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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.

Mark,What you are going through now, as an individual and as a people, is one of the most important stories of our time. Many would consider what I am doing by helping you to be reckless and that I should tell you to just sit back and seek shelter. I won't do that. I won't deny you advice I have because of some misplaced sense of right and wrong. I believe the Ukraine should continue to exist and I am proud to support a patriot who is going to do what he is going to do, whatever he is called to do. If not for people like that, Ukraine, as well as any good place worth living in would soon cease to exist. I've compiled everything I could think of that might benefit you in the coming months be it dealing with an insurgency or with the threat of a Russian advance. I've been up writing all night and the sun is rising here, so you'll forgive me for not proofreading this so that the information can get to you sooner. That said I, along with everyone else, sincerely hope you never need anything I mention in this answer, but now you have it. I'm incredibly grateful to have had the chance to get to know you in the few times we've talked and am inspired by your dedication to service. Mostly, I am proud that you would ask me to for advice during this time of your life. Having said that, I want to do everything I can to help you see a day when the Ukraine is at peace.Semper Fidelis,Jon-Know your situation:Situational awareness will be your most valuable asset throughout. It doesn't matter if we are talking about on guard at night, driving a truck at night, exchanging rumors with other members of your unit or sitting at home watching the news, knowing exactly what is going on will be the thing that let's you make smart decisions or avoid dangerous situations.At this point what your country is engaged in is insurgency warfare. The nature of insurgency is that you will be fighting an enemy that is elusive and doesn't always operate in face-to-face combat. In fact, they will try to avoid it. Insurgents operate with very few people and a limited budget. To maximize their effect, they will try to do most of their fighting when they aren't actually there or when they aren't in danger. This means that tricks, traps and improvised dangers will be common. For example, be very cautious if you are operating in an area that the enemy has had access to. They may have rigged it with some kind of trap. Piles of trash on the ground could be hiding explosives. Holes could be dug with sharp spikes, poles or sticks which can wound or maim. Abandoned equipment you discover may be booby-trapped. With the advent of cellular phones, the enemy can watch you from anywhere and remotely detonate at any time.For this reason constant vigilance is your greatest defensive asset. Once you are a uniformed soldier of the Ukraine, you will always be considered a target by the pro-Russian forces. Remember that, at no point from then on will you ever truly be completely safe. Someone less than a hundred kilometers away would love to get their hands on you, no matter what your job is.You should also consider what your job will be. I can only guess, but if I were put in charge of you, an untrained, inexperienced member of what amounts to a reserve militia, I would not have much faith that you are ready for front line duty. If it were me, I would free up more capable fighting men to do the fighting while having you do other tasks that need to be done, but aren't exactly front line infantry stuff. I would take people like you and use you for rear duties that would involve guarding equipment and logistical tasks, like driving trucks filled with people and cargo. This doesn't mean the rear is a perfectly safe place. When in convoys you are at your most vulnerable and must remain vigilant throughout. It was during these times when, in Iraq, we were attacked by enemy insurgents using improvised explosive devices, or roadside bombs. The only thing that could possibly save your life in such an event, is staying focused and watching out for trash on the side of the road that looks out of place.Insurgents also use civilians for different purposes. One of which is that sometimes they will be used as figurative shields in battle situation, sometimes as literal ones. For example, often times we fought insurgents who would fire rockets or mortars from civilian locations such as schools, hospitals or apartments. When an automatic system fired back at their locations, the evidence showed that the Americans had bombed an apartment building for no apparent reason. Similar tactics are being used today in the warfare that is taking place throughout the Levant. This is an experience situation, because if you are given the chance to make a bad choice, one in which you are not completely aware of your surroundings, you may play into a media trap for the insurgents. If, for example, a person is firing on you and you fire back, not realizing that behind him is a church, school or worse, a crowd of people, you have just given them a massive strategic tool to use against your forces. The insurgents will use the captured evidence to show that your actions are that of tyrannical regime. They will use it as a recruiting mechanism for spies and future insurgency fighters and your fight will become much harder.Information warfare:Knowing your situation is vital, but it is also important to know how to gather and communicate information as well. One thing you should start doing is carrying a journal to write down rumors you hear, information you come across, odd observations, or changes in the environment. You need to take the hyper-vigilance and put it to use. Do this especially when out on convoys and on guard detail. Make sure to report anything up your chain of command. What you don't realize is that mundane information to you, may be a missing puzzle piece to a commander somewhere else. If you are always supplying your commanders with puzzle pieces they will make better