26 Lessons In 26 Years: Business & Life Lessons From A Contrarian Lifelong Entrepreneur

What I Learned About Human Psychology, Marketing, Business Strategy, Investing, Finance & Life Design After 12 Years Of Running Successful Businesses & Getting Rich My Own Way

Birthdays have always been a time of reflection for me. A birthday may be an arbitrary milestone, but I’ve found it useful to pounce on any excuse possible to think deeply about my current outcomes and life trajectory.

It would perhaps have been more appropriate to publish this article for my 25th birthday (celebrating a quarter century), but it turned out to make the most sense for this one. Life is not always as predictable as we would like it to be.

This article is going to be a collection of the 26 most valuable lessons I have learned over my now 12-year career running all kinds of businesses, ventures and even managing my own life in a very unconventional way. I tried to stay away from “conventional” / commonly accepted wisdom and basic tips you could just find anywhere. I wanted to focus on the strange and sometimes even counterintuitive things that I believe have helped me achieve many of my goals at a relatively young age.

Little did I know when I started selling my first ebook on the Kindle store 12 years ago that it would be the beginning of such a crazy journey. I’m perhaps best known in some circles for making a few decisions that seemed crazy at the time but turned out particularly well — such as dropping out of high school at 18 against the advice of literally every single person in my hometown and pouring most of my capital at 19 into the highly competitive food supplement industry.

Along with these, I’ve also made some unconventional bets that turned out to be epic failures. I’m happy to report that on the balance, despite the setbacks, my contrarian streak has allowed me to be headed right where I’ve always aimed to be. It was not always as smooth and linear as I wanted it to be.

As I headed back to my hometown of Geneva, Switzerland for my birthday last year, I managed to find an old “Vision & Goals” document in a dusty drawer. I wrote it at age 14, and it outlined most of the things I was looking to accomplish in life. It’s a great feeling to observe that after just a little over a decade, I’ve managed to accomplish most if not all of these goals. Those that are not accomplished are getting close to accomplishment. 

It turned out to be a bit of an issue, because I was roughly 80 years ahead of schedule. What should have taken a lifetime only took 12 years — and this is the perfect illustration of one of the upcoming lessons. The fix was remarkably simple — just find a new vision, set bigger goals and keep reaching for the stars.

I’ve continually enlarged my ambitions, to the point that the old vision I wrote down back in the days seems almost timid and pessimistic in comparison to the new one. I look forward to seeing what the rest of my hopefully long journey will look like.

Without further ado, let’s jump in!

1-In life, business and investing, you pay a high price for certainty. It generally pays very well over the long term to take a “low risk, high uncertainty” path

When thinking about big life decisions, people usually break things down in a very “binary” way: there’s the standard, high certainty, known path, and then there’s the crazy, high risk path. You either become a lawyer, the certain path, or a musician, the crazy high risk path — there’s no in-between.

Investing is seen in the same way. You either buy stable, blue chip, well known companies or you invest in early stage, highly uncertain startups.

The problem with certainty is that while it’s nice and sensible, you have to pay an extreme price for it. In investing, the stocks of highly predictable, well-known companies usually trade at very high prices which lowers your returns. When choosing a career, very stable paths usually come with an extreme amount of competition which means it takes years of hard work just to get in the game.

In my own life, I’ve found that there’s a highly profitable “middle zone” of seemingly uncertain decisions that turn out to actually be very safe. These are decisions that seem uncertain at the time, but that a good amount of research or thinking can prove to be safe.

What you’re looking for are low risk, high perceived uncertainty decisions. The reason why these tend to be so great is because the competition is scarce. Few people are willing to tolerate the uncertainty. A much smaller amount of effort can produce outsized rewards.

When I decided to start studying copywriting (the art of using words and writing to sell products), it was a typical “high uncertainty, low risk” situation. There was no clear path to becoming a great copywriter — no university course, no known method of apprenticeship. It was uncertain, and a bit obscure. And yet it made perfect sense that if I became good at using words to sell products online, I would never have to worry about making money. Generating sales is the cornerstone of any business, and my skillset would always be in demand.

The result was that it took me about a year and a half of intense work (about 4h per day) to become a great copywriter, probably in the 99th percentile. To get to the 99th percentile of doctors, lawyers or accountants would have taken me 20 to 30 years with much, much lower odds of success. Even then, the payoff would have been smaller (perhaps the same pay, but without geographic flexibility and the ability to choose my own work hours).

Why did this opportunity exist? Because I had to navigate through the uncertainty of learning a new, uncharted field. There was no set path. Very valuable fields without a set path tend to generate incredible returns in relation to the work you put in.

Of course today, it’s well known that copywriting is a lucrative path. There are dozens of courses out there. The competition is much greater. But there are hundreds of other, lesser known and very lucrative paths.

