What a billionaire taught me

In the early 1900s, there was a guy who owned a fast-food burger business. He was a very analytical person who thought he had fully optimized his business in every way. Because he'd done such a stellar job at optimizing, he'd hit a bump in the road. How much more efficiently could this business run? 

Since he'd exhausted all possibilities of optimizing in the food industry, he decided to look at what businesses were doing in other industries. 

He went to grocery stores, libraries, a bunch of different places to gather ideas. On one particular day, he stopped outside of a bank that was under construction. When he asked what it was that they were building, they told him that they were creating a drive-through so that people no longer needed to get out of their cars to do parts of their banking. 

A few years later, for millions of dollars in the early 1900s, his business was bought by McDonald's. 

Jeff Hoffman is a billionaire. He founded priceline.com.

He created something called Info Sponging. Info Sponging is where he takes time every single day to learn something that has nothing to do with his business. He'll read a chapter of a book, a magazine, or anything that's from a completely different industry. Then he'll get a three-by-five card and he'll summarize what he learned for the day and put it inside a box. At the end of every single month, he takes out the shoe box and looks through all the cards to think about how it could potentially spark a new idea within his business or life. 

One day he was looking through his box and he found an article that he had read earlier that month. The topic of the article was bananas. When they're getting closer to their expiration date, they become cheaper. The grocery stores want to make sure that the bananas because if they don't get sold, they'll lose money. It's better for them to sell the bananas at a cheaper price than get no profit at all. 

He was in the airline industry with the company that developed the kiosks where you check yourself in. 

He thought to himself that when bananas are about to go bad, they become cheaper so what if the closer it gets to a flight departure, the seats become cheaper. 

He had connections in the airline industry so he went to every single company that he could and asked them how often they have seats that are not sold. 10 to 15% of the seats on all of the flights were never sold.

He asked them what they would be willing to take instead of having empty seats.

With this, he developed Priceline. People could now bid on their seats. They could maybe bid $300 on a $500 seat. The bid would then go to the airline companies and they would either accept or decline. If they accepted, your card was automatically charged and there were no refunds. 

Jeff Hoffman built a multi-billion dollar company off the idea that he got from reading an article about bananas. 

Benjamin Franklin created the 5-hour rule.

He believed that every day, Monday through Friday, you should spend one hour reading something outside of your industry or your interests. Just five days a week all you have to do is read, learn, and grow. 

I challenge you to try this along with Jeff Hoffman’s Info Sponging.

This will help you to adapt to our changing world. If you are a business owner, this could be massive for you to stay ahead of the competition. 

The thing that tends to be the common denominator, even though they're all in different industries, is that they all have a commitment to learning, growing, and never resting on the laurels of their success.

The difference between a lot of successful people that I know and unsuccessful people that I've seen is that unsuccessful people tend to just think that they know it all and don't see the need to push themselves to be better.

The people who are successful act like they aren't successful at all. They act like they don't have any money. They never rest. The laurels of their success are constantly trying to learn. They're constantly trying to grow. The commitment to being a student is what helps them out.

Dedicate an hour to yourself instead of watching Netflix or being on social media.

I think people underestimate the value of the long-term results that you'll get from investing in yourself whether it's business, self-development, creating a better relationship with your spouse, or being a better parent, there's always time available to you.

Just make the time, make it a priority because years down the road, you're going to notice you're a completely different person. 

You might not be a billionaire but you will be way richer in every aspect of your life.

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