Sunburned and starving. Sand in every orifice. Stranded on a beach in a far-flung country where
he can’t even speak the language. He is two steps away from utter defeat. But then
he receives it: the gift. This homeless, high-school
dropout is going to become a billionaire. Born to a Colombian mother and a Swedish father,
the young Andres Pira understood what it felt like to live in two worlds.
The family moved from Colombia to Stockholm when he was just a young boy,
then when he was seven, his parents got divorced. He said after that the world felt “cruel” to him.
He had no footing. He was a long, long way from finding what he would later call his “secret”.
“Youth like me didn’t have a future,” he said. He stopped caring in his teens, dropping out of
school at 14 with pretty much nothing to show from his time there. His parents, he thought in those
dark days, would never be proud of their son. One of the last things the school ever said to
them was your child has stunk out the classrooms after hiding rotten fish in the air vents. He
was that kind of kid and one that took to drinking, as the saying goes, like a fish.
Andreas was like many other lost kids in this world, perhaps similar to some of you
younger folks watching this show right now. With no sense of direction, he decided being
destructive was the best way to go. One day when he was 18 this culminated with him waking up after
a booze binge at the side of an abandoned building. His body was cut and bruised.
Broken glass lay all around him. He had no idea what had happened, later saying he felt as though
he was dead inside. He was a tough kid, a fighter, but when his mother saw the state he was in,
he said her look of disappointment hurt much more than any smack to the face ever did.
Little did he know, he was about to throw gasoline on the already raging fire.
In the early 2000s, he managed to find work selling SIM cards at a telemarketing company,
but then he got fired for not showing up one day. The shame just piled up, as did the bills,
as did the amount of drinking he was doing. Without money, without a job, without an
education, he felt absolutely hopeless. In his mind, and his parent’s minds for that matter,
he was destined for the trash heap of life. In dreams, he saw himself swimming closer and
closer towards a giant plughole. He saw poverty, addiction, violence, prison, and early death.
Then something happened that changed everything. His grandfather passed away. Andreas was stricken
with grief. Many a time this guy had taken Andreas to the side and tried to give him
some words of wisdom. He’d never really listened, but now with a $2,000 inheritance,
he thought he had to do something with his life out of respect for the old man.
The first thing was to escape. He knew he had to get on a different track.
So, he did what many young folks have done and bought a plane ticket to a distant country.
Perhaps, he thought, if he could just get away from all the things that kept bringing him down,
he might discover he isn’t such a failure after all.
He bought a one-way ticket to Thailand, destination Phuket,
that sweet little spot in the world which people visit and never want to return from. The number
of foreigners who’ve felt this way must be in the millions, but Thailand has been the wreck
of many a young man. Paradise can soon turn into hell in a country without any kind of safety net.
But Andreas, then 20, told his mom he wasn’t coming back.
She just looked at him and said, “Follow your heart kid and do whatever you think is right.”
He was determined to make something of himself in Thailand, but with barely
over a hundred bucks in his pocket, he didn’t have much time to find a way to make money.
Just buying the bus ticket from Bangkok to the beaches was almost enough to bankrupt him.
In Phuket, after traipsing the streets and asking anyone he met where he could find work,
he got a job handing out flyers for a hotel. Not only was working without a permit illegal,
but the job only paid about $100 a month. That was far less than the lowest-paid locals or
migrant laborers got. It was barely enough to pay for a rotten room and buy himself a noodle soup
every day just to have the energy to walk around. But when he could, he took advantage of well-off
vacationers who were only too happy to share their bottle of the dreaded “Sangsom” Thai rum.
This stuff has been the downfall of many a man, and it was partly the reason why Andreas
ended up not being able to pay his rent. He was thrown out of his hovel and had no place to go,
the vacationers now not wanting any part of a man who couldn’t even afford to have a decent wash.
He was lost in Paradise. Down and out. But how could he tell his parents what had happened?
He couldn’t do that to them. He slept on the beach at night and woke up before sunrise
so no one knew he was homeless. Had the Thai cops ever found him,
he would have likely been sent to one of Thailand’s notorious immigration jails,
hell on Earth to most people that have been unlucky enough to stay in one. There wasn’t
much time. He had to somehow find a way out. This future mega millionaire wrote to a friend in
Sweden asking for some cash. The friend, knowing the destruction Andreas had already caused,
sent a letter back with the total of zero cents in it. But it came with some words of advice.
Those were “I won’t give you any money, but I’ll give you a book that might help.”
That book was called “The Secret”, written by Rhonda Byrne.
Andreas just looked at it with a sense of disdain for his friend, thinking how is this going to
help me eat. Still, with absolutely nothing to do, he read it. He later called it “The
best gift I’ve received in my entire life.” He read things like, “There is no such thing
as a hopeless situation. Every single circumstance of your life can change!”
He read about the law of attraction. It told him not to think for a minute you’re just a product of
the past. You can change. You can become what you want to be with the power of positive thinking.
Gradually, people will feel this positivity emanating from you, and they will want to
be close to you, perhaps even reward you. He sat on the sand, his stomach churning
with hunger pangs, and read, “When you want to attract something into your life, make sure your
actions don’t contradict your desires. Think about what you have asked for, and make sure that your
actions are mirroring what you expect to receive.” Part of him thought he wasn’t going to fall
for some self-help garbage written by someone exploiting people’s fears and making a ton of
cash from it, but then again, he was homeless in a country where he couldn’t even speak the language.
