'Shark Tank' investor Daymond John says 3 things set billionaires apart

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"Shark Tank" investor and entrepreneur Daymond John was broke with a $40 budget when he started growing FUBU.

Today, the brand is worth $6 billion, and John — with an estimated net worth of $250 million — has been around his fair share of wealthy individuals and entrepreneurs who have founded multi-million dollar companies.

On a recent podcast, host and business coach Lewis Howes asked John what separates billionaires from the rest of the crowd.

It boils down to three things, John said:

1. They're as frugal as possible when launching a business.

"When your back is up against the wall and you have no other way to advance or create relationships and you can't buy anybody — you can't buy things to help you — you start to become creative," John tells Business Insider. "When you become creative, that's when you think outside the box — and that's utilizing the power of broke."

John went from cash-strapped to tremendously successful, which he details in his new book, "The Power of Broke," but he refuses to abandon the "broke mindset." In fact, he says many billionaires thrive by sticking to this mentality.

"The billionaires I've seen use the power of broke," he told Howes on "The School of Greatness" podcast. "They may spend a billion dollars on a party, because that's a party. But they are very disciplined and they won't spend that on launching a company — they'll act like they don't have anything."

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2. They write everything down.

"We're in this day and age where people are typing into their smartphones," John told Howes. Billionaires "physically write down everything. I remember one of them said to me, 'The dullest pencil will always remember more than the sharpest mind.'"

John isn't the only one who's picked up on this success habit. Virgin Group's billionaire founder Richard Branson, who happens to be a note-taking connoisseur, attributes some of his most successful companies to the simple act of jotting things down.

3. They think big.

Billionaires "think purely on a global scale," John explained. "We'll sit there and say, 'How many people can I get to walk by my service place in Manhattan?' And they'll sit there and say, 'How many cars are in the world? How much exhaust comes out of them?' They're really thinking like that. That's how they are."

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