📚 From Barista to Billionaire, mental health, and more.

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👋 Hey everyone,

Here are a few popular posts you may have missed:

• 20 Awesome book summary visuals.

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• Summary of “Never Finished” by David Goggins.

📚 Book Summary:

This week’s book is “Never Enough” by Andrew Wilkinson.

Andrew went from making $6 an hour as a barista to being a billionaire by the time he was 36. In his book, he shares insights on building a successful business as well as the surprising realities of life as a billionaire and the challenges that come with extreme wealth.

Here are a few key lessons from it:

📖

1) The Simple Path To Starting A Business

Andrew didn’t have a secret plan to become a billionaire, in fact, when he dropped out of college, he didn’t have any plan at all.

He lived with his parents but they threatened to kick him out if he didn’t get a job, so he got a job at a local cafe.

He enjoyed the job, but after a few months, the excitement wore off and he realized he couldn’t be a barista forever, especially not on his $6-an-hour salary.

Feeling stuck, Andrew started looking at talking to customers at the cafe to find out how they were able to work remotely and on their terms.

He soon befriended two locals and learned they started a business building websites for local businesses. Andrew couldn’t believe that they were making $20,000-40,000 a month while he was earning $1,500 a month.

He figured if they could do it, so could he. After work, he went to his local bookstore and bought a few books on web design. He quickly devoured every book and bought a few online courses on web design.

He spent every night improving his web design skills, reverse engineering popular websites, and trying to develop his skills as much as possible.

After a few weeks, he started searching the web for design projects. He applied for more than a hundred of them but only heard back from one of them.

Andrew almost collapsed when he saw that the client offered him $3,250 to design two web pages. Andrew worked hard on the gig, and after completing it and getting paid for his work, he realized this was it.

He immediately quit his job as a barista and went all in on web design.

A few days later, Andrew got a request from a client about a coding project. Since Andrew didn’t know how to code it, he asked a developer friend how much he would charge to write the code.

His friend responded with $1,000. Since the client’s budget was $2,000, Andrew agreed. He soon realized he had just made $1,000 without doing any work:

“This was how every business worked–creating the demand, building the systems and processes, hiring other people to do the work, then charging enough for whatever it is that you’re selling that you turn a profit.”

From that point on, Andrew stopped looking at the world as a barista and started looking at it as a businessman.

📖

2) It’s Not Enough To Do What You Love, You Need To Stop Doing What You Hate

Fast forward a few years and Andrew’s company is making tens of millions of dollars in revenue and has dozens of employees.

Although Andrew loved most of the work he was doing, he felt burned out from managing such a large company.

That’s when he borrowed the idea of “Anti-Goals” from his business hero Charlie Munger.

Andrew grabbed a whiteboard and started writing down all of the tasks that made him miserable:

• Long meetings

• Late-night emails

• Travel that took him away from his kid

The list went on.

Once done, Andrew spent the next several weeks thinking about how to delegate and structure things so that he wasn’t responsible for any of those tasks.

He started to hire more leaders for each business to handle the day-to-day operations so he could focus on the long-term plan:

“We transitioned first from players on the field, to coaches yelling plays from the sidelines, and now, finally, to the hushed wood paneling of the owner’s box…I had my life back.”

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3) Be Aware That It’ll Never Enough

Fast forward a few more years and Andrew’s company is making even more money now and is on the path to becoming a public company.

To prepare for the IPO, Andrew went on a roadshow to talk with wealthy investors, bankers, and CEOs.

His first meeting was with a banker who had invested early in Amazon and was now worth $50 million.

The banker lived on a beautiful waterfront property but complained about the size of his home calling it a “shack” since his house was only worth $10 million while his two neighbors had mansions worth $25 million each.

The next meeting was with a successful entrepreneur who was worth $150 million.

The entrepreneur complained that his $25 million second home (not his primary home), wasn’t good enough and he was waiting to buy the adjacent property so he could expand the house.

The last meeting was with a tech investor worth $1 billion.

The investor had a 16-bedroom home with two swimming pools but spent the entire time complaining that his neighbor had a home with three pools.

“It seemed like, no matter what they owned, they were always comparing themselves to their increasingly wealthy peers. Looking up, never down. Never taking a moment to appreciate what they had,” writes Andrew.

It’s easy to think that if we had a billion dollars we’d never be unhappy again, but the truth is that it’s human nature to always want more and compare yourself to 0.0001% of people doing better than the 99% of people you’re ahead of.

✅ Actionable Advice:

1) Starting a business is simple:

• Learn a valuable skill.

• Reach out to potential clients.

• Hire people to help out.

2) Write out your Anti-Goals:

• Make a list of all of the tasks you hate doing and reflect on how you can delegate them to others or automate them to free up your time for more meaningful work.

3) Be careful of the pull that no matter how much money you make, you’ll probably want more:

• The millionaire wants to be a deca-millionaire.

• The deca-millionaire wants to be a centi-millionaire.

• The centi-millionaire wants to be a billionaire, and so on.

💎 Weekly Gem:

Podcast: Dr. Jonathan Haidt: How Smartphones & Social Media Impact Mental Health & the Realistic Solutions

This is a great podcast about how smartphones and social media have negatively impacted our mental health (especially in kids).

It’ll motivate you to spend a lot less time on your phone and more time outside.

If you have kids, this podcast is worth listening to.

Thank you for your support, read on everyone!

-Alex W.