Welcome to the ambitious corner of the internet! Each week, we study history’s most successful icons so we can steal their strategies. If you were forwarded this email, you can get the free weekly email here.

Some of us get up extra early to work on our businesses.  The rest of us are night owls who prefer working while everyone else is sleeping. Either way, we are all passionate about what we’re building.   

Passion is why I made my way to a Turkish coffee shop at 7 am on a Saturday.  Fun fact - it doesn’t open until 8, so I’m editing this at a fancy hotel bar in Brooklyn instead. 

We have to be careful when being driven by passions.  Passion can lead to burnout and bad business decisions. It can kill any business at any stage.

And none of that is happening to us! 

Instead, you and I are going to study someone who turned their passion for education, mentorship, and self-empowerment into a billion dollar business - Janice Bryant Howroyd, the founder and CEO of ActOne Group.

TODAY’S LESSONS

1. If you're not in the right location, move

2. Don’t put all your diamonds in one basket - diversify risk

3. Build your network before you need it

4. Pay attention to people’s problems so you can solve them

5. Believe in your success before you have the evidence to support it

They Say Pressure Makes Diamonds

Janice was born in the 1950s, one of 11 siblings, in a small North Carolina town. If you do the math, that puts her childhood in the middle of a place you and I don’t necessarily equate with a successful upbringing - the segregated South in the Jim Crow Era. 

And she still won :)