In a similar way, some of my best investing decisions have come from buying the shares of companies that were going through some perceived drama or a major problem that a bit of research and common sense proved were perfectly safe and had great long-term prospects.

Where is your “low risk, high uncertainty” middle-zone that can help you achieve much more with relatively little effort?

2-True long-term thinking is the most difficult and valuable skill any human being can acquire

The ability to prioritize long-term results over short-term pleasure truly is the foundation of a great life. There is absolutely no way to have a successful business and investing career without being able to delay gratification.

My core argument is not just that “you have to think long term” — it’s that it should be the singular focus of almost any attempt you make at improving your personal and financial life.

In business, the ability to plan several years ahead truly is a superpower. It allows you to work on projects that competitors with a shorter time horizon aren’t even considering.

In investing, being able to see further out into the future than other investors gives you an incredible edge when evaluating whether or not a company is undervalued.

In life, whether you want to be healthy, have great relationships or even be happier, the ability to plan ahead and delay short-term rewards works incredibly well.

My litmus test is always the following: what percentage of the thoughts going through your head on a day-to-day basis are about the next week compared to the next few years? Over time, you want to transition away from the natural tendency to focus on your immediate reality, and focus on your long-term outcomes.

In my life, this has always played out. I have never consumed alcohol or smoked cigarettes, and I’ve been consuming a diet at least 90% healthy since I was 15. I never attended a party before age 19. That helped my brain work better over time. I read books in my teens that did not have any immediate applications but turned out to be incredibly useful over the years. That give me an edge for most projects I started.

For many of my projects - learning new skills or launching a company — I started planning them several years before they actually became a reality. I started learning about the supplement industry and e-commerce at age 14, and only actually launched a successful supplement business at age 19. It was an overnight success story years in the making.

3-Focus obsessively on your strengths and ignore your weaknesses

We live in a world that is all about “fixing problems”. In school, when a student underperforms in a particular area, they’re told to hire a tutor to practice and raise their grades.

My approach to life has always been totally different. It has always seemed obvious to me that it’s better to focus obsessively on the few things you’re naturally good at. For me, writing always came naturally. Business, history, psychology, biology and economics always made sense. On the other hand, I was useless at mathematics, physics, chemistry and other scientific topics.

I was always very good at dealing with qualitative concepts and ideas. As soon as anything turned into a proof or involved numbers, I became useless. 

So what did I do? I relentlessly exploited my abilities. I didn’t try to improve at what I wasn’t good at: I began learning more and more about the subjects I was obsessed with. I focused on fields which require strong qualitative abilities (e.g psychology, history, business and a specific style of investing) and ignored fields which were quantitative.

The reality is clear: we live in a globalized, highly competitive world with exponential outcomes. Going from the top 10% in a field to top 1% will not bring twice the results — you will get ten or even a hundred times more outcomes. Going from the top 1% to top 0.1% can in many case lead to 1000 times more rewards. 

Reality check: you are never, ever going to get to the top 0.1% of a valuable field without some kind of natural ability and strong innate interest.

So why are we encouraging kids and adults like to try to fix the things they’re not good at? If you’re hopeless in math, stop practicing math! (Thousands of parents are going to be screaming at me for this one. I will stand by that statement.)

4-Stop exclusively learning from your mistakes and start learning from other people’s mistakes

The wisdom of the crowd in today’s world is that one should “make as many mistakes as possible, and learn from them” to get ahead. That is totally and utterly stupid.

Let me make this clear first: mistakes will happen. When you make a mistake, you should learn as much from it as you can. But what smart people do is learn, learn and learn to study other people’s mistakes and avoid making mistakes in the first place.

This is not rocket science. So many people start businesses without doing the basic work, research and analysis to see if their venture has any chance of succeeding. Encouraging people to start businesses without encouraging them to spend a few months planning to avoid failing is simply irresponsible.

Your main job in business and in life is getting “access” to the brain of other people through books, articles, podcasts and videos to learn from their experience. Implement what worked from others and stay away from their mistakes.

And this inevitably leads to…

5-You’re nearly guaranteed to become successful if you read hundreds of intelligent non-fiction books about business, finance, economics, history, science and psychology

We live in a knowledge economy. Knowledge compounds — when you read a lot about a wide range of important and relevant topics, the information you learn comes together in unique and interesting ways. You’re able to come up with interesting ideas grounded in reality. And as lesson 4 explained, you’re able to avoid other people’s mistakes — a major advantage in the competitive world we live in.

I’ve been an avid reader since I was 8. I began reading history books and encyclopedias along with fiction, and then transitioned to reading non-fiction books about business, finance, economics, psychology and marketing around 14. I would estimate that I’ve read over 1500 books since I was 14 — an average of 2.4 books per week. Some of these books I read completely, some of them I dropped after 2 chapters because they did not add any value over what I read previously or I just thought they were stupid.