more informed decisions that will ultimately keep you and your team safer.You aren't the only person who can be an observer. Teach everyone you know the importance of forward observation. Thinking about how you and your friends can gather information will be vital for all of you to keep going. Try to come up with methods for gathering information that might be specific to you. Consider websites that might be useful for communicating with friends and family across the country and even consider building an internet community to gather and share information on enemy troop movements. If you have people who are willing to help out, you should allow them, making it possible for them to become eyes and ears of the military. This is something that could put them in danger. They would be considered conspirators and collaborators. If they don't want to do something like that, don't ask them to. If they come to you wanting to know how they can help, that's what you should do. Teach them every way you can imagine on how to feed you information about what they hear and see. Learn to filter it and figure out how to get it to command.You also need to adopt the point of view of a combat journalist. Carry documentation material like pen and paper with you and more importantly, a camera for taking pictures and videos. As this conflict escalates, choices are going to made which will be very ugly. Someone will need to document things to communicate them. There will be times when you will come across something horrible or something which means that your allies are in immediate danger. You must be able to capture this evidence. This is part of being vigilant. By having a means to record data and communicate it, you give your command something to use to make better decisions. As you spend time in the military you will see that worst case scenario is when command does not have enough information. A video or pictures, along with your accounts, could give your command immeasurable amounts of information to act upon, far more than you know.The second reason that you should consider yourself a combat journalist is that you will be needed to combat enemy efforts at information warfare. Everything that I am telling you is already being done by the enemy. They are taking videos of everything and editing it to suit their needs. If it airs to the public that is because someone wanted it to. Often times insurgents try to maximize their effect by releasing misinformation into the media through doctored videos or by taking events out of context. Eyewitnesses can also be produced, or manufactured, from civilian populations to say and do whatever they want for the camera. These eyewitnesses have a massive impact on spreading information and misinformation to international powers. The word of some middle-of-nowhere farmer can have such a great effect on the hearts and minds of the international community that it can increase how much assistance you receive in the future.What that means is a few months from now, it may bring about billions upon billions of dollars, extra equipment, and allies.The international public has far more influence on your conflict than you would like to believe. For them, perception is reality and all they need is to perceive that something unjust is going on and they will pull all support from your cause, whether or not what they have been told is the truth.Sometimes these witnesses are actual supporters, sometimes they are people who have been bribed or intimidated into action. Remember that local accounts of events are often unreliable. People being interviewed don't owe anything to the people recording them. They know that when the camera goes off they won't be protected by the cameraman, and the enemy will still know where they live. They will say whatever they have been told to say so that their family gets to live. That's why you have to be the guy with a camera of your own. You need to be the guy who can disprove what others are saying that isn't true. You need to prove them wrong by showing opposing information that invalidates what they are saying and proves their source to be a liar, invalidating everything they say from that point it on. It will also shifts public opinion in your favor if you can show that the other guy is untrustworthy and should not be allowed to rise to power. Lastly, disproving the eyewitness does not harm him. Remember, he may being forced to say whatever the enemy wants him to say. Even if you disprove him, he has fulfilled his obligation and has committed no crime against his assailants.Finally, in the event you don't get called up, you should consider starting a blog or vlog on Youtube. You should list what you see, what you hear and everything you know about the conflict and make it a matter of public record. Right now the world is watching you. By communicating and sharing on Quora, where you already have a significant following, you will sway public opinion further in your favor.Most of this advice won't keep an individual alive in battle. But it may keep a national alive for months. Hopefully when all this is over, you will have many, many more friends to share beers with on celebration day.Survivalism Practice and training:As others have shown, the United States military has published many good resources that are available online. I've gone through and added a few that I think will be the most important to you at your level.INSURGENCIES AND COUNTERING INSURGENCIESPage on armypubs.army.milThis will help you understand and combat those who fight utilizing insurgency tactics and techniques. It will help you to identify threat areas in your defense and let you know where to direct your vigilance when in the field. It also gives good tips on the importance of information warfare.BOOBYTRAPSPage on www.lexpev.nlThis will train you to better identify dangerous traps which insurgency fighters may use against you.SURVIVALPage on survivalebooks.comThis will teach you many, many good ideas on how to survive in the field. It will give you advice on what and how to pack, and how to live