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Indian liberals did not fight this election, political parties did. Those who lost were termed as liberals by (should we call them?) conservatives.Elections are fought on agendas such asmoral principles - liberal vs conservativeeconomic principles - socialism vs capitalismperformance - indicators of well beingcorruption - indicators of crimepersonalityThis one was fought on personality, not on principles or performance.Bollywood MasalaIt was a surreal experience to watch this election. It was a Bollywood Masala.This election was skillfully turned into a personality contest between two or more individuals something like the big boss contestants. In that context, one emerged like a poor, but a brave hero who beat the rich, elite villains who plundered the nation. One of the contestant talks like them, dresses like them, mocks like them.The carefully articulated narrative had several Bollywood style dialogues tooMahabharata - one versus manyNaamdar Vs KaamdarChowkidarGhar Gus Ke MarengeEvery vote goes to mePhir Ek Baar …Mere Maa…This is not the first time that personality contests have happened in India. Actual stars such as MGR, NTR in the south too have created and protected their impeccable image of being for the common people. A generation of people grew up not believing anything negative about their leader, no matter what statistics said.Using silence effectivelyThe PM does not make any statement about issues raised by the opposition, letting his proxies do the explaining (or engineer a clean chit from someone) until the desperate opposition makes a bad provocative statement mocking him. He then plays the victim. So when he finally spoke, he could talk about as if he was the victim. At times, even desperately asking opposition to attack his parents[1]which he can presumably use to play victim.Note: Manmohan Singh was silent too, however, he did not play the victim. MMS lost his mother early on and was a partition refugee. He never made a big deal out of his humble beginnings or use it for politics or harbored hatred against any community.In the book, Games People Play (book), Dr. Eric Berne analyzed human interactions as transactions and came out with a series of standard interaction what he calls as games. The above would have been a good game.When the opposition announced their manifesto, with a bold, path-breaking scheme for minimum income program, they simply ignored it. They weren’t going to fall into the trap of discussing economic issues such as poverty, farmers distress and joblessness. An analysis of PM’s speeches showed that he wasn’t going to speak about them to his audience. Why give publicity to opponent’s agenda?However, the opposition talked about agenda set by the ruling establishment - they were defending ex-PMs, me-too surgical strikes, misquoting Rafale verdict, election commission, EVMs, Sadhvi Pragya, etc. What seemed like a naive mistake that opposition can score points, ended up bringing up an agenda that put them on a back foot.The opposition was still demanding that ‘15 min discussion on Rafale’ and the press, it’s ‘first press conference’ even after the fag end of the election campaign. After the Karan Thapar and Rajdeep Sardesai fiasco, there is virtually no image or video showing anything but well-choreographed adulation. The PM does not answer questions on any hard issues raised by the opposition or the press. Using pivoting, diversion and whataboutery if pressed in parliament.Access to powerPerhaps for the first time in the recent past, there was a huge disparity in the access to power between the ruling party and opposition.financial power to fund campaignsmedia power to set narrativesbureaucratic power to control the conduct of electionsIn the past, governments were afraid of exercising this power in the fear of a backlash. This election, however, there was no holds barred campaign. Virtually, nothing was spared.Momentary highPeople go to movies to momentarily experience that exhilaration of being a hero. They put themselves in the shoes of the actors to get an emotional high of vindication. They forget worries about their daily life and experience being a part of success.A few days from now, we will have the Cricket World Cup and Indians will laugh, cry, skip a beat along with their team - forget the worries for a few more days.But after the movie, one has to stand up and walk back to their lives. They can hope that they too can beat ten thugs with one punch. They know, they can’t. They can barely protect themselves. At least, they had that momentary high of being a part of it.This election was like such an event.Note: Romans used to organize Gladiator games to give a emotional high to its citizens when there was unrest. This is not a new technique.BJP without heroWithout the hero in the ballot, MP, Rajasthan, and Chattisgarh voted out the incumbent regime less than six months ago. In these very states, BJP had a landslide victory.A classic case is vote share in Chattisgarh.Assembly - INC-43%, BJP-32%Lok Sabha - INC-40%, BJP-51%From -9 to +11, in six months. A 20% upswing is primarily because of the image factor, not because of local leadership or performance.Rajasthan, Gujarat, MP, and Karnataka too had nearly equal aggregated vote shares in assembly but completely different results in Lok Sabha elections. Even states like UP, Maharashtra, Bihar, Orissa don’t have credible local leaders. Orissa voted differently for state and center at the same time.It is not like people were happy with their governments six months ago. They were and are dissatisfied. It is simply that, they don’t have someone to rally around.If the central government performed, the state