This also does not include the countless articles, podcasts and videos I consumed. At this point in my life, I spend most of my time learning. There is simply no other activity as valuable as adding new information to my mental library of models and frameworks.

I would say close to 100% of the good things that have happened in my life have come as a result of reading books and accumulating knowledge. It’s probably the main competitive edge that I’ve had and will hopefully continue to develop.

6-The idea of opportunity cost is the greatest time and life planning tool that exists

Very few things actually matter in life. Most of the things you do and think on a day-to-day basis will have little to no impact on your long-term outcomes. But the few things that will have a long-term impact matter a great deal, much more than what we imagine.

Being able to shift just a little bit of your time from the vast mass of the unimportant to the important can have an exponential impact on your results. This is where the idea of the opportunity cost comes in: whatever you’re doing, what else could you be doing that has a higher expected value?

Over the years, I’ve become obsessed with this idea to an extreme. I’m almost unable to do anything at this point if I know that there’s something more valuable I could be doing instead. 

The entire reason why I dropped out of high school was simple opportunity cost math: I was earning around $75/hr as a copywriter. I knew going to school for one more year would prevent me from doing around 5h a day of work as a copywriter. Over a full year with 250 business days, I would forego $93,750 in earnings. I was 18 years old at the time, so the expected value of this money was immense. Assuming I could save just $40,000 of this and invested it reasonably well, it would turn into about a million dollars by the time I was 50 or 60.

In other words, dropping out of high school was almost a sure-fire way to make a million bucks. The math was simple.

Always think: what else could you be doing that is more valuable? How can you delegate, eliminate or ignore the unimportant to focus on the few things that truly matter?

7-Nearly all of business and investing is about managing risk, reward and probabilities

The amazing thing about (smart) entrepreneurship is that if you manage the risks well, the math really works in your favor. A typical business venture for first-time entrepreneurs requires between $500 and $20,000 of starting capital. If it fails, you can’t lose more than your initial capital. If it works, you can realistically generate between $50,000 and $500,000 per year in net profits. You can fail five or six times in a row, succeed the seventh time and you’re still in a very good spot. All it takes is some planning and persistence.

In life, always focus on opportunities with a very limited downside and high potential rewards. When investing, I always try to think — “how much can I lose, and how big can this get?”. 

You’re looking for a sweet spot of investments and decisions where the risk of losing your initial investment is fairly low, and the upside is that you have a reasonable chance of making at least ten times your money (or hopefully more!). In fact, as venture capitalists well know, if the potential reward is high enough, even a high chance of losing your initial investment may not even matter. It’s not my approach, but the point remains — risk, rewards and probabilities. That’s almost all there is to it.

8-Nearly all human progress is driven by individuals with a clear vision and imagination willing to put in the work to make it happen

It has long fascinated me how many of the greatest inventions, companies and ideas that have driven humankind forward started with a single person who used his or her imagination to come up with a vision, and then worked tirelessly to make it happen. It might be cliché, but it’s true. 

Whether it’s the ideas of gravity or natural selection, companies such as Amazon or Apple, inventions such as the telephone or the telegraph — it all started with the vision and imagination of an individual.

Why is that? It turns out that inertia, the tendency for things to just remain as they are, is very powerful. One of the best ways of “breaking” inertia seems to be for a single individual to take ownership of a particular project or idea and drive it to completion. A committee or an organization on their own, with typically poor incentives, will never have the will to build new things or develop complex projects.

This might be one of the main reasons why the economic systems of communism and socialism always fail. It simply prevents driven individuals with a vision and imagination from launching and pushing ambitious projects. When you leave human progress to committees and bureaucrats, nothing ever gets done. Nothing worthwhile, at least.

The implications in our individual lives are profound. If you do not exercise your imagination to imagine a better future for yourself and your fellow humans, I would argue that you’re wasting your potential. All you need is a bit of imagination to come up with a vision for some kind of big project, company or idea. And then you need to develop the will to work tirelessly to make that vision or idea a reality. Only you can fight inertia and make it happen.

9-The most reliable way of becoming a better businessperson is studying other businesses and industries in depth

Most business owners operate in the dark, in a myopic way. They may have a lot of experience in their particular company or industry, but they lack a higher-level view of the business world and the economy as a whole. They suffer from the old “when all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail” syndrome.

Warren Buffett has a famous quote — “I am a better investor because I am a businessman, and a better businessman because I am an investor.”

It seems trivial at first, but this quote if taken seriously is probably more valuable than a $150,000 Harvard MBA. If you become an investor, you’re guaranteed to become a better business person. Studying a wide variety of industries and companies in detail will give you a new level of insight into how companies operate.

