The Billion Dollar Secret

The Billion Dollar Secret: Summary

A twelve-year-old boy stands at the market behind a tiny round table. He borrowed it from his mother. Beside it, an umbrella, also brought from home. All around him are the competitors: huge stands with roofs, tents, camping wagons, every kind of fruit and flower. He sells one thing. Strawberries. And he knows that by evening he has to sell every last one, because day-old strawberries are worth nothing.

One night he comes home and complains to his father. About the size of the other stands. About how much more everyone else has. His father looks at him and says one sentence the boy will never forget: "Petter, I'll teach you one thing. Sell the strawberries you have, because they're the only ones you can sell." That night the boy falls asleep thinking his father is a genius. Years later, that boy, Petter Stordalen, becomes the hotel king of Scandinavia, with nearly two hundred hotels. And to this day he says he owes his entire success to that one sentence.

That is exactly what this book is about. Rafael Badziag spent five years traveling the world and sat down in person with twenty-one self-made billionaires, from India to Brazil to China, to find the answer to one question: what do they have in common? What makes them think differently from millionaires, or from you and me? His answers are not theories from an armchair. They are twenty mental principles these people learned the hard way, principles you can learn too. Because as the book's first line tells you: success is not decided on the outside. It is decided within.

The book echoes a hundred-year-old classic. For Think and Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill interviewed America's richest people and tried to crack the code of their success. Badziag does the same thing, only globally, and not with millionaires but with billionaires. The difference matters. A million-dollar fortune can be the result of one diligent life. A billion dollars is a different order of magnitude. To grasp it: imagine someone earning half a million dollars in profit a year, putting away every penny. No taxes, no inflation. Even then, they would have had to start saving before the birth of Christ to have a billion today. Billionaires create that within a single lifetime. This is not a bigger serving of the same thing. It is a qualitatively different way of thinking.