governments would have benefited from that performance too. State elections were fought on a different agenda (performance), unlike the general elections. Remember, the CMs who lost or nearly lost were pliable people and don’t use rough language like common people.Critical Issues remainIt is important to note that issues such asunemploymenteconomic developmentfarmer distresspovertypoor infrastructurehealtheducationempowerment of vulnerable (women & under-privileged castes/tribes)toxic nationalism, sectarian violenceyellow journalism, fake newsremain as they were a week or six months ago.It is not as if India has become a developed, democracy with freedom of speech in the last five years. It is simply that people have put their faith in one man to find solutions.Of the above list, a liberal’s agenda should be toprotect the vulnerablefight toxic nationalismcounter yellow journalism, fake newsIt is a responsibility.BJP successfully turned it into a Big Boss type contest and made people forget that elections are about their life and not about the politician’s life.ConclusionLiberals did not put up a candidate. It was not a referendum on liberalism. This election was not about:Liberal Vs ConservativeSocialism Vs CapitalismIt was a personality contest between individuals. Nearly, every slogan had PM’s name on it, just like the Big Boss contestants. There was nothing about principles or policies in this election.The ruling establishment unabashedly used every means of power (financial, media and bureaucratic) to successfully change agenda from performance to personality.Liberalism was a small part of the political agenda in this election and therefore it is not a rejection of the ideas.It is disingenuous to claim that this victory is:vote against liberalismvote for Hindu nationalismvote ending casteismvote for capitalismvote for absolving criminals committing rapes and murders in the name of religionvote for toxic nationalismvote against free mediavote for benevolent dictatorshipvote against socialismRemember a 45% vote share with 68% voter turnout is like 31% of eligible voters. It is creditable and a big mandate. It is not a referendum on policies and principles.Footnotes[1] I will sponsor Rahul Gandhi's press conference if he can find any wrongdoing by my parents: PM Modi

As a scientist and entrepreneur I’ve been following free energy concepts for my whole career. I am not a skeptic because I understand there is much we do not know, but I have to tell you none of these are yet ready for market any time soon. I have even helped get funding for many of these free energy concepts. My suggestion is to first go to PESwiki (Pure Energy Systems news forum) and browse hundreds of free energy concept projects. From that you’ll get an idea of how others have approached this question of marketing a disruptive technology.You could also follow Sterling Allan’s podcast here: Free Energy Now -- Weekly Radio Show by PES Network, Inc. Just listening to the discourse will help you understand how other scientists think when these concepts are presented to them.So how do you start? If you’ve prototyped your invention then the first place to start is to document that your device produces energy.Inputs: You must document all of the inputs to the device like fuel, mechanical input, water flow, electricity, and other substances that are being consumed or energy that is going into the device. Quantify the energy input. If a material is being consumed as fuel then you should quantify exactly what it being consumed. If energy is being stored and then released you should quantify the input to store the energy in the same units you use to quantify the energy output.Outputs: You must document the energy output. This is usually expressed in Kilowatt Hours or Mega-Joules or Joules. I’d use Kilowatt Hours or Watt Hours here in America.Most inventions fail at this point. Many scam artists have tried to trick unwitting people by showing an increase in voltage, for example. That’s not energy until you convert it to watt-hours (Volts x Watts x Time). Others have tapped into parasitic energy, like the piezoelectric devices in shoes that run LED lights, or tapping heat differentials in the earth. Novel fuel sources or chemical batteries are another common invention in this field. Each of these may be valid approaches to generate electricity, and they may be very marketable, but they are not free energy. It really doesn’t matter if it is free energy or not as long as it is a useful way to generate electricity, but you need to be careful about your claims.Once you have proof of concept you are ready to approach somebody. Be careful with who you approach because there are lots of scam artists in this field with no real technology. I trust Sterling Allan’s group and of course I trust myself, but you should find somebody reputable who has looked at many of these technologies. You’ll get a feel for these groups by browsing the wikis.The first thing you need with whoever you talk to is an NDA (non-disclosure agreement). Here’s one from RocketLawyer. I have one my attorneys developed that I believe is better but honestly it hasn’t been tested in court. The most important thing at this point is not to disclose anything publicly because then you can’t file patents for whatever is disclosed. Also these agreements need to be maintained. They can’t be “forever agreements” because those are not enforceable.Now, with agreements in place you can send the person your proof of concept videos or notes or whatever you have developed documenting inputs and outputs. Meet with them, show them your device, show them the documentation. Explain how it works and demonstrate it to them.The scientist or engineer you