In a recent article on Contrarian Thinking, Codie Sanchez shared seven principles for living a richer, freer life, drawing lessons from her mentor, hedge fund manager and entrepreneur Bill Perkins.

One of the core ideas Sanchez highlighted is the danger of letting small thinking and slow action sabotage big ambitions. “Sometimes, playing it safe feels smart… when it’s actually just playing small,” she wrote in the article, recounting a moment when Perkins challenged her to think bigger.

Sanchez also tackled the misunderstood nature of risk, noting that most people treat it as a binary—risky or safe—when it should be viewed as a curve. She encouraged entrepreneurs to pursue “calibrated risk,” making thoughtful bets with asymmetric upside rather than clinging to false safety. “Risk isn’t a light switch — it’s a spectrum of tradeoffs, probabilities, and potential outcomes,” she explained.

Other principles included the need to fire oneself from day-to-day operations to truly grow a business, to treat failure as data rather than disaster, and to recognize that money only matters when it is used in the right season of life. Sanchez emphasized that generosity is the real display of wealth, sharing the mindset that buying experiences for others is more meaningful than material accumulation.

The overarching theme: living fully requires speed, resilience, generosity, and the courage to embrace discomfort in the right places.

Codie Sanchez is the founder of Contrarian Thinking, a platform that teaches entrepreneurs and investors how to break free from traditional employment, build cash-flowing businesses, and think independently about wealth and freedom.