted in after a while was

really good knowledge across all sorts of things and an ability to go in at every different part of the business and see how that interconnects to everything else and troubleshoot things

real quick and problem-solve things real quick and when you learn the full stack so multi disciplines and the stuff down

here what you'll be able to do is do the work of 30 people yourself and move a hundred times faster than the thirty people would as a team right now you

want to have that skill and billionaires have that skill billionaires multi-disciplined they are typically like t-shaped and what I mean by that is

they have a broad knowledge of all these different things but they focus in an extreme obsessive way on a particular thing so someone might know law taxes

accounting and all of this but they might focus incessantly on like just corporate structures right but they have to understand all this other stuff in order to do this and what I see today is

a lot of entrepreneurs just learning one discipline and then they go out into the world and they they're not able to do anything they're not able to create

value because businesses are the things that create value for people the businesses have value and businesses are made up of lots of different

interconnected parts and so if you want to start a business you need to know the different parts and how they interconnect you currently just know one piece that's how you get a job at a

corporate not how you create a business and add value in the world and so this is a very important thing and then on this top layer here we've got like

processes and tools and things like this and you have different processes and tools on top of every discipline so on

top of just the discipline of marketing right I understand Facebook Ads I understand like click funnels for landing pages I understand analytics and I understand

conversion rate optimisation and I understand a whole bunch of different processes like how to create ads different frameworks for ads just within one channel and then I know how to do

copywriting and then how like what types of images and things would work well and I know the psychology of marketing and all that and so these are all different specific

processes tools and skills that just sit on top of one discipline of marketing and then with sales you know you've got different sales skills and processes and tools and then on top of Finance or

product development you've got different processes tools and skills and so up here we get into the actual what is the step by step process of how we do this

thing here is the discipline the marketing the sales then we've got the principal's so it's your core beliefs about operating a business then your mental cognition your problem-solving

abilities and your prioritization and planning and forecasting and mental models and all of this and then down here we've got your awareness and that

is self-awareness identity belief systems things like that now like I said earlier in this video what I see today is people just learning tools how to use

the power editor good god if you just learn how to do that you're useless and or just processes like how to just run this per specific process what are you

doing the process breaks what the hell do you do now you're screwed because all you know how to do is execute a process you don't know the the discipline on which the process says and you certainly

don't know the principles upon which this process was founded and created on and you don't know how to prioritize and problem-solve anyway and you're not even

aware at the base level so even when it stops working you probably won't even notice that it stopped working and you'll just continue to execute it and it not work and you're not even aware

that it's not working and I see this every single day so the purpose of this video is to really show you in decode the billionaires mind how it works what

it is and how it's fundamentally different from the everyday normal person's mind and if you want to be successful in life and in this world and any endeavor then you honestly need to

focus on becoming full-stack you need to work on your awareness your cognition you need to develop principle your philosophy of things and then you need to learn different disciplines by

keeping Michael Jordan he could play offense and defense right here's one of the first players that could do that because players usually focused on just offense or just defense he played both

and so we see this everywhere across all disciplines Michael Schumacher was one of the only Formula One drivers who was a mechanic and would get in the workshop

with his mechanic for his Formula One car and know what's happening with everything you'd come off the track and say you need to turn this on this fuel mixture up here I want this fuel mapping to have more

kick down here and it needs to not be a spiky back here or that back lift tire needs to go up 1 psi right he would he would know the detail he was full

stack and so you know whatever the thing is that you want to achieve and succeed in in life then I can tell you that the way you're going to be exceptional at it

is through becoming full stack so that's it for this video today now what I want you to do is if you enjoyed this just click that like button and let me know what you thought in the comments section

below just give me some feedback also make sure you subscribe to my youtube channel I release a video like this once a week every week as well as customer interviews and other resources like that

so thanks for watching and I look forward to seeing you in the next one soon