when you don't have a strong logistical backbone to keep you supplied.FIRST AIDPage on armypubs.army.milThis is an in depth primer on first aid techniques that are used in training across the United States military. You should learn how to make a first aid kit that you will carry on you at all times. One piece of advice I have not seen mentioned so far is to pack one item that will be considered odd by most people: Tampons. You should carry at least three in your first aid kit. Tampons are made of super absorbent materials that swell to much greater sizes when they take on liquid. This means that they are excellent for stopping bullet wounds. If people laugh, oh well.BATTLEFIELD INTELLIGENCEPage on fas.orgThis pub will instruct you and others on how to inspect and prepare a battlespace so that you can maximize what you can learn from it and communicate that accurately to others.The tips that everyone else on this question have given I think have equipped you with immeasurable advice. What I would ask that you do is to try to get some practice applying it before you are forced into it. If you still have time, my advice to you is to start a "camping club". You gather friends who are in the same situation as you are and what to learn the skills they will need if they are called. You plan an outing into the woods. The goal is to put into practice what have learned from studying. The goal isn't to starve yourself or see how far you can go before dying. The goal is to test the advice you have been given, see what works and what doesn't before you are really required to use it. You should try to pack as much as possible into as little a carrying case as you can. You should pack more clothes than you need, more food than you need and more equipment than you need. After a few days, reflect on what was the most important and on the next trip, pack more accordingly. Keep learning how to pack tighter and tighter so that you can be as prepared as possible.While you are on these camping trips you can also use the time with your friends to exchange information you have learned and train each other. That, is perhaps the best way these trips will help you. The skills you all learn and exchange in these trips may be the very skills which ensure you will still be camping with each other 30 years from now.Equipment Usage:As a former Marine marksmanship instructor, I would be shocked and a little more than dismayed if you receive no training whatsoever. But, in such an event, I have done some searching for you. I created a YouTube video playlist that lists as many videos that I could find in a few hours that show good weapons marksmanship techniques and practices. You should familiarize yourself with them:Mark's List - YouTubeIn it, I have (so far) collected 3 hours worth of video that describe basic marksmanship, care and maintenance of the AK-47 platform, weapons safety rules for firing, various videos for learning to load, reload and stoppage drills, maneuvering, use of cover and concealment, first aid on the battlefield, packing your first aid kit, prioritizing how to set up your gear, as well as a few ideas on equipment you might want to buy. It's made from videos put together by American Army, Marines, and Special Forces as well as Police officers, medical personnel, survivalist experts and even Russian Spetsnaz. Don't be surprised that I included videos from Spetsnaz. They are probably the world's greatest force in terms of the AK-47 weapons platform and it is indeed ironic that you might be using that against them. The complete collection, which I will improve upon in the future, teaches you far more than I possibly could given the 9313 kilometers that currently separate us. Share it with your friends.If you can, you should get hold of a weapon and try it out. You need to find a friend who has a weapon and let them take you out into the woods to fire it. Do this only after you have watched all the videos I've shown, particularly the weapons safety videos in the beginning. I want to be absolutely clear: This is literally the only time I have ever said that a person should try out shooting without having a trained instructor present. But these are clearly exceptional conditions. In this case, you have indicated a very real possibility that the first time you ever fire a weapon will be when you are under attack. That is the worst time to be firing a weapon for the first time. You need to feel it go off. You need to practice aiming with the sights. You need to spend time performing drills to load and reload, and from what you communicated to me, the Ukrainian government is not prepared to give you that. While on one of your "camping trips" I would suggest that you and your friends run through the training videos with no rounds to practice fundamentals. I'd also suggest that you each take turns to experience pulling the trigger while aiming down range. You need to know what that feels like.One piece of advice I can give you specifically about the AK-47 is that you will be tempted to use it in the fully automatic setting. This is not the way it is meant to be used. It is a rifle which means that it was intended to be used to fire single shots. Common sense may tell you that firing more rounds is better, but the truth of the matter is that none of them are going to hit the target, besides maybe the first. The AK-47 fires a somewhat larger round than other weapons systems. This means that it has more recoil and you feel a strong kick when you fire it. That recoil has an important effect on the muzzle of the weapon, it will make the weapon jerk backward so much that subsequent shots will no longer be on target. At this point you will just be fighting the weapon to keep it in place, wasting ammunition and declaring to everyone in the vicinity exactly where you are. There are very few times I would ever consider using the automatic fire setting. Focus on placing well-aimed shots.Another thing that I couldn't find mentioned was the use of a technique the Marines and others use that they remember by reciting the phrase, "I'm