I could have been a billionaire in my 30s if I knew this

Somebody asked me a good one: if you had to start all over again, from the beginning, from scratch, what skill would you focus on? I gave two answers, because these two skills sit kissing close to each other, and everything else in business lines up behind them.

The first one is my biggest asset: my willingness to communicate. I can get in front of one person or a hundred people or a thousand and be just as comfortable with all of them. And here is what people get wrong about that. It is something I developed. It is not something that was natural.

Three days staring at a phone

Here is the true story. I got a job as a telemarketer, where I was supposed to call people up and talk to them, and I was petrified. This whole idea that somebody is a natural born salesperson? No. I had to go through the terror, and it was terrifying to pick that phone up and talk to a stranger.

I showed up to a boiler room and they let me sit there and stare at the phone. Shift after shift, three straight days, I stared at that phone with my stomach in knots. The idea of picking that thing up and calling someone, I could not do it.

And now? Here I am talking on a video that goes out to thousands of people. I have stood in big meeting halls talking to hundreds and thousands, and it does not bother me one bit. So the number one skill I would work on, starting over, is driving my communication higher and higher. Take an acting class. Grab every chance you get to talk in front of an audience. Treat it like a skill, because that is exactly what it is, and skills are built.

It is all people

The second skill sits right next to the first one: how do I evaluate people? Folks ask me how I separate business and life. I do not, because it is all made of the same material. I come home and I have a wife, kids, a family. I go to work and I have a business with employees and customers. My wife is a person. My kids are people. My employees are people. My customers are people. This whole thing is about people.

So you need to be able to evaluate them. You need to see what you see, hear what you hear, and understand what is going on between the other person's ears. That is a fellow human being over there, and they are not always easy to deal with, and they do not always have good intentions.

They do not come with horns

Now, the plus point: the vast majority of people are good. But you can get some nasty ones on your lines, and here is the problem. It is not like the movies. They do not have horns growing out of their heads. They do not look evil. They could look like the babysitter next door, like your grandma, like your favorite high school teacher. They can look like anybody and everybody.

What gives them away is what they do, what they say, and what happens around their world. Do you know what you are looking for? People act in certain ways, and the attributes can be learned: what to look for, what to listen for. Once you know them, you can figure out who you are dealing with before they cost you anything.

What it cost me

Here is how important this is. If I had known this information back then, and could use it as well as I use it today, I would not have lost my first company. That company was growing, growing, growing. Multiply that growth over the years and you can see where it lands. I could have been a billionaire in my thirties instead of a man who had to learn the lesson the hard way and start again.

And it is not just business. Roughly half of all marriages fail, and a big piece of that is the inability to really read the person you married. How is a business any different? People come in the door wanting to work with you. If you do not read them right, you get the wrong person inside, and the wrong person can take down everything you built. You will not make what you want to make. You will not be successful the way you want to be.

So learn to judge people. Nothing, and I mean nothing, will be more important, because once the right people are around you, you can start building. You have a foundation. And understand me here: everybody has bad days, you and me included. That is not what I am talking about. I am talking about the people who have a bad lifetime and intend to make sure everyone around them has one too.

Those are my top two. If you do not know how to communicate, and you do not know how to watch out for the wrong people, the rest of it does not matter. And that is a fact. I will talk to you later.