â The secret to success everyone has but no one wants to give⦠â Hey Contrarians, Last week, I met a guy who ran a business for 61 years. Thatâs six decades. He now lives in Monaco, is a billionaire, has kids, a beautiful wife, and an insane life. It made me think: â[What if time is the main ingredient](? In life, we always look for the next hack, the right business model, the path less traveled we can optimize and outsource to ChatGPT. Weâve completely forgotten why weâre entrepreneurs â to build something so big, we live long after we die. To do that takes one thing more than anything else... Time. â
Today in 10 minutes or less, you'll learn: âï¸ Frameworks from a billionaire âï¸ Time kills all things âï¸ One thing most fortunes have in common âï¸ Travel is a teacher âï¸ The kick in the a$$ you need â
Frameworks from a billionaire As I sat on a plane heading out of France, a well dressed â dare I say kind of good looking â elderly chap sat down next to me. Nice watch? Check. Custom baggage? Check. Drinks tea with a pinkie raised? Check. I have a rule of largely NEVER talking on a flight, but I was intrigued. I knew he had a story. So we struck up a conversation. The next 2 hours flew by and ended with his concierge meeting us at the door, expedited security, an offer of his second driver and to come meet his family in Monaco this summer. You know, normal-people stuff. His name is Geoffrey Kent, heâs a billionaire, and he arguably started the luxury travel market we know today. I left with a few frameworks that will change how I do business forever. Maybe theyâll do the same for you. â
Time kills all things But time, it can also build all things. Geoffrey ran Abercrombie and Kent for 61 years. There is a lesson in that. His story in 61 seconds: His billion dollar company all started with him being born in 1942 in Zambia. He was raised in Kenya to hunt, ride horses, and question authority. He got expelled from school at 16 for having a motorcycle. Instead of switching schools, he went on a two-month road trip where he became the first person to travel 3,000 miles on motorcycle from Kenya to Cape Town. Not a safe route to say the least. His thread of adventure carried through enrollment in the British military, to becoming the world polo champion alongside the Prince of Wales. One day, he realized he wanted to integrate his love for adventure and travel in business. So in 1962, he started Abercrombie & Kent with the idea to do photographic safaris and the slogan, âHunt with a camera, not with a gun.â He created the first luxury camping tent experience in Africa, and today A&K has 55 offices in more than 30 countries, offering 100s of tours across all seven continents. Heâs managed to make millions while adventuring across the arctic, circumnavigating the globe in a private plane, and hiking peaks from Kilimanjaro to Torres del Paine. How? He said, âThere is one magic word. Time.â What if the recipe is simply: â â
The one thing most fortunes have in common⦠When someone has made a lot of money and you dig into their background, I can almost guarantee you one thing: Youâll find some acquisitions there. - Geoffrey actually sold A&K to a Chinese Private Equity firm in 2016.
- Then bought it back for pennies on the dollar when that company stumbled.
- Acquired the polar expedition ship MV Explorer in 1992.
- Recently bought Crystal Cruises, a luxury cruise line. When you know how to play the game, you learn to look for deals everywhere. You learn these three beautiful words: Buy + Your + Profits. Turns out, unless you have a home run of an idea powered by a titanium level of resolve, the acquisition path is just smarter. â
Travel is a teacher I feel like that might be on 90% of Instagram bios, right next to âLive, Laugh, Wanderlustâ and all the used and abused John Muir quotes. And yet, thereâs something poignant in its truth. Travel teaches. And we crave it. â We get so wrapped up in our biz's and careers, we kick our bucket list down the path. There is saying we use in business-buying: âDo you have a job or a business?â Whatâs the difference? A business runs without you. A job is tied to your time. As we come into the summer, I think about all the business owners who will miss that vacation with their family, who will spend the two weeks in their cell phone. (Iâm looking at myself on this one, Codie.) Then I remember [founders like Peter Lohmann](=), who takes off a month a year without a cell phone while running a million dollar business, or Ann who [runs a $100Million](=) business while traveling 100 days a year. We used to work, travel, and vacation like this⦠â Now we do it a bit like this⦠â Geoffrey says, âTravel teaches us as much about ourselves as it does about the world.â What if heâs right? â
The kick in the a$$ you need I have a question for you. Have you noticed increasingly that we run our businesses from our keyboards, forgetting about the world around us? That our neck cranes down to manage, not up to marvel? When did we become a group of vitamin-D-deprived, Allbird-wearing, alternative-milk-drinking, extreme PowerPointers, who dream of get-rich-quick NFT schemes? Many of us got soft. We donât climb mountains. We only take risks with other peopleâs money. We sit behind keyboards bragging about how ChatGPT did all the work. How can you make the most money by employing the fewest people and doing the least work? How can you get mailbox money? Or a fast exit you can tweet about? What a terrible thing to strive for. The secret: Entrepreneurs donât exist just for a bunch of zeroâs and some big exit, but because we are crazy people willing things into very existence. We are supposed to be the next generation of explorers, risk-takers, adrenaline junkies. Addicts to the masochistic mission of achievement and ownership. The feeling of being so damn unemployable your only option is owner. The inability to sleep because of visions so big they pull you from bed in the dead of the night. Dreams so futuristic, people laugh at them. Those are the entrepreneurs I admire. Weâre investing in entrepreneurs like them... Who donât want passive income, they want f*ing empires. My husband and I have a saying: âProtect those who canât, cast aside those who wonât, enable those who want.â Hereâs to all of you who want so badly that your wants become realities. â
I want your hands dirty, calloused, and rough. - Codie â â â ð³ï¸ Are cruises your trip of choice? Just do your best to [stay on board](=)â ð [First electric car]() vs [first all-electric car]( to be most-sold car in the world ð Visualizing: NVIDIA in the [trillion $ market-cap club](=)⦠vs [revenue](=)â ð¯ï¸ [One simple hack](=) to get millennials to spend money at your business 𤳠95% of teens use social media & [the surgeon general](=) has thoughts on it â
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