approach will help you evaluate your technology, help you figure out if it is repeatable and manufacturable, and validate it if it works. Then a reputable engineer or scientist will approach several others, very likely in academia, to validate the technology. This is called a “Peer Review”. Together they will write up a confidential independent evaluation report. After the report, this group will probably be able to help you approach somebody who will help fund it.Sometime during this process you need to file for patents on whatever concepts are novel and innovative in your invention. If you think you’ll get to funding within a year then you can do this inexpensively with a provisional patent application. That just preserves your date for a year while you go out and get funding to file your real application. This patenting strategy depends on where your device is in the development cycle. Good quality patent writing is expensive so the provisional patent route is the one most inventors use. If the device turns out not to work then you haven’t spent much money.I don’t know about other scientists but I’ve never charged up front to evaluate a new free energy technology that appears to work. Typically engineers do this on spec sort of as a hobby. I’ve been involved in at least 10 different evaluations, including a working magnetic motor, advanced batteries, a flywheel system and a water fueled car. None of these evaluations resulted in a successful demonstration of free energy or energy from some previously unknown source, and only a few went on to get seed funding to explore the concept further. I remain hopeful however. It doesn’t even need to be “free energy” to be marketable. Any energy storage device or generator might be a breakthrough.If your device really does work, meaning it actually produces more energy than you put into it or it produces energy from an environmentally friendly fuel source, and it is manufacturable, then it will be no problem getting funding. It will be the first of hundreds of free energy projects that actually succeeds. The “free energy world” has been waiting for such a device for hundreds of years. If it can be produced in small quantities it would be easiest to go to rewards based crowdfunding. Your “community” is already in place and if Sterling and others are convinced, and they say so on air, then funds will flow into the portal. If it is not manufacturable in small size then you might need to develop a strategy to achieve seed and series capital in the angel and equity market. Equity crowdfunding might also be an option. There is a lot of angel money available for energy products.

Wonderful question!Throughout my entire career as a serial entrepreneur and writer, I have been fascinated with a question that correlates directly with becoming part of the 1%:Is there some unique way of thinking that gives self-made billionaire entrepreneurs an edge?I’ve read more billionaire entrepreneur biographies than I can count, researched what they have in common, and met and interviewed several.Without a doubt, luck plays a central role. But luck alone doesn’t explain the repeated success of entrepreneurs who create billion dollar company after billion dollar company or who have enduring multibillion dollar companies: entrepreneurs like Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, and Elon Musk.By researching these entrepreneurs, I’ve found unique ways of thinking that aren’t commonly known among most entrepreneurs (even successful ones).The process of uncovering these principles has fundamentally changed how I think about business. Some have served as a reminder that it’s consistently doing simple things that matter most.Photo Credit: Steve Jennings/Getty Images For TechCrunch (Elizabeth Holmes), Michelle Andonian (Elon Musk), Joi Ito (Reid Hoffman), AP Photo-Nati Harnik (Charlie Munger), Steve Jurvetson (Jeff Bezos), World Economic Forum/Moritz Hager (Ray Dalio), Marcin Mycielski (Larry Page), Matthew Yohe (Steve Jobs), Stuart Isett/Fortune Most Powerful Women (Warren Buffett)For each entrepreneur I studied, I’ve uncovered a:Billionaire entrepreneur strategy. The overarching principle that has served as a foundation for the billionaire’s success. I focused on one specific, non-obvious strategy.Billionaire entrepreneur hack. How successful entrepreneurs are applying the strategies to grow their business.1. Charlie Munger (billionaire investor): Analyze what can go wrong instead of what can go right.Photo Credit: AP Photo-Nati HarnikBillionaire Entrepreneur Strategy:Until I read billionaire Charlie Munger’s Poor Charlie’s Almanack, I thought the key to success was creating a vision, setting goals, and working hard toward them every day.If I failed, I thought it was because I did one of these steps wrong.Charlie Munger, Berkshire Hathaway vice chairman and long-time Warren Buffett business partner, shows another equally important path to success; thinking through what can go wrong.Things constantly go wrong no matter how smart and hardworking you are.Realizing this, Munger continuously and methodically considers every way a plan could go wrong and plots out how to avoid each obstacle. He says:“Invert, always invert: Turn a situation or problem upside down. Look at it backward. What happens if all our plans go wrong? Where don’t we want to go, and how do you get there? Instead of looking for success, make a list of how to fail instead — through sloth, envy, resentment, self-pity, entitlement, all the mental habits of self-defeat. Avoid these qualities and you will succeed. Tell me where I’m going to die so I don’t go there.”Munger’s approach helps him avoid roadblocks and be more prepared when he inevitably runs into