In fact, many of the greatest breakthroughs in the history of business have come from applying insights that worked in one country or industry to another:

• IKEA (among other strategic decisions) applied an idea that already existed in many industries — co-opting the customer into part of the process of delivering the product. It took it one step further by asking customers to assemble the furniture on their own.

• Apple applied the idea of luxury branding from luxury companies to consumer electronics with great success. It also took the idea of building a direct-to-consumer store base (Apple Stores) from luxury brands such as Louis Vuitton

• Tesla took insights from the software industry such as continuous app updates to deliver a better consumer experience

• Costco applied the idea of a membership club from magazines and member’s clubs to the retail world

• LVMH took insights from consumer staples giants such as Nestle and Procter & Gamble that centralizing luxury brands in a conglomerate gives them leverage when negotiating distribution and ad placements.

• Dollar General took the initial idea of Walmart (bringing supermarkets to underserved rural communities) to an extreme in the dollar store industry. They focused on bringing dollar stores to low-income rural communities of thousands or even just hundreds of residents.

What is the best way of studying other businesses and industries? Read as many annual investor’s reports of successful companies as you can. Read, watch or listen to any case study you can find about successful businesses. Try to understand their business model — why does one company work better than another? What are the dynamics of this industry? What are the key insights that make a particular company work?

10-Using the lens of evolution and natural selection to look at the business world can lead to incredible insights

In my view, the idea of evolution and natural selection is perhaps the greatest insight any human being has ever come up with. It’s a non-intuitive, hidden framework which allows us to explain not only our origins but the entire natural world.

What’s more, it can be applied to create tremendous value to the business world. Let’s look at a few crucial implications:

• The higher the pace of change in a market (how quickly market share is taken or lost), the faster it’s going to evolve and the more companies will go bankrupt. Most of the time, fast-growing industries tend to be the ones where market share is least stable.

• Most industries evolve over time toward more and more specialized companies dominating a niche. The personal computer niched down over time into a split between laptops, desktop PCs, tablets and arguably even smartphones.

• A company can only be successful if it operates in a unique way — with a differentiated product and/or serving a different set of customers and/or operating in a different way. The closer you are to one of your competitors, the less profits you will be able to capture.

• Each industry (“environment”) selects for very different characteristics. Industries such as physical and online retail select for thrift and ruthless efficiency to bring costs down. Industries such as luxury goods select for product quality and marketing efficiency. Others such as technology select for innovation and speed of implementation. You should only compete in industries or sectors where your personal and business traits align with what the sector is selecting for.

• Never go against the tide of market forces. The job of a businessperson is not achieving success despite difficult market conditions in a declining industry. His or her job is finding a wave that they are uniquely suited to ride.

11-When making important decisions, suppress your tendency to copy what other people are doing and break it down to first principles

I’m not going to argue you should never copy the crowd. If I’m hungry and I want to eat some good food, I might very well choose the restaurant that’s crowded over the empty one.

But when it comes to important decisions — what career to choose, what the next move in your business should be, who you’re going to marry, whether or not to make an investment, where you’re going to live — suppress your tendency to be affected by social proof.

Just because everyone around you is doing, saying or thinking something does not mean that it’s right. History is full of examples where the vast majority of people in a particular era made foolish decisions or had fundamentally incorrect beliefs. 

What should you do instead? Break it down to first principles — focus on the things that you know for a fact are true.

• When choosing a career, don’t look at what your peers are choosing to do. Focus on first principles: which fields are in high demand and have bright future prospects? What are your unique strengths and talents? What do you enjoy doing? Do you have any unique opportunities?

• When deciding on an investment, ignore what the crowd is doing. When evaluating an investment or asset class, focus on the fundamentals — is it a productive asset? Is it priced reasonably enough that I’m going to get a decent return? Am I considering this investment because it makes sense or because other people are excited about it?

• When starting a business, don’t focus on the “hot” industry or trends of the moment. Ask yourself: Which industries/sectors are supported by strong tailwinds and are still going to be around in 20 years? In which sectors am I uniquely suited to win? Do I have a reasonable chance of achieving positive cashflows within a few years? Are the economics of this industry attractive? Am I going to get a good return on the time and money I invest in this venture? Is everyone else going to be able to easily copy what I’m doing once they see it working, or do I have some sort of barrier to entry?

12-The most underrated mental model for getting rich is an obsession with competition and competitive advantages

Capitalism is brutal. The fundamentals of economics are that in theory, all profits are an anomaly. In other words, in a word with perfect supply and demand, there should be no investor surplus and all the value created should be captured by consumers. In reality, profits do exist, but they really are an anomaly: if an industry is able to sustain high returns on invested capital, it’s going to attract a mass of new entrants that will drive down the returns.