up, he sees me, I'm down". This means that you have about one second in the open before a person can see where you are, adjust their aim and fire upon you. You only have that much time to poke your head out, look around and then back down. There are two videos in the list that show drills for this. I just wanted you to know what the drills were for. Never stay in the open.Safety FirstI want to leave you with one last piece of advice and that is to always focus on the safety of you and everyone else around you. Think of it this way, you are surrounded by your friends and teammates. They have guns they have not learned to use. They may not know how the safety works. You have now been given access to a lot of information and you are now responsible for dispensing it to them.The single greatest killer is accidents and complacency. You need to think about every accident as a potential enemy hit. Every time you or one of your team accidentally points a weapon at each other, that is like the enemy pointing at them. It really doesn't matter if someone is taken out by an accident or enemy action - you are missing someone who might have been able to save your lives. That is the real reason we take care of each other so much out there, because with every one of us who lives, our own chance of survival increases exponentially.I'll put it to you another way. We had a saying in the Marines, "If you screw up... it won't be you who gets killed." Remember that and teach it to others. Make them realize they are responsible for far more than their own lives.Final Notes on Insurgency Warfare:You need to do everything you can to understand insurgency warfare and tactics. You have to obsess about everything they are doing and how they are operating. You're going to need to investigate them from all sources you trust. Know where they are getting their funding, their training and who exactly is giving is giving them support. You may be able to meditate on the situation and figure out holes you wouldn't have thought of because of knowledge only you have. Perhaps your finance background could show a certain pattern of spending and you could help others to lock up funds that are used to fund insurgents based on information you have gained on the ground. I can't tell you, but you need to gain as much information about them as is possible.Second, you will need to try to understand what tactics they would employ by asking yourself what you would do to cause the most damage to your own forces with the least amount of men, equipment and risk. Creativity is good, but creative ideas can often be situational and not useful. You need to think in terms of replicable, something that an insurgent can teach to another insurgent and use over and over again. Imagine passive resistance strategies that could defeat them. Passive means that no human needs to be involved to think, know, or react to a situation. Humans may not be there or react in time, no matter how well trained they are. The passive defense systems are always active even when human operators are sleeping, eating or incapacitated. An example here is that in the Marines and Army we have large troop carriers. These vehicles are armor plated, but a rocket propelled grenade could do a lot of damage, along with killing or injuring the Marines inside. To defeat this, a special type of fencing, similar to heavy duty rails you might install in a yard, was bolted the vehicles a few feet out. This caught the weapons a few feet out and detonated them in mid air, doing far, far less damage to the vehicle. Speak with other veterans of the conflict you are in to get their knowledge and try to imagine passive ways to defeat every tactic without using people to do it. The passive defenses completely shut down an enemy tactic across the country, saving a lot of lives and severely damaging their capability to harm your people.Last, you wrote that you are concerned about an invasion by the Russian people. If this is the case then you will really understand why I want you to focus on insurgency. In the event of a Russian invasion, you will become the insurgent. I'll be honest, not many people have faith the Ukrainian government could hold out long against a full scale attack by the Russian military. That means that, in all likelihood, your government will be overrun in a matter of days or weeks. If you decide you still wish to fight you will have to do so much without a structured support of a command that can give you gear, equipment, or even ammunition. You will understand then just how important it was that you learned how to equip yourself and not rely on the gear given to you by the military.You should also expect that no help will be coming. Imagine the case of the world. I really hope that in such a case the world would come to the defense of the Ukraine, but imagine what that means. Most of the major world powers will now be involved with a direct military conflict between each other. Events like that could easily lead to a full scale world war. There are going to be many, many who would stand in the way of such a thing being risked and that means that the forces of people who want to aid you will be slowed by those who are willing to sacrifice Ukraine for continued peace elsewhere. That means you will be alone, perhaps forever.Once you are the insurgent you are going to need to take the imagination of those you fought and turn it around on your occupiers. Remember how you tried to devise methods to take down your own defenses? Now you create a plan of implementation. One thing you should study is actually from Russian history. Study the Battle of Stalingrad. As German troops took over parts of the city, many of the fighters who remained were reserve units who transitioned in asymmetric insurgency warfare. It is a great study on urban insurgency warfare from the point of view of the insurgents. A definite source of good advice is a study of the Soviet war in Afghanistan. Here you will see insurgency fighters using direct action against Soviet heavy weapons and using cheap methods to bring