one. Furthermore, combining goal setting and obstacle avoidance is backed up by a growing body of over 100+ academic studies on the topic. When people only ‘fantasize’ about the future, they actually end up taking less action than they would if they also thought about what could go wrong and made plans to avoid it.Bottom line: Being both pessimistic and optimistic is better than just being optimistic. One of the best ways to win is not to lose.Billionaire Entrepreneur Hack:To apply this principle, test your plan with this three-step pre-mortem process developed by Meathead Movers CEO and cofounder, Aaron Steed:List the ways the project could failAssign a probability to each possibilityPrioritize actions that can be taken to avoid failureSteed created the process after noticing that certain projects at his 350-person company were getting poor results.Rather than adding new procedures to help those projects succeed, he developed the pre-mortem process to remove the barriers that were causing them to fail.One of the obstacles that Munger proactively avoids is psychological biases. As an additional resource, we compiled a 27 page report that summarizes the 22 psychological biases that Munger has identified throughout his 70-year career.2. Warren Buffett (billionaire investor): Use checklists to avoid stupid mistakes.Photo Credit: Stuart Isett/Fortune Most Powerful WomenBillionaire Entrepreneur Strategy:Generally speaking, there are two types of mistakes: those that are stupid and those that are ignorant.Ignorant mistakes happen when you don’t know better. Stupid mistakes happen when you do know better.Stupid mistakes are the hardest to stomach because they’re the easiest to solve. Yet people, especially smart people, make them over and over.Warren Buffett and his 40-year business partner, Charlie Munger, don’t attribute their success to raw intelligence or brilliant ideas. Instead, they attribute a large part of it to consistently avoiding stupid mistakes by religiously following basic tenets and ideas they know will work.Talking about his and Buffett’s strategy in his book, Munger states:“We try more to profit from always remembering the obvious than from grasping the esoteric.”To counteract the often negative influence emotions can have in investment decisions, Buffett and Munger use several checklists, including ones for investing, problem solving, and psychological biases.They claim that using these checklists have been crucial to their miraculous 21.6 percent return on investment for four decades, which is double the market average.More recently, checklists have been receiving well-deserved attention as a result of theChecklist Manifesto, written by Harvard Medical School professor of surgery, Atul Gawande.In a fascinating study by the World Health Organization, 8 hospitals who adopted a 19-point checklist saw deaths from surgery nearly cut in half!Billionaire Entrepreneur Hack:Blake Goodwine has used a decision-making checklist to build his Lionize Media Group into a network of niche media sites with tens of millions of monthly visitors.His problem-solving checklist, shown below, lays out the path to a successful business strategy, and counteracts any internal biases that impede him from reaching his desired destination:Brainstorm. Dream up as many possible solutions as you can. This helps you avoid availability bias, which often results in us choosing the first solution that comes to mind rather than the best solution.Test. Test as many potential solutions as you can afford to. This avoids the confirmation bias of rationalizing the one solution you chose.Evaluate. Have a minimum success criteria for each experiment. This allows you to avoid doubling down on bad ideas that aren’t working in an effort to recoup sunk costs.Learn. Dive deeply into the data and learn from EVERY experiment, not just the one that worked best. Avoid taking mistakes personally and feeling shame over something that did not work.Goodwine says:“Even if this checklist helps you make big decisions just slightly better, it will change the entire trajectory of your life and business. It has for me.”As an additional resource, we compiled some of the best expert advice on how to create actionable checklists into a step-by-step guide.3. Ray Dalio (billionaire investor): Learn how to think independently so you can be smarter than everyone else.Photo Credit: World Economic Forum/Moritz HagerBillionaire Entrepreneur Strategy:“You can’t make money agreeing with the consensus view,” asserts Ray Dalio, founder of Bridgewater Associates, the largest hedge fund in the world ($169+ billion under management).Doing what everyone else does is going to bring you average results. That’s the definition of average.To Dalio, the key to having enduring, extraordinary performance is to do what others won’t or can’t AND to be right.This is easier said than done. For example, 86% of professional investors do not beat the market. The numbers are sobering for entrepreneurship too: 30.9–37.6% of new businesses fail in the first three years.In a recent op-ed, Dalio explains why it’s so hard:“Whenever you’re betting against the consensus there’s a significant probability you’re going to be wrong, so you have to be humble.”The good news is that with enough practice, you can put the odds in your favor.Billionaire Entrepreneur Hack:Thinking independently is more than one simple hack. Broadly speaking, it requires:Courage to stand up against the herd when you’re right and everyone else is wrongAccess to or understanding of information that other people don’t haveUnique ways of analyzing that informationHere are ways to hone each of those abilities:Ability #1: Stand Up Against The HerdWe are wired to want to