1. Charlie Munger (billionaire investor): Analyze what can go wrong instead of what can go right.

Things constantly go wrong no matter how smart and hardworking you are.

“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.”

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.

Being both pessimistic and optimistic is better than just being optimistic. One of the best ways to win is not to lose.

2. Warren Buffett (billionaire investor): Use checklists to avoid stupid mistakes.

Ignorant mistakes happen when you don’t know better. Stupid mistakes happen when you do know better.

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.

“We try more to profit from always remembering the obvious than from grasping the esoteric.”

3. Ray Dalio (billionaire investor): Learn how to think independently so you can be smarter than everyone else.

“You can’t make money agreeing with the consensus view,” asserts Ray Dalio

To Dalio, the key to having enduring, extraordinary performance is to do what others won’t or can’t AND to be right.

“Whenever you’re betting against the consensus there’s a significant probability you’re going to be wrong, so you have to be humble.”

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.

Entrepreneurs who can conduct more experiments will discover more new data and therefore have a big advantage.

4. Jeff Bezos (Amazon founder): Invest in what will NOT change instead of only what will change

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.

“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.’”

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.

5. Steve Jobs (Apple co-founder): Use storytelling to make your vision more compelling; not mission-speak.

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.

6. Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn founder): Build deep, long-term relationships that give you insider knowledge.

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.

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.

“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.”

Be extremely picky about whom you spend a lot of time around.

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.

7. Elon Musk (SpaceX and Tesla co-founder): Use decision trees to make better decisions.

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.

If there is even a tiny chance that doing something could destroy you, it’s a very bad idea.

8. Sara Blakely (Spanx founder): Train yourself to love failure rather than to fear it

the only way to protect yourself from failure is to not try, or to not try anything hard at least, both of which are sure and direct routes to mediocrity. The only way you can achieve anything big is by daring to try big things, and if you do that failure is inevitable.

Elon Musk puts it, “If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.”