The law of attraction is not scientific, although its proponents will tell you that it works.
Andreas will tell you that it works. That’s because something happened on the beach that day.
Something changed inside of him. He said to himself, “The only difference between rich
and poor is the mindset.” After that, he admitted to himself that he had for
a long time hated the world. That had to stop. The American writer Malcolm Gladwell might not
totally agree with wealth being gained only from mindset. He’d say you also need a bit of luck,
too, as well as a lot of drive. Andreas had some luck when he went to a real estate developer in
Phuket and asked for a job. He got it, because, he later said, he’d visualized getting it.
As strange as it sounds, just a few days before that he’d sat on the beach visualizing a cup of
coffee. He thought it was a stupid thing to do, but what the hell. He later said in
an interview some guy came up to him on the beach and handed him a cup of coffee, saying, “I thought
you could use a coffee because you look tired.” His second visualization was him having a nice
lunch, rather than his usual dose of noodle soup. Now he started thinking about a tasty schnitzel.
He said he could imagine how succulent it was. He saw the color of it. He smelled it. He later said,
“It’s very important when you visualize stuff that you have a very clear picture of
it…The more senses you put into the picture, the quicker it manifests.”
A couple of days later, he was walking on the beach in the morning when an old friend
bumped into him and invited him for lunch. Andreas got his schnitzel. He then started
thinking this can not just be a coincidence. So, now he’d thought about coffee and food,
and coffee and food had come. He’d thought about getting a job and the job came. Hmm, he thought,
I wouldn’t mind being rich. He then meditated on becoming successful.
Handing out brochures didn’t exactly make him rich, but it paid enough to rent a decent-looking
place. In his new house, he posted pictures of all the things he wanted to happen to him.
He saw a nice car, a bigger house, but not yet quite what was about to come into his life,
including his emotional meeting with boxing legend Mike Tyson, a man who’d once visualized
becoming the heavyweight champion of the world. We’ll come back to that meeting.
One day, Andreas gave a businessman one of his brochures for a property. The guy told
him that he’d like to see the property that day since he had a flight out of Thailand later in
the afternoon. Andreas told him to get on the back of his scooter and he’d take him there.
No sales reps were around, and anyway, he believed he was able to do what they did.
Once they were at the property, the guy said, ok, I’ll take it. Andreas couldn’t believe what
he was hearing. He’d just landed the sale of an expensive Phuket property. His boss was made up.
After that, Andreas landed a job as a sales rep, and that led to him becoming a sales director,
which led to him leaving the company and starting his own real estate business. All the time,
he was visualizing what he’d become. Then, when things were going well
and he was living the high life in Phuket, he lost something important
He later said, “I stopped meditating, learning, and doing affirmations.
I started worrying about losing everything I built, focusing on scarcity instead of abundance.”
This led to a bunch of bad decisions that ultimately forced him to sign for bankruptcy.
But Andreas picked himself back up again and started focusing on the positive. He grew a
property empire in Phuket. He learned to speak Thai fluently. He never took anything for granted
and each day felt grateful for everything he had. With around 19 companies and over 250 employees,
the homeless and angry beach bum turned into a man with a net worth of somewhere in the region
of 2 billion Thai baht. That’s not the same as a billionaire in US dollars, but it is still
many tens of millions in US currency. Not bad for a guy that couldn’t afford a roof over his head.
He now also tries to give a bit back, starting a foundation in Phuket to help young folks on the
island try and find work. Never has that been more important than of late, when Phuket turned
into a ghost town due to the global pandemic. Andreas also became a motivational speaker,
often saying things like, it doesn’t matter how far down you go, there’s always a way back.
He once said, “I came to a country broke, without speaking the language.
If I can change my fortune, anyone can.” That was around the time he met Mike Tyson.
On a podcast, Tyson joked with him, saying that homelessness on a beach in Phuket with
the “hot chicks” and relative safety compared to the US, couldn’t have been all that bad. On
a serious note, Andreas said, “Mike became the champion so early because he could see
already that he was the champion before it happened. Everything starts in the mind.”
Tyson then used some choice language when talking about millennials. They give up too easy, he said,
with both of them saying people these days spend more time being envious of what they see online
than trying to achieve things. Maybe that’s the case, maybe it isn’t.
If a homeless man can become a billionaire in a foreign country without even knowing
the language or culture, that itself shows you that you should never give up.
In the words of Andreas, first, know what you want, and after that, fight for it even if it
means picking yourself back up after a failure. The first step is right now,
he likes to say. Write down what you want and the things you are grateful for.
He does that every single morning. He says every person out there has something to be grateful for,
never mind how bad things are. To that, Tyson said, “I’m grateful I’m not dead.”
That’s a place we can all start from. Hey, it’s hardly scientific, but some folks obviously
believe in it. We repeat, this is not science, lest you think thinking alone will make you rich.
We think you might need to make a plan and focus on what you want, but you will also
need to work hard, have some skills, and as we said already, a bit of luck always helps.
Now you need to watch “How Does Law of Attraction Work? Real or a Scam?” Or,
have a look at “Is She Into You? Signs & Signals of Attraction.”