down a massive war machine. You can learn a lot from it since much of the Russian military philosophy has not greatly changed. More so than that, it will serve as a testament to remind you all what is possible.You should also consider setting up a fall back location in another country. For you in Kiev, I would look at towns in Belarus along the border. As I see it, the Polesky State Radiological Preserve might be a good place to hide for a short time. As I understand it is the site of the radiation leak from Chernobyl, but this is the route that followers will be afraid to take. Short trips through the reserve will be a safe haven, especially if you set up some sort of safe house, perhaps in the town of Narowlya. Being that it is in a third party country will allow you to continue operations without being hunted down. If they do try to get at you, they risk detection and progressing the fight into yet another nation. Belarus will be preparing to join in the fighting the same way you are now. For Russia, choosing to follow you will come with a massive international backlash and may be enough to sway others to your favor if they haven't already. As I said before, this is what the Taliban did to us in Pakistan and it works. It's a dirty insurgency trick, but it works.The most important thing that you'd have to remember though is that in the event of such an invasion, you surviving is the best thing you can do to defend your nation. The best tactics are passed on by the survivors. Know your surrounding and know that there are many, if not most times, when you will say, "I can't win this fight." Even, "I may not be able to win this fight." Nothing is worth losing more than an engagement that you aren't sure you can win. This is why insurgents use ambushes and boobytraps. The simple fact is that you can't afford to die in some heroic gesture. It is a waste of resources that will never again be able to support your country. The same goes for your friends. Being brave is being stupid and if they get themselves killed then that is just one less person who later be used to fight and train others. You must live, more for your cause's sake than for your own.Insurgencies win not when they have won some stunning military battle but when they fought for so long, and whittled down the enemy so much and caused so much cost to the enemy nation, that they no longer view staying as worth the trouble. Those who die in the first weeks in some glorious charge during the preliminary invasion don't help anything. They are great stories to tell, but their names are forgotten by all but their closest friends in less than twenty years. It is the smart insurgent who, months and months later, long after winter has set in, are able to conduct a mission as part of a small team, plant a bomb, head back to town and the next morning wave and smile at the Russian soldiers patrolling their streets, never arising suspicion. That's the person you should become if you are afraid of a Russian invasion.Only once you show that you are willing and capable of surviving as a burden to the enemy will outside help start to filter your way. Build up your information networks to channel information from the world to you and to the back to who you need to know it. Direct information about the war from your point of view; pictures, videos and testimonies from the inside will gain you support from the outside and put pressure on the Russians government to leave. Learning to survive in the wilderness by relying on your training and your equipment will allow you to make it through the hard times when food and supplies may be scarce. Taking care of your friends and keeping them safe will allow you to continue on fighting long, long after you were supposed to have given up and died off.While this is happening you will be faced with many choices. All I can hope is that you make choices that you would want to be associated with the history of the Ukraine. Using civilians against their will through bribery, intimidation and murder can get you a long way closer to a victory. Others will instruct you to do what must be done. It doesn't have to. You have to consider with every choice you make in fighting against the occupation if would you want to raise your children under leaders who did the things you are planning to do? If you say no, and there is no other option to gain the victory you want, you should consider the very real possibility the Ukraine you knew is already dead and will never be able to return.The last thing I am going to leave you with is a question you must ask yourself. Should I give up? Ask yourself everyday. There is a point when nothing you do is worth the lives you will be a part of destroying. Innocent people are always caught in the middle of insurgency warfare. You have to ask if the government you want is worth the risk of your life or the lives of your people that might, and probably many will, be lost. If you are serious about defending your homeland, that is what it will mean. There is a definite point when you have to consider that the Ukraine may in fact be gone as you knew it before. At that point you should leave, flee to some refugee camp and get in contact with people on the outside who can help you. Seek asylum with various nations as best you can and start a new life. Use your new freedom to speak out about the conflict and about your aggressors. You may find one day that giving up allowed you reach out to speak to millions and perhaps save other nations and other people from the same threat you are facing today.I think that what you are doing is very brave. Accepting the duty of safeguarding your nation's survival is truest act of love a human could display. That is why I wrote to you the best answer I could, given the time you have to read it.And in the event that my worst fears are realized...Give them Hell and give them my regards.Thanks for reading!For more answers like this check out Global Outlook by Jon Davis and follow my blog War Elephant for more new content. 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