If you were to draw a quintuple Venn diagram with interlocking circles for record executive, alcohol magnate, fashion house-head, reality TV star, and rapper, in the center you’d find one man and one man only: Sean “Diddy” Combs. Perhaps you could’ve included 50 Cent had he not sold his $60 million stake in a vodka company, Effen, in 2016 and/or had G-Unit Clothing not ceased production in 2009. But that in itself just proves how singular Diddy, as a business, is.

There aren’t enough hyphens in the English language to accurately connect all the money-making job titles that Diddy has occupied in his lifetime; his LinkedIn page would need its own Wikipedia page. (Forbes lists his net worth at $820 million, which feels low.) To celebrate the man, the myth, and the legendary GQ cover, we reached out to the people who have worked closest with him to glean insights into what makes Diddy, you know, Diddy.

Here are the seven habits of one highly effective mogul:

1. Have a vision

Timbaland: He’s a genius of a businessman and a marketing person. He’s always energetic. There’s not a moment that Diddy is going to miss. He likes to stay ten steps ahead of what’s going on with everything: the partying, lifestyle and his whole branding. He wants to be ahead of everybody.

Chucky Thompson (The Hitmen, the in-house production team at Bad Boy): He knows what he wants to get accomplished. In the earliest stages of the label, we had a conversation—I remember he used to have these [Motown founder] Berry Gordy books just laying around—where he was like, “I want to develop a sound.” At the time, he had done some work with Mary [J. Blige], and Jodeci, and some others. But he was like, “You can see a similarity, from the first record to the last.” It’s still that way. You can tell a record he’s a part of. It’s a certain melody, and a certain energy.

Q (112): The way Puff constructed Bad Boy—think about it this way: If I have Michael Jordan, and Michael Jordan says, “Scottie Pippen is good,” people love Scottie because Mike said it. And if Mike says, “Look out for this new guy, Kobe, coming up in the draft,” you’re going to give Kobe a shot, too, because MJ vouched for him. Puff took the same approach to Bad Boy. Craig Mack started everything with “Flava In Ya Ear.” Then he brings Big on to do the remix, and Big gets hot.

Faith Evans: Him and Big were kind of like big brother, little brother—but often that role would reverse itself. Big ended up becoming exactly what Puff told me he would become. Puff told me way before Big took off that he was going to be a superstar—before Big had a commercial record, back when he was still grimey, running around to little recording studios in Brooklyn, wearing the same jeans for days at a time.

Q: Big then introduced Faith [with “You Used to Love Me”], and Total, with “One More Chance.” And us [112], with “Only You.” You go from that to the “Only You” remix, where Puff uses our record to introduce Ma$e, and then he had Ma$e introduce Carl Thomas. This was Puff’s vision—to discover these talents, and to have your family members introduce you, and for you to introduce the next artist. “Family” wasn’t just a word we used. It was a family. And still today, we tour together, we stay friends, and we support each other.