Even within an industry, if your company figures out a new highly profitable strategy or tactic, soon enough it’s going to be copied by a competitor. 

This is probably the biggest mistake investors and businesspeople alike make: they focus on the benefits of new strategies and tactics developed by their business. “XYZ new initiative is going to help us lower costs to improve our margins” is a common example. Little do they know that within a few years, all their competitors will have adopted the same initiative. All the producers will lower cost to try to exploit the benefits of the tactic— consumers will benefit from lower prices, but none of the entrepreneurs will make any excess profits.

Fortunately, the picture is not quite hopeless. As it turns out, there are specific situations or strategies which can lead to sustainable profits that cannot be competed away. In the business world, Warren Buffett popularized the idea of “moats”.

Now, the fact that Coca Cola has a “moat” — i.e you can’t easily create your own competing cola brand, is fairly well known. But few businesspeople consider this in their own industries. In fact, there’s little to no information out there about how to create a sustainable competitive advantage from scratch in a new business. And yet it’s going to determine most of a company’s long-term profitability prospects.

If you do not have a clear strategy — not a goal, not a vision, but a specific step-by-step plan to enter an industry and operate your business that is hard to replicate, you will never generate large and sustainable profits. In other words, the only way of getting really rich in business is creating a company that operates in a way that cannot be easily replicated by competitors.

You may not be able to achieve an unbeatable moat that will last 100 years like Coca Cola, but I’ve found it very doable to achieve temporary advantages that give you an edge of 2 to 5 years. Your goal is to operate your business in a way that would take at least a few years for a competitor to replicate. This will give you the ability, if you keep executing well, to stay ahead and generate excess profits.

To make a closing point: there are many smart people who have created a lot of value for consumers without capturing much of it for themselves in the long-term. The key to capturing value (excess profits) is developing a sustainable, defensible competitive advantage.

13-Find the right role models and study the details of their lives, strategies and career paths obsessively

I’m trying to avoid stating the obvious and repeating common self-help advice in this article. While it’s well known that you should have role models and mentors, I’m going to add some nuance here: you shouldn’t just be inspired by them, you should be obsessed with the specifics of how they achieved their success.

Many times, it has been my experience that a particular person achieved success with a very specific set of tools and strategies. While the public, commonly told story about this person is a generality that brings little value, the little-known specifics can be incredibly powerful.

Here are a few examples:

• Warren Buffett is known as a good-natured investor who bought into the shares of great businesses such as Coca Cola. The specifics of his career — such as buying the shares of companies trading well below liquidation value early on, using insurance float to gain near risk-free leverage, and de-commoditizing his capital to buy great private businesses below fair value — are not commonly known and have tremendous value. Studying exactly what he did and how he did it is much more value than just being inspired by him.

• Arnold Schwarzenegger is famous for becoming the greatest bodybuilder of all time, the highest-paid movie actor in the world and governor of California. Yet, few people study in-depth the mindset and specific routines he developed to achieve this. Clearly, a man going from a small village in Austria to becoming one of the most successful people in the world must have had some pretty specific and valuable things going through his mind as he achieved it.

• Richard Koch is known as the author of the bestselling book The 80/20 Principle and a successful investor. He achieved a compound return of over 22% per annum for over 40 years as a private equity investor and venture capitalist. Yet, few have studied in-depth the specific strategies and mental models he has used to evaluate investments — which, in his case, he’s kind enough to outline for free in various podcasts, books and articles!

• Jeff Bezos is known for having created the behemoth that is Amazon today. Yet, few people know the specifics of his career — from his work at the hedge fund D.E Shaw which taught him that long-term free cashflows are the key determinants of a company’s value, to his use of the negative cash conversion cycle inspired by Costco, to his strategic approach to growth and building defensible competitive advantages.

I’ll cut the examples short — the lesson is simple. When you see someone you admire achieving great success, don’t just take it at face value. Dig, dig and dig some more until you’re able to find the specific insights or ideas that helped them achieve their success.

14-Hard work really isn’t enough. Focus on leverage instead

It’s always struck me how people like to talk so much about how working hard is the key to success. I see plenty of people working very hard and going nowhere. What gives?

As it turns out, hard work in and of itself really isn’t that valuable. Hard work simply is labor — and there’s plenty of labor to go around. Just try posting a job post for an unqualified position online and see how many applications you’re going to receive.

The real underrated factor behind how some people who “worked hard” achieved wealth and success is really leverage. Leverage can come in many different forms:

• Selling a mass-appeal/mainstream product which can be sold to a large number of people. This is operating leverage — when growing the revenue of a business significantly leads to an even more dramatic increase in profits because the fixed cost base does not expand.

• Selling an extremely expensive product or service for wealthy people or big businesses. The leverage here is that you’re exploiting the large company’s existing success or the wealthy person’s success in tapping his or her own form of leverage.