fit in socially. So, standing up against the herd is extremely hard.Fortunately, courage is a skill that can be practiced.Emerson Spartz, founder and CEO of Spartz Inc., a digital media company that owns a network of sites like Dose and OMG Facts (45+M monthly visitors), practices daily what he calls comfort zone challenges. Spartz says:“These are little things I do that cause me to feel uncomfortable and socially awkward, but have no real negative impact.”These challenges train him to be comfortable with being uncomfortable, so he has courage when he really needs it.His favorite challenge is the coffee cup challenge, which is simply asking for a 10 percent discount when you buy coffee.Ability #2: Develop An Information AdvantageOne of the easiest ways to beat the herd is to have an information advantage. Here are four ways to get that advantage:Build deep relationships with people who have accomplished the goals you want to accomplish. By building relationships based on mutual trust and respect, where others want you to succeed, people share information they never would publicly. For more on this strategy, read Reid Hoffman’s strategy (see #7).Learn from other fields and bring the insights into your own. Most people focus on learning about their own field, even though other fields have proven insights that are applicable. Being an expert-generalist (a term coined by Orit Gadiesh, the chairwoman of multibillion dollar consulting company,Bain & Company) and going wide into adjacent fields will quickly give you a unique perspective.Build a lab, not an experiment. Entrepreneurs who can conduct more experiments will discover more new data and therefore have a big advantage. These entrepreneurs look at their business as a lab where they constantly run experiments. Many entrepreneurs fail here because they look at their business as one big experiment to test just one idea.Be good at pulling out the wisdom of others. Many successful people are not able to articulate how they do what they do. They just do it. Asking the right questions can help bring to the surface this tacit knowledge. One way that famous technology investor, Peter Thiel, uncovers this knowledge is by asking the founders he backs what they strongly believe that no one else does.Ability #3: Develop An Analytical AdvantageThis is where many of the billionaire strategies mentioned in this article can be applied:Charlie Munger (see #1)Elon Musk (see #8)As an additional resource, we summarized Ray Dalio’s seminal ebook, Principles, and interviews he has done over the years into a step-by-step guide on how to develop your own independent opinions.4. Jeff Bezos (Amazon founder): Invest in what will NOT change instead of only what will changePhoto Credit: Steve JurvetsonBillionaire Entrepreneur Strategy:Judging by the media coverage of entrepreneurs, it’s easy to think that the #1 key to success is hopping on the biggest trends.Jeff Bezos shows that big trends are only part of the story. It’s also about doing the exact opposite and focusing on what does not change.Since its founding in 1994, Amazon has focused, like a laser, on the simple idea that people will always want to buy products as cheaply, easily and as quickly as possible. Therefore, Amazon can safely make huge technology investments in these areas and know they will pay off in the future.Bezos explained why this approach makes sense at the 2012 Amazon Web Services conference:“It’s impossible to imagine a future 10 years from now where a customer comes up and says, ‘Jeff I love Amazon; I just wish the prices were a little higher,’ or ‘I love Amazon; I just wish you’d deliver a little more slowly.’”The strategy seems to be working. Amazon just became the most valuable retailer in the world this year, and its growth is speeding up, while the growth of its main competitor, Walmart, is slowing down.Bottom line: Become the best in one core area by continually investing in it over time, rather than jumping from trend to trend and starting over each time.Billionaire Entrepreneur Hack:To apply this principle to your business, identify a core customer need that will likely stay the same (even as technology and culture evolve) to which your company is uniquely positioned to cater.Then build your company around it.This is what Ohio-based entrepreneur Jason Duff did.Realizing that nostalgia doesn’t get the attention it deserves, Duff built his whole real estate business around it. Nostalgia is the universal inclination to remember the past sentimentally in order to derive meaning from our lives.Duff applied this insight in his company by focusing on restoring historic downtown buildings rather than tearing them down and building modern structures.He used the following formula to create hundreds of jobs in his community and build several multimillion dollar businesses.Purchase overlooked historic properties at a large discountInvest heavily in repurposing and restoring themTell the story of what they meant (and could mean again) to the community through social media.In doing so, he has increased the value of the property, by tapping into the warm feelings held by the townspeople who remember coming to the building in their youth. His Facebook posts providing details on renovation projects regularly attract hundreds of likes.5. Elizabeth Holmes (31-year-old billionaire): Be laser focused on a single problem with no backup plan for your career.Photo Credit: Steve Jennings/Getty Images For TechCrunchBillionaire Entrepreneur Strategy:Elizabeth Holmes, the 31 year old founder of Theranos (valued at $9 billion) doesn’t believe in backup plans. Speaking to a group of students at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, Holmes shared her