From working in a supermarket to flying in private jets and earning millions in crypto, that’s the story of Carl Runefelt. The serial entrepreneur, crypto expert, speaker, consultant, philanthropist and millionaire, is known for driving his Bugatti around Dubai and is reported to have a net worth of 1.1 billion USD. What’s perhaps most inspiring is that his journey took only three years, and began with visualising where he wanted to be. You can hear the full, modern-day financial fairytale on my podcast, but here I wanted to look at the takeaways from his experience with nine key learnings for business success. Can you really visualise success and make it happen?
Believe in yourself, not just your business idea
Carl’s story starts long before he decided to work with cryptocurrency. In his own words, he was working in a supermarket, suffering from depression and drinking too much. However, he speaks about an underlying belief that he was meant to do more. It was that inherent belief that drove him to proactively go out looking for an idea and to relentlessly pursue success as the overarching goal.
Visualise your success
Carl is a big believer in the law of attraction. Athletes and billionaires have attested to the power of visualisation, using it to shape their mindset by envisaging the specifics of their success through practices like meditation, writing down goals or simply imagining the details of what success looks like for you. You visualise success to make it happen.
Carl didn’t just focus on his business idea. In fact, long before that, he focused on the life he wanted to live – in detail. He even took to role-playing – for example, looking at websites with the intention of buying a private jet, understanding the cost, and planning when he would purchase it – as if it were an inevitability that he would. His hypothesis was that if he was serious about buying a jet or a yacht or a £1,000 watch, he would plan it – what, when, how, which one, how he would operate it, etc. He explains how he even bought a pair of second-hand Louis Vuitton shoes as an investment and decided that every time he put them on he would act like the successful person he intended to become.
Build a business based on your interests
Of course, it’s not enough to believe in yourself – you have to do something about it. At 24 years old, Carl looked at his situation and decided he needed to be proactive if things were going to change. He didn’t know about cryptocurrency, but he had a sense that his interest lay in online and digital opportunities. He might not have known consciously what he wanted to do, but he had a long-running interest in the banking system and had done a lot of reading around it, learning as he went, whether he intended to or not.
Believing the mainstream banking system to be corrupt, he had begun buying solid gold and silver in small increments a few years before. When it came to deciding what to do, that background research meant that he understood cryptocurrency and what the merits were. He had a head start because it was already an area of interest, and he had built up a lot of knowledge simply by being curious.
Look out for Opportunities
Carl’s story is a great lesson in understanding that you don’t need a big, lightning bolt idea to be a financial success, but you do have to keep your eyes open – to visualise success. He describes it as meeting the universe halfway by looking out for opportunities. If you sit on the sofa at home, nothing will happen but, he says, he was confident that the universe would give him the life he was visualising and opportunities to make it happen – he just had to look for them. Crucially, it wasn’t his first venture that was an immediate game changer. He tried a number of things before venturing into cryptocurrency, which brings us to our next Carl Runefelt lesson…
Treat every business experience as an opportunity to learn
Having spent time selling items of clothing, amongst other things, on his journey to crypto success, Carl speaks about seeing every ‘failed’ attempt at business as being an opportunity to learn. He says that researching different ideas led him to cryptocurrency and that he couldn’t have gotten to that point without all of the previous steps. Equally, Carl hasn’t stopped moving forward, he keeps building on his success – investing and reinvesting in ideas and monetising different aspects of his growing empire as he learns and embraces commercial evolution.
Make your money make money
Carl wouldn’t be the first person to tell you that it’s one thing to earn money and it’s another to make it. He says that the key to wealth is cash flow, explaining that having reached a point where he was earning around $10,000 a month, it was the reinvestment of that money to make more money that was the game changer into Bugatti-owning wealth. The lesson here is that if you have earned a certain amount of money, don’t just let it sit in an account waiting to be spent – make it work to make more money through reinvestment and new opportunities.
Don’t put all your Bitcoin in one basket
It’s common sense to have a risk spread, but when someone tells you that it really doesn’t bother them if they ‘lost’ $100m in investments in a single day because the market was down, then you’ve got to believe that they know what they’re talking about. Carl doesn’t just invest in one type of cryptocurrency but in hundreds.
If Bitcoin is down from one day to the next, he sees it as an opportunity. After all, where you enter the market is where you make money – if it’s down, it’s an opportunity – as long as you know what you’re doing.
Be curious and keep learning
As we said, Carl’s made a success out of cryptocurrency to date because he is interested in it. His career since the beginning shows an insatiable appetite to learn. He’s not the only billionaire to believe in the power of curiosity. Charlie Munger, Vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, the conglomerate controlled by Warren Buffett, has been quoted saying: “Develop into a lifelong self-learner through voracious reading; cultivate curiosity and strive to become a little wiser every day.” Buffet himself is also an avid learner and reader. It’s in knowing a lot about a specific area that he has made an incredible commercial success.
Be prepared to back yourself in business
As if Carl didn’t start with big aspirations, his plan now is to proverbially ‘go to the moon’. He believes that cryptocurrency will take over the world, and he’s prepared to bet everything on that in pursuit of competing with the likes of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk for global success. However, as he points out, he’s not trying to compete in other spaces – his risk spread remains limited to the cryptocurrency arena. In some ways, it’s a gamble, but in reality, it’s a calculated risk based on his own extensive knowledge of a specific market. He says he believes that true wealth comes from passion, conviction and confidence – and he’s certainly got that in spades.
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