• Raising funds to grow a company or manage a private equity fund. This is leverage from capital — when you’re using other people’s money to generate returns and capture some of them for yourself.

• Building a large audience which means you can promote and market your or other people’s products without any advertising cost. Think of wealthy influencers, YouTubers and podcasters.

• Starting a service business where other employees are doing the work for you — this is leverage from labor.

These are just a few basic examples of how leverage is the real factor that unlocks value and wealth. You have to find creative ways of coming up with leverage that creates value and allows you to capture some of the value you create (see point number 12 to understand how to capture value).

Working hard may be necessary — but it’s far from being enough.

15-It’s incredibly difficult to get rich without understanding finance and accounting deeply

Finance and accounting are the language of money. If you’re not fluent and highly proficient in the language of money, becoming wealthy is much harder.

It doesn’t mean you have to become a quant genius and be able to do equations in your head. You just need to become very comfortable reading financial statements, understanding some key finance and accounting concepts, and making financial plans and financial predictions.

Here are a few concepts you should really study:

• The idea of returns on capital — meaning, how much money does a company need to invest to generate its current and future earnings? The more money is required to grow a business, the less of the profits it will be able to pay to its owners.

• The difference between cash and profits. A business can be highly profitable but bleeding cash. Some businesses always have to reinvest into capital expenditures to generate their profits, while others turn almost all of their profits into cash. What matters ultimately are not a company’s profits but its free cashflow that can be distributed to shareholders.

• The importance of gross margins, particularly in how it creates inherent operating leverage. Companies with a higher gross margin tend to simply be better businesses as long as that gross margin is sustainable. 

• The difference between maintenance expenditures and capital expenditures and growth expenditures. There’s a big difference between a company that has to permanently keep making investments to maintain its revenue and earnings versus a company investing part of its profits and cashflow to grow.

• The use of debt to increase returns while simultaneously increasing risk. Debt can be an incredibly powerful tool to enhance financial returns, but it also adds the risk of bankruptcy. Study its successful and unsuccessful uses.

• How to determine the value of a business. Ultimately, it’s impossible not to get rich if you’re really competent at determining the fair value of businesses. You should study the art and science of valuation from many different angles.

There’s a lot more, but these are good starting points.

16-Optimism is a superpower, and you should nurture it

I’ve always observed in life that the most successful businesspeople and managers tend to be highly optimistic. This doesn’t mean they’re delusional — they’re can admit their weaknesses and failures. But they have a generally positive outlook on the future.

Now, here’s the trick: it’s easy to be optimistic when things are going well. But being able to be optimistic when things are difficult or not going your way is the real superpower. Because it requires a certain “leap of faith” — you have to keep a positive outlook even when the world seems to be against you.

It’s extremely important in your own life to develop mental habits and tangible habits that will keep you positive and focused on the upside. Daily exercise, healthy food, and the continuous habit of positive thinking are all tools that are proven to work. If you can’t keep your energy and optimism up, you’re not going to get anywhere. You can be the most knowledgeable and visionary businessperson in the world, but if you don’t have the energy and optimism necessary to move forward, you will not succeed.

17-Learning to understand consumer behavior is one of the highest return-per-hour activities you can perform

There are many strange psychological phenomenons that affect consumer behavior and defy conventional economic wisdom. Ever since Daniel Kahneman published “Thinking Fast And Slow”, the field of behavioral economics has been growing rapidly and still remains understudied.

Deep study and understanding of principles such as:

• Raising product prices can increase demand in specific situations — when an intermediary such as a plumber sells a product with a commission or for luxury goods

• Sales of cosmetic products for women tend increase during recessions — evolutionary psychology has proven that in times of economic scarcity, women pay more attention to their appearance for prospective mates

• Adding an additional product to a product line that does not sell or is unprofitable can increase the sales of other products in the line — think adding an incredibly expensive product to a carmaker or luxury goods brand to improve the perception of the brand even if it barely sells

• Creating the illusion of scarcity can massively increased perceived value for a product — think small-batch fashion drops or limited editions

These might seem like oddly specific situations, but they create something “interesting”. What does interesting mean? It tends to lead to situations where companies can create and capture a lot of value with these insights. Obvious example — if you own or invest in a company where raising prices increases demand, you’re in a pretty damn good position to generate excess returns.

18-Everyone should aim to become at least a good public speaker and learn about persuasion

There’s no two ways around it — whatever you want to achieve, chances are you’re going to need to persuade people along the way. In business, whether you want to sell your products to consumers or businesses, you need persuasion. In your personal life, whether you want to find a partner or convince people to do something, you need persuasion.

