Billionaires and millionaire are just people like you and I, the difference is that they know how to play to their strengths, minimise their weaknesses, achieve their goals and most of all they are prepared to do without to get it all.

Is this something you do?

1. Playing to your strengths: Take a leaf out of the book of billionaires like Warren Buffet, Donald Trump and my favourite Richard Branson they only ever play to their strengths, each one of these amazing gentlemen has a different strength and they make sure to capitalise on it to the max.

   Warren Buffet is a natural trader or investor and he restricts himself to businesses he understands while open to adaptation he follows some strict rules of investing (his own), and looks for value-based investments. “I was wired at birth to allocate capital and lucky enough to have people around me early on (my parents and teachers and Susie) who helped me make the most of it,” Buffet told Carol Lumis of Fortune magazine.

   Donald Trump is a born manager or CEO, he understand how to run a company which makes his strength – leadership. He knows how to get the best out of people and to generate employee loyalty.  He tends to be a little unconventional to say the least and takes risks others would quail at, yet for him this works.

   Richard Branson is what I call an adventurer, he takes risks and he is flamboyant in his personal and business life.  He also is a born leader and is known for his eccentricity, he believes  in learning constantly and is very creative, an ideas man and very social, “Having a personality of caring about people is important,” he says. “You cant be a good leader unless you generally like people. That is how you bring out the best in them.”

   How can three such different people all create the billions they have in business? By playing to these strengths and minimising their weaknesses, which they do by hiring people they can trust to do those things they are not great at, and allowing them to get on with their jobs. Learn from this!

   How many times have we tried to be the one-stop-shop in our own businesses? To quote Dr Phil, “How’s that working out for you?”

   Remember this: extreme delegation – giving away every task that is not in your area of special talents – can be a recipe for extraordinary riches.

2. Working on your business as opposed to working in your business: Yes, we have all heard this one before, I want to know how many of you are actually following this advice?

   The trouble with working in your business thinking that you have to work hard to ‘get ahead’ is that you never get time to plan ahead. I have to ask, “Do you know where you are going?” How can you get there if there is no map to follow?

   Setting aside the time to brainstorm with others either trusted employees, partners or a mastermind club is essential for setting goals and taking the steps needed for those goals to be achieved. This is actually more important than slaving away every day in your business, or do you want to be doing that for the rest of your life?

3. Keeping your vision outside of yourself: Right up there with working on your business is the mindset you need to stay motivated. When we look at money as our main objective we tend to be focussed inward and staying motivated enough to reach your goals becomes difficult.

   We end up working and slaving away thinking we are getting ahead and yet money seems to be even more diffucult to come by.

   Understanding that by focussing outward on what we are achieving for our customers and clients and the contribution we are making to their lives through our business can change our whole perspective. This mindset can reignite the orginal passion we had for our business and motivate our actions to adding value to our clients/customers lives, increasing consumer trust, respect and loyalty which creates a natural inflow to our business.

   Knowing how easy it is to fall into old habits of having an inward focus, especially when things are tight, we need to have a set of strategies in place reminding us to focus outwardly, these can be vision and mission statements, vision boards which include long term and short term goals and the outcomes which will prove to us we have achieved those goals.

4. Understanding money: One of the key competencies of billionaires is the understand of what money really is and what it isn’t. Money is not a goal, Warren Buffet has said this best when he said, “Money means absolutely nothing to me!” he then qualified this statement with, “..money is only a vehicle to doing what I love.”

   Financial freedom is really the ability to have the things in life that make it worthwhile and that may not be material things, for me this means having the money to help my family or to spend more time with them doing things that make us happy. This is what I work for.

   Billionaires also understand how to do without or wait for their rewards and not give into the need for instant gratification. Yes it does seem like they can have anything they want, but it wasn’t always like this for them. They had to learn what was important to spend their money on and what wasn’t, often driving old, beaten up vehicles and investing instead on their business or their education.

   If you have a fear of not having enough money and yet you spend what you have to fill the hole that fear creates in you, you will manifest the outcome that you will never have ‘enough’. Read more about Money, Wealth and Abundance.

5. Don’t take it all too seriously: remember that this is life, it is filled with ups and downs and you can always make another start. Most billionaires have won and lost businesses, many of them suffering at least one bankruptcy along the way. They learned what worked and didn’t work and kept on going and developed a sense of humour about it all.

   Each of the billinaires have the ability to laugh about themselves and their lives, to take time off and to treat life as an adventure. One of the mistakes people like you and me make is thinking it is all so serious, when we are successful we earnestly worry about losing it, when things are not going so well we worry about not having it. Give yourself and your business a break!

   Get some perspective and decide if it isn’t fun, it’s not worth having!

6. Make friends with the media: Pay them the respect they need to do their jobs well and they will honour you too. If you are thrown a curly question, take the time you need to answer it without being aggressive and never be defensive or they will smell blood.

   Warren Buffet, Donald Trump and Richard Branson are great at this and as a result recieve more good press than bad, even when they are ridiculed in the press they join in the joke showing good humour and this is a perfect example of not taking themselves too seriously. They have also taken the step of branding themselves as much as their busineses..

Things to leave you thinking:

* “Money frees you from doing things you dislike. Since I dislike doing nearly everything, money is handy.”
–Groucho Marx

* “Half of life is luck; the other half is discipline—-and that’s the important half, for without discipline you wouldn’t know what to do with luck.”
–Carl Zuckmayer

* “Bureaucracy is nothing more than the hardening of an organization’s arteries.”
–William P. Anthony

* “The salary of the chief executive of a large corporation is not a market award for achievement. It is frequently in the nature of a warm personal gesture by the individual to himself.”
–John Kenneth Galbraith

* “We can tell our values by looking at our checkbook stubs.”
–Gloria Steinem

* “If your Riches are yours, why don’t you take them with you to t ‘other world?”
–Benjamin Franklin

* “Take events in your life seriously, take work seriously, but don’t take yourself seriously, or you’ll become affected, pompous and boring.”
–Shelley Duvall

* “You only have to do a very few things right in your life so long as you don’t do too many things wrong.”
–Warren E. Buffett

The Zen Bull

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