A Life Plan for People Who Want to Win

The first time I saw a billion-dollar balance sheet up close, it wasn’t the number that struck me.

It was the silence.

I was a junior banker, a spreadsheet jockey in a world of titans, and I was in a conference room so high above Manhattan that the city below looked like a circuit board. The MD I worked for, a man who moved markets with a phone call, was staring at a set of financials. He wasn't smiling. He wasn't frowning. He looked like an engineer staring at a schematic, searching for a flaw in the design.

In that moment, I understood something about the world I was in.

The money wasn't the point.

The money was just the output, the exhaust from a much more powerful engine.

The real game was the design of the engine itself. The men and women at the top weren't just richer or smarter; they were operating on a different set of principles. They had a plan, an architecture for their lives and their businesses, and they executed on it with a relentless, almost inhuman, intensity.

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