Public speaking is directly related to this too. Being able to give compelling speeches and to debate well can turbocharge your career. It can help you gain influence, network with interesting people and get a much easier entry point into any field. 

The easiest way I’ve found to become a good public speaker and “master persuader” is simply studying masters in the field. Listen to old Churchill speeches, look at how Tony Robbins behaves on stage. Record yourself in video format and then compare how you speak and behave in front of the camera with the masters. I performed these kinds of activities for many months when I was younger, and it paid off.

19-We consistently overestimate the results from intense work periods and underestimate the results of consistent progress over long periods of time

In the self-help world, you hear this all the time — “Set a clear goal for the next 90 days, work intensely at it and you can achieve anything.”

In my own life, I’ve found this kind of thinking to be not only wrong but also destructive. The problem is that it’s a natural human tendency to overestimate that we can achieve over short periods of time. We’re naturally short-sighted — after all, we evolved in an environment where long-term planning had far less value than it has today. In our “caveman days”, you just had to get motivated for this season’s hunt — not plan 5 years ahead for a new business.

On the other hand, some of the best results I ever achieved happened when I created a simple system: I’m going to make consistent, daily progress toward XYZ objective, and I don’t particularly care how long it takes. Paradoxically, this kind of thinking led to relatively “fast” results — such as becoming a high-level copywriter in 12 to 18 months.

We all want to achieve great things — but don’t make a whole event out of it. Simply create a system — a set of tasks you can perform daily to get closer to that goal. Forget about saying that it has to happen in XYZ days — just make progress toward it daily. Want to become wiser? Read 30 minutes per day. Fitter? Exercise 30 minutes per day. More charismatic? Record yourself speaking 30 minutes per day. Build a successful business? Perform 3 key tasks per day to move forward.

20-Learning to control and discipline your mind is not cheesy self-help, it’s the only way to live a good life

When reflecting back to some of the best and worst periods of my life, what I’ve come to realize is that the objective material circumstances I was in were not the main factor at play. There have been some relatively tough periods that I remember fondly because my “state of mind” was in the right place.

In fact, perhaps the worst period of my life which I won’t talk about in-depth here came many years ago at what was perhaps the peak of my accomplishments at the time. What happened? I was in the wrong state of mind. I wasn’t in the forward-moving, aggressive mindset that had always driven me. I had become passive, a victim of my circumstances.

On the other hand, I remember fondly the days of my last (before dropping out) year of high school. Objectively, my life may not have looked great on the outside — I was waking up at 6.30am every morning to go to school, then coming home and from 5pm to 11pm working on learning copywriting and doing client work. My only “hobby” was lifting weights 3 times per week to achieve my fitness goals. Weekends were basically spent working the whole time. Yet it was one of the most exhilarating moments of my life.

Some of my life’s best periods, which hopefully you can get some value from and implement in your own life, came under a very specific set of circumstances:

1. I had a very clear idea of what I was trying to achieve

2. I was making clearly visible and tangible progress toward that vision on a daily basis

3. I had a strong and carefully selected narrative in place about my identity, who I was and what my beliefs were (you could call it a “philosophy”)

4. I was surrounded by like-minded, optimistic people who shared this philosophy

This point is strongly related to the one about optimism. You need to take control of your “mental narrative” — your identity, vision and beliefs. It’s going to happen anyway, but if you don’t take control of it, the world will dictate its own vision and identity onto you. Don’t let your life happen by accident.

21-Most of winning in life is about positioning yourself at the right place and the right time. Quitting is sometimes the best choice you can make

I would bet almost every single time on a person of average intelligence and work ethic who found a good opportunity at the right time over an extremely smart and disciplined person pursuing a bad opportunity.

Time and time again, I have seen extremely smart and competent people position themselves poorly and fail. Whether it’s getting into declining industries with bad economics, choosing highly competitive career paths with little upside, or even trying to find a partner in highly competitive and unfavorable dating environments — it almost never works.

The decisions you make at the start— what kind of business to start, what skills to develop,, the first employees you hire and who you choose to associate with — make almost 80% of the difference in the success of a project.

Many of my greatest accomplishments simply came from being early — doing something valuable and important before it became popular. Many of the great success stories you’re going to hear about will talk about all the hard work they did — but they rarely mention that they just did the right thing at the right time.

Does that mean you should despair and leave your success to fate? Certainly not. You have complete control over how you position yourself in life. You can start a new business. Change your partner. Choose a new career. Move to a new city. If things are not working the way you want now, chances are they also won’t be working a few years down the line.

Your goal in life is not to follow the success path of someone else and try to be someone you’re not. Your goal is to know yourself and the world enough to find the path with the greatest potential that uniquely suits you. You need to find the equivalent of “product-market fit” for yourself.

