Billionaires often serve as sources of inspiration and guidance for aspiring entrepreneurs and individuals seeking to achieve financial prosperity. Their accomplishments and insights are greatly celebrated because of their understanding of complex business environments.
However, there are certain actions that billionaires may advice but seldom practice themselves. By examining these contradictions, we gain a deeper understanding of the complexities and nuances of achieving billionaire status
Join us as we explore the common advice billionaires rarely implement in their own lives.
Network extensively
Over the years, billionaires cum successful entrepreneurs have preached that networking is powerful in the business world. They counsel young minds to cultivate meaningful connections, nurture relationships and leverage their network to unlock opportunities. However, these billionaires focus more on strategic connections and high-level relationships.
While they tell you to exchange contact with at least one person at a professional event, seminar or conference, they focus on knowing a few people who know a lot of people. These billionaires channel their energy into knowing people that can give them access to other people. Rather than have a network of 1000 persons, they would rather choose 10 persons that can connect them to 1000 people.
Embrace failure
Most of you have heard that failure is a stepping stone to success, embrace failure. While that could be true, reports say a large number of people don’t learn from their failures. It will also interest you to know that billionaires who counsel you to embrace failure, do everything within their power to avoid it or minimise it.
Failure leads to financial losses, damage to reputation and loss of confidence in one’s ability. So as much as possible avoid it. On the flip side, it is good to state that billionaire sometimes fail, but most of them see their failure as part of the learning process.
Work hard
Africa’s richest person, Aliko Dangote is known for his favourite quote, “I enjoy myself a lot but I derive more joy in working. I believe in hard work and one of my business secrets is hard work. It’s hard to see a youth that will go to bed by 2 am and wake up by 5 am, I won’t rest until I achieve something.” Asides him, other billionaires go big on hard work but it is highly overrated!
This is however evident in the lifestyle of Nigerian billionaire, Femi Otedola. Otedola once revealed that he sleeps 10 hours daily, meaning he goes to bed at about 10 pm daily and wakes up at 8 am. Most billionaires prioritise a few activities with a lot of impact because they understand that working hard has a lot of diminishing returns.
Get out of debt
A lot of successful entrepreneurs teach that debt is a burden that can take a toll on your physical and mental health. They also teach that it can limit your options and counsel that getting out of debt is the way to attain financial stability. However, most billionaires get richer through debt.
Debt has been described as an extraordinary financial tool that can either make you extremely rich or poor. They counsel you to stay out of debt probably because they feel you may not know how to generate wealth from it. But billionaires like Dangote use debt as a tool to become richer. For example, the recently commissioned Dangote refinery was financed majorly by commercial loans from domestic and foreign banks.
Speaking at the commissioning, The governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, Godwin Emefiele said, “The Dangote Group has started repaying some of the commercial loans even before the commissioning of this facility. This reflects the commercial capability of the Group and its Chairman. I am pleased to inform everyone today that, following extensive repayments, outstanding debt has dropped appreciably from over US$9 billion to US$3 billion.”
Reduce spending
Avoid spending more than you earn is one of the big pieces of advice that billionaires give to those who are struggling financially. They advise that rather than spend money, you should save money. While this is a great financial tip, billionaires don’t look for where and how to cut their spending, rather they look for how to add.
They never reduce their spending below what they consider necessary. An example will be how Otedola last year spent $3 million to rent a yacht in celebration of his 60th birth anniversary. This is because as they spend money, they look for ways to generate more money. So rather than reduce their spending, they make more money.
Credit: Business Elites Africa