philosophy:“I think that the minute that you have a backup plan, you’ve admitted that you’re not going to succeed.”Conventional thinking says you should diversify when it comes to your career, business, and strategies within your business. The rationale is that if one option fails, you’ll still have something to fall back on.The problem with this approach is that it takes precious time and resources away from your best option. As a result, you decrease the odds that either one will work.Holmes’s approach is to spend extra time determining what to focus on and then put all of her energy into that one thing. The same philosophy is used by Warren Buffett who only makes 2–3 investments per year.Another benefit of going all in on one career path is that you are building up your skills, network, and reputation in that field, so even if things don’t go as you had planned, you can still use your ‘career capital’ to pursue your next big idea.Finally, Katy Milkman, a professor at Wharton, has performed research that shows that backup plans come with another unexpected downside. She explains the downside in an episode of the Hidden Brain podcast:“Because you know that all your eggs aren’t in this one basket, you may feel more confident and comfortable relaxing and letting up and not pushing as hard toward your primary goal since you know things will be OK, you can always go with your back up plan.”Billionaire Entrepreneur Hack:By not having a backup plan, you can put all your energy into your primary plan.But, in order for this to work, you need to have put in the extra effort to make sure you’ve prioritized correctly.The “one thing” philosophy is a powerful approach that ensures you stay on track.The heart of this approach is taking extra time to prioritize, so you always have clear view of the one most important thing you can do for the day, for the week, for the month, and for the year to push your vision forward.This approach:Forces you to get a deeper understanding of what’s really importantIncreases the odds of completing that one thingRyan Simonetti, co-founder of Convene, which has 150+ employees, applies the “one thing” philosophy by waking up every morning and asking himself,“What is the one thing I need to do today to help my company accomplish its singular vision such that by doing it everything else would be easier or unnecessary?”In an Entrepreneur.com article, Simonetti shares,“When you compound this process over days, months and years, the impact is truly astounding. It is the 80/20 rule on steroids.”Professor Edward D. Hess has spent much of his career studying the outliers (both private and public companies) that achieved above average shareholder returns. What he shares in his book, Smart Growth, is that focus on a singular vision is one of the key themes of successful companies.6. Steve Jobs (Apple co-founder): Use storytelling to make your vision more compelling; not mission-speak.Photo Credit: Matthew YoheBillionaire Entrepreneur Strategy:Having a powerful vision is essential for all entrepreneurs, but if you are going to excel, your stakeholders need to buy into your vision.That’s where most people fail.For many, the vision ends up becoming a few lines of mission-speak on their corporate website.Yet, there are other leaders like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk who seem to have the superpower to distort reality.After listening to them, it feels like their vision of the world is inevitable and http://critical.It is easy to attribute this ability to charisma, but there is a case to be made that Jobs was just really good at storytelling, which is a learnable skill.According to academic studies on storytelling, great stories transport others into a whole other world and, in doing so, alter their beliefs, cause a loss of access to real-world facts, evoke emotions, and significantly reduce their ability to detect inaccuracies.Throughout history, visionary storytellers have changed the course of societies and industries:Billionaire Entrepreneur Hacks:1. Turn Your Vision Into A Detailed Story And Picture1–800-GOT-JUNK? founder and CEO Brian Scudamore captures his company’s vision through a document called the Painted Picture.In vivid detail, the document explains what Scudamore expects the company to be like in 3 to 5 years. This description includes both quantitative details (like the number of people the company will employ and how many locations it will have) and qualitative ones (like how employees will describe the culture to their families).The Painted Picture was paramount in 1–800-GOT-JUNK? growing its revenues to more than $100 million, Scudamore says. He recommends the following steps "retreat, visualize, and ask" to create your own:Retreat: First, grab a notebook and find a quiet space where you don’t have any distractions from your daily life.Visualize: Transplant yourself five years into the future. See yourself looking around at your life and your business. Imagine that you’re really in that place where the future HAS already happened. For example, if you have a five-year old child, imagine your child is now ten. Then, imagine yourself five years older.Ask: Once you’ve transported yourself to that place, ask yourself some questions that will help you “crystal ball” the future. Here are some key questions to ask yourself:- What is your top-line revenue?- How many people are on your team?- How would your people describe the culture of your company when talking to a family member?- What is the press saying about your business? Be as specific as possible: what would your local paper say about your company? What would your favorite magazine say?- What do your people love about your vision and where the company is headed?