At the same time, one caveat: be wary of giving enough time for your projects to develop. If you’re a year into a 2-year project, now may not be a wise time to quit. Don’t be excessively impatient.

22-Comparison is not only the enemy of joy, it’s also the enemy of success. Create your own standards and ignore the crowd

Few things are as destructive to an ambitious person as comparison. Comparing yourself to people both more and less successful than you is a trap. If you look at someone who has achieved more than you and compare it to your current life, it might be discouraging or even trigger envy or jealousy. If you look at someone who is worst than you are at something, it will encourage complacency.

You have to develop your own outlook in life — of what you expect of yourself. Don’t look to others to know how you should manage your affairs. Just because most people drink alcohol doesn’t mean it needs to be acceptable for you. I’m not judgmental here, you decide how you conduct your life. But don’t let the way others live become a benchmark.

It may “seem” like making $100,000 per year at 30 is an accomplishment. But it’s totally arbitrary. That’s what society says. Who says you can’t make 10 times that? Or much less? You have to decide.

Society says that not being overweight and not having major health problems means you’re healthy. But is it really? What if your standard for yourself was that you had to have 10/10 energy and focus on a daily basis? Or that you had to have a six-pack year round? Once more, there’s no right answer — but my best guess is that society’s standard is not appropriate for you.

23-Just because something is “news” and everyone is talking about it doesn’t mean you need to pay attention to it

Don’t pay attention to the narratives of mainstream news outlets and what everyone is talking about. Oftentimes, the truly important forces driving the world we live in are simply not newsworthy. I’m not talking about some “lizard conspiracy theory”. I simply mean that the large forces moving our society forward simply don’t change quickly enough to be of interest to news outlets.

Realize that the media is an entertainment business — their role is to present shocking and captivating facts about the world we live in, not the ones that actually matter.

• No matter how many “bad news” you read about the economy and the upcoming market crash, the reality is that stocks will probably deliver between 3% and 7% of real inflation-adjusted returns. No amount of bad news will change that.

• Even if you read 10 true crime stories today, the fact is that violent crime has gone down exponentially in the last 40 years.

• No matter how many articles you read about the “decline of businesses and the economy”, the fact is that American GDP per capita has increased more than 6-fold since 1980.

• Just because you read about an ongoing war doesn’t mean the world is becoming more violent. The amount of violent wars has been on a downward slope since 1945.

Focus your attention on the real, slow-moving factors that really drive our world. Take into account the “base rate” of how societies are historically and don’t just look at surface-level problems and positive things.

24-Success is the enemy of success

I’ll keep this one short and sweet: the better things are going in your business and in your life, the more cautious you should become. Success naturally breeds complacency — lack of innovation, lack of experimentation, and lack of ambition. Whenever you achieve something significant, be very careful. Immediately find a new goal and arrange your affairs so as to avoid becoming passive.

In fact, you should be on highest alert when things are going well in your life. Be a little paranoid — in business, someone is probably going after your success and trying to copy you.

25-Most young people are better off trying to increase their earning power than saving every last penny

This might be a controversial one. Personal finance advisors are always quick to point out that “if you cut your expenses and invest that money, at retirement it’s going to be worth XYZ”.

There are many, many problems with that. First of all, there’s no better time than your twenties to live a good life. Second, it assumes that the best way to save more is to cut expenses — and that’s mathematically wrong. There are only so many expenses you can cut — but there’s an unlimited amount of money to be made.

Instead of focusing on avoiding drinking a Starbucks latte a few times a week, you’re better off buying some books or a course to develop a skillset and multiply your earning power many-fold.

26-Overconfidence and a little ego, as long as they’re well managed, can take you far in life

It’s very, very hard to achieve big things if you’re a very pragmatic and realistic person. You need just the right mix of overconfidence, ego and ambition to achieve great things.

You don’t want to become delusional — a megalomaniac who thinks he’s better than everyone even against all evidence of the contrary. But you do need to have a very high opinion of yourself. When I was writing my big vision at 14 in a notepad, I certainly had an excessively high opinion of myself — but life is a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

You can grow into the person you believe you are. If you see yourself as a high-achieving genius, and you actually adopt the behaviors of a high-achieving genius, you might very well become one.

People who are timid, excessively cautious and reasonable often don’t achieve their full potential. You have to be able to ignore the immediate limits you’re facing. If you just take every obstacle at face value, you’re not going to advance very far. It’s fascinating to me how much persistence and determination have helped me overcome seemingly “impossible” obstacles.

Our societies move forward thanks to unreasonable people who are willing to do whatever it takes to achieve their goals.

Once more, I want to stay away from cheesy self-help. But this particular piece of self-help advice really seems to work — life is a self-fulfilling prophecy, and you might as well think you’re a little better than you are and aim much bigger than whatever you’re aiming for now. You might well just be able to achieve it.