#27-Never Enough: From Barista to Billionaire by Andrew Wilkinson

Sunday Biographies 📚 Perfect for those who love learning from the experiences of successful individuals.

Every Sunday, I'll share biographies I've read and the highlights that resonated with me. Your positive feedback on my previous biography-related posts inspired me to create this newsletter.

Joseph Heller and I were at a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island. I said, “Joe, how does it make you feel to know that our host only yesterday may have made more money than your novel Catch-22 has earned in its entire history?” And Joe said, “I’ve got something he can never have.” And I said, “What on earth could that be, Joe?” And Joe said, “The knowledge that I’ve got enough.” —Kurt Vonnegut

My top 10 Highlights from the book:

1. I looked at the family photos that lined the stairwell, and as I felt the mood in our home turn sour, I decided then and there that I would make enough money that finances would never be a problem for me or my brothers or my mother and father—and especially for my future family. But how? I didn’t know this at the time, but I sure as hell wasn’t going to strike it rich in the world of journalism.
2. 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. Counterintuitively, you didn’t actually do most of the work yourself, and yet you earned the profits for putting it all together.
3. I remembered a line that stopped me cold during a Francis Ford Coppola interview I’d watched recently: “You can always understand the son by the story of his father. The story of the father is embedded in the son.” I had watched Dad struggle in business, and this struggle was now embedded in me, too. My singular goal in life became to resolve this open thread.
4. When I told another successful friend about this experience, he told me an anecdote about William Golding, the author of Lord of the Flies. At the time, he had just won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and a young writer asked Golding what it felt like to receive such a prize. His response was telling: “You find out who hates you.”
5. The twentieth spoonful of ice cream never quite hits like the first. The hedonic treadmill in action.
6. That’s what money does—it removes obstacles. But it also creates new ones.
7. My key insight at this time was one that would become the core of how I run my businesses today: It’s not enough to do what you love. You also have to stop doing what you hate. The goal isn’t—as many people think—to not work at all; it’s to only work on things that you enjoy doing. The stuff that you’d do even if you didn’t get paid for it.
8. To me, the ultimate luxury was having the ability to cancel all my meetings on a whim and hang out with my kids, just because I felt like it.
9. I was starting to feel like “The Aimless Billionaire.” I’d read a hundred books on how to get rich, but none explained what would happen if you actually pulled it off. Now I was searching for a model. Somebody who had cracked this. And what I’d found, as I met more and more successful people, is that most were like sharks: automatons unable to stop swimming forward, eating whatever was unlucky enough to cross their path. Never once taking a moment to hold a mirror to their lives. For some, their fuel seemed to be insecurity or childhood trauma. For others, it seemed like a personality disorder. Many suffered from both.
10. There was something else that surprised me about this big lifestyle upgrade. The thing that nobody tells you is that nobody is impressed when you drive a flashy car or show off your crazy house on Instagram. My friend Morgan Housel put it well: “People aren’t thinking: ‘Wow, I’m impressed by this person!’ They’re thinking, ‘I wish I had that house.’” Or more likely: “What a prick.”

And remember, your comments and book recommendations are always welcome in the comments below.🙏🏽👇🏼

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See you all next week, and happy reading! 📖