- How would a customer describe their experience with you? What would they say to their best friend?- What accomplishment are you most proud of? What accomplishment are your people most proud of?- What do you do better than anyone else on the planet?- Describe your office environment in detail.- Describe your service area. Who are your customers and how do they feel?As an additional resource, read Brian Scudamore’s article on the science-backed reasons that creating a vision is so powerful.2. Share Your Vision Often And EverywhereCameron Herold, author of Double Double, CEO coach and globally renowned speaker has helped tens of thousands of high growth entrepreneurs and leaders from 6 continents create a Vivid Vision for their organizations.One of the biggest mistakes that Herold sees leaders make is keeping their vision to themselves rather than sharing it with others.He recommends sharing your Vivid Vision as widely and as often as you can. This means sharing it with your team, family and friends, investors, media, customers, potential employees, and partners. He explains why:“When you’re a startup just getting traction, you can’t offer the salary and benefits that a world-class employee would normally get at a large company. You haven’t accomplished a lot that you can talk to the media about. So, what you’re always selling is the sizzle; not the steak. The sizzle is your vision!”A few ways and reasons that Herold recommends sharing your vision with different stakeholders include:Media Exposure. Herold recommends turning every conversation with the media into a conversation about the vision:“What makes a company like Uber get covered is not the fact that it’s a taxi service; it’s the story that Uber is completely changing the transportation industry. If companies like Uber only talked about what they did now, they’d be boring and they’d only get a fraction of the media coverage.”Employee Filtering. Herold says that the Vivid Vision should act like a magnet; it should attract those who are committed and repel those who aren’t. He shares one example of what one of his CEO clients told his employees after sharing the vivid vision with them for the first time, “15% of you hated what you heard. That’s alright. Now’s an ok time for you to leave. 5% of you loved it. Let’s build it. This is what we’re working toward.”Customer Relationships. Herold advises his clients to send out the vivid vision quarterly to their customers, “90% clients may not care, but even if just a few do, you’ll be able to take your relationship to a whole new level.”Employee Alignment. Herold says that sharing the vision internally leads to more clarity, less in-fighting, and less bureaucracy, because there isn’t confusion about what everyone is working toward. It’s crystal clear and not questionable. Herold recommends that every quarter, employees reread the vivid vision as a team and do a few things: (1) Highlight each sentence with green, yellow, and red depending on how it’s doing so everyone can visually see how the vision is coming alive. (2) Share how they individually can make each sentence of the vivid vision come true. (3) Circle sentences that really excite them and read those sentences out loud.Executive / Board Alignment. In a Forbes interview, Herold recommends having one executive read all or part of the vivid vision at the beginning of your meetings meetings with executive and board members.As an additional resource, go here to download Cameron’s free book chapter on how to create a Vivid Vision.7. Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn founder): Build deep, long-term relationships that give you insider knowledge.Photo Credit: Joi ItoBillionaire Entrepreneur Strategy:If you reverse engineer the relationships of many successful entrepreneurs, as I have, you will realize that many people work with the same people over and over in their careers.In the technology world, this phenomenon has been cataloged extensively (see the mafias of Oracle, Netscape, Fairchild, PayPal, andMyspace). Each of these companies have spawned new multi-billion dollar enterprises as a result of former employees starting new companies together, advising each other, investing in each other, and much more.These long-term, collaborative networks are often referred to as mafias. Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn and part of the PayPal mafia, has put these types of relationships at the centre of his career and makes a case that others should too. In the information age, one of the best ways to get information is not from just being better at searching Google, it’s from learning how to build a network and get the information you need through that network, Hoffman says.In a fascinating interview on This Week In Startups, Hoffman goes so far as to say that the biggest mistake in his career was deciding that in order to be a product manager he needed to learn product management skills. In retrospect, he would have focused on placing himself in the right network by working at one of the fastest growing, futuristic companies at that time: Netscape.Hoffman refers to the information that only exists in people’s heads as the ‘dark net.’ This includes information that is not searchable online, in any book, or in any classroom and never will be.Getting access to this ‘dark net’ information from people who have accomplished what you want to accomplish is extremely valuable and will help you think independently. The ‘dark net’ includes people’s lessons learned and hacks, topics that are too sensitive to talk about because they make someone look bad, and tacit knowledge (knowledge that people have but aren’t able to articulate).Hoffman explains the power of the ‘dark net’:“Ten extremely informed individuals who are happy to share what they know with you when you engage them can tell you a lot more than a thousand people you only know in the most superficial way.”Billionaire Entrepreneur Hack:Deep long-term relationships don’t happen by chance. Just as divorce rates are high, so too are partnerships that go sour.Two keys on building long-term relationships that I’ve learned from researching and writing on the art and science of building deep and authentic relationships for Forbes include:Key #1: Be extremely picky about whom you spend a lot of time around.Our time is limited. Every minute you spend with one person is a minute you’re NOT spending with someone else. Below are characteristics other relationship builders and I use for filtering our professional network:1. Professional network. Qualities that I look for:They value relationships over pure achievement and are willing and able to invest in the relationshipThey are giversThey are open to being vulnerable and to sharing their true experiencesI genuinely enjoy spending time with themThey are constantly growing and learningThey share similar values2. Close business relationships. Rohit Anabheri, founder of the firm Circa Ventures($10M+ revenue), has built multiple multimillion dollar companies before he turned 30. He has built each business through business partnerships by using the following rules:Have a mutual, enduring commitment to the relationship so you can get through tough timesComplement each other in multiple ways; strengths and weaknesses, visionary and execution, and styleHave clear, mutually-agreed-upon rolesKey #2: Invest the time.No matter how successful you are, building deep relationships still takes a lot of time. So, it’s critical to turn relationship building into a habit.8. Elon Musk (SpaceX and Tesla co-founder): Use decision trees to make better decisions.Photo Credit: Michelle AndonianBillionaire Entrepreneur Strategy:Many thought that Elon Musk was crazy when he plowed all of his PayPal earnings into SpaceX and Tesla. However, there was a proven logic behind Musk’s decisions. Musk, like Warren Buffett, uses decision trees to make big decisions.Decision trees are particularly useful for avoiding stupid risks and big bets that aren’t likely to succeed.Making unlikely big bets:In an interview with tech entrepreneur Kevin Rose, Musk admits that he thought the most likely outcome for both SpaceX and Tesla was failure. However, they were both so important to the future of humanity and had so much potential that he felt the risk was worth it.Probabilistically, it makes sense. Here’s why.Financially, if Musk thought that SpaceX could be a $100 billion company and that the chance of success was 30 percent, the expected return statistically using a decision tree is $30 billion. Not bad!Musk could have easily focused on a company with a $1 billion potential and a 80 percent chance of success. But, in this case, the expected return would only be $800 million.Avoiding “Russian roulette” risks:If there is even a tiny chance that doing something could destroy you, it’s a very bad idea.In a talk, Warren Buffett compares these types of situations to Russian roulette:“If you hand me a gun with a million chambers in it, and there’s a bullet in one chamber, and you said, ‘Put it up to your temple. How much do you want to be paid to pull it once?’ I’m not going to pull it. You can name any sum you want, but it doesn’t do anything for me.”Smart people fall for this mistake all the time. In the same talk, Buffett shares the story of the collapse of the multibillion-dollar hedge fund Long-Term Capital.The leadership team included the smartest people in the industry along with Nobel laureates. Yet they played Russian roulette. For every dollar of their money they invested, they borrowed $25. This made them extremely susceptible to a downturn in the market, even a small one. This happened in 1998 and the firm went under in just a few months.Buffett’s point was that all of the company leaders were already extremely wealthy and had spent decades building reputations. So, the incremental benefit of growing richer was small compared with the risk of losing everything, which they ultimately did.Billionaire Entrepreneur Hack:Utilizing a decision tree does not require a PhD. All that’s needed is a basic understanding of probability. Here’s a step-by-step process you can follow to use the principles in your decision making:Understand the different outcomes that could happen (both positive and negative)Calculate the expected return or loss of each outcome:Attach a probability to each outcomeUnderstanding the magnitude of the return or lossMultiple the probability by the magnitude (probability of winning * value of win) — (probability of losing * cost of the loss)Add up and subtract all of the expected returns and lossesTo get started you don’t need to know the exact probabilities. Just following the process will give you unique insights you wouldn’t have had otherwise (i.e., the power of unlikely big bets and the risk of Russian roulette decisions).For a step-by-step guide on how to create decision trees, visit this page. It is an online companion to an economics textbook.—Special thanks to Rachel Zohn, Sheena Lindahl, Emily Shapiro, Austin Epperson, and Ian Chew who volunteered their time to edit this article and do research.Also thank you to Jessica Newfield, Antonia Donato, Amber Tucker, andEduardo Litonjua for reviewing the article and providing insightful feedback.Disclosure: Some of the contributors featured in this article are members of Seminal, a selective council that distills research-backed, actionable insights from world-class entrepreneurs and leaders.