Kilimanjaro

“It is not the mountain we conquer but ourselves.” – Sir Edmund Hillary

Kilimanjaro

I never wanted to climb Mount Kilimanjaro. In fact, I never wanted to climb anything.

Still, I couldn’t say no again. Dr. Al Sears is a good friend and an important client. And I’d been demurring on all sorts of hiking and climbing invitations from him for about two years. Besides, since the event was eight months in the future, it was hardly more than a note on my calendar. It wasn’t real. It was subject to cancellation. What did I know about Kilimanjaro?

But even then, I never had any illusions that I would actually like it.

There is a lot to talk about here – including the fact that within 48 hours of accepting Al’s invitation, I had invited two other people to come with us. One was a colleague. Another was a high-school chum.

Why did I bring two more people to the party?

For one thing, it allowed us to have a climbing group of our own. We could plan our own itinerary. We could have our own cabins. But mostly, I felt that by bringing together three people whom I liked and admired we could all have an experience that was more than just a climb. And I was right. Our group of four becomes fast friends – and I think that friendship will endure, because the deepest friendships are always forged in misery.

More about that misery a little later…

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Boost Your Productivity by Cloning Yourself

In some way or at some time every business is limited by the limitations of the man who started it.

For many businesses the problem is that the entrepreneur feels that he has to micromanage everything, even when he knows the business has grown too big for him to do it. By making it necessary for all decisions to continue to go through him, he creates a constant bottleneck.

Other businesses are stalled because they are built around the talent or skill of the top man. These businesses stop growing when the boss can’t do any more than he is already doing.

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Why People in Need Should Be Treated Like Children

The following is an interview that was published November 2, 2011 in The Palm Beach Letter. The subject: charity.

Ellen: In the office the other day, I heard Tom say, “Mark doesn’t believe in charity.” Is that true?

Mark: If I ever said I don’t believe in charity, I misspoke. I believe in charity. But I also believe that charity can be dangerous.

Ellen: Dangerous? How?

Mark: Charity has the potential to create dependency, destroy initiative, and promote entitlement. If you give a beggar a five-dollar bill every day for nine days, then give him one dollar on the tenth day… chances are, he’ll ask, “Where’s my other four dollars?”

Ellen: That’s pretty cynical.

Mark: I don’t think so. Cultural economists tell us that human populations tend to do what they get rewarded for doing. When you provide unwed mothers or unemployed workers or homeless people with substantial financial subsidies, you are, in effect, rewarding them for such behaviors. You are creating an ever-expanding culture of people who feel entitled to stay pregnant, jobless, and homeless – and be paid for it.

Ellen: You seem to have a dim view of human nature.

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Zen Wisdom in 10 Lessons

 

(Collected from friends)

1. Do not walk behind me, for I may not lead. Do not walk ahead of me, for I may not follow. Do not walk beside me either. Just pretty much leave me the hell alone.

2. It’s always darkest before dawn. So if you’re going to steal your neighbor’s newspaper, that’s the time to do it.

4. Always remember that you are unique. Just like everyone else.

6. Never test the depth of the water with both feet.

7. If you think nobody cares if you’re alive, try missing a couple of car payments.

8. Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in his shoes.
That way, when you criticize him, you’re already a mile away from him and you have his shoes.

9. If at first you don’t succeed, skydiving is not for you.

10. Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach him how to fish, and he will sit in a boat and drink beer all day.

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Investing and Wealth Building: Don’t Confuse Them! The Five Key Financial Strategies You Need to Create Wealth

This essay first appeared in The Palm Beach Letter

In my ongoing effort to shock and awe you with contrarian (and sometimes counterintuitive) truths about building wealth, I give you this little nugget to chew on today:

You cannot become wealthy by investing.

Please don’t tell anyone I told you this. If any of my fellow investment newsletter publishers knew I was saying such things they would have me tarred and feathered.

The investment advisory business – and in that I include brokerages, private bankers, and insurance agents, as well as investment newspapers, magazines, newsletters, and Internet publications – is a huge, multibillion-dollar industry based on lots of hard work, clever thinking, sophisticated algorithms, and one teensy-weensy lie.

The lie is that you can grow wealthy through investing.

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Superstars and Thoroughbreds

There is nothing that will change your business faster than getting a superstar to work for you. A superstar is someone who comes with his own high-powered battery pack fueled by nothing more than the desire to be your best performer.

Finding them takes work. Lots of work. You have to sift through a hundred wannabes to find a true superstar.

Hiring them is easy if you show them that you recognize their potential. Give them base compensation that is slightly better than industry standard and performance compensation that can make them rich. The most important thing a superstar wants in his job is the authority and tools to accomplish his goals.

Make sure, in hiring him, that he has what he needs.

Managing the superstar takes skill and patience. Superstars are like great thoroughbreds. They need to be well fed, shod, and cared for to be at their best. But they also need a lot of exercise and a good, lightweight jockey to steer them now and then.

And finally this: When your thoroughbred fails to win the race, change the jockey… don’t kill the horse.

 

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How to Become a “Really” Good Writer

There is nothing good writers like to argue about more than what constitutes good writing.

In my 30+ years in the publishing business I have taken part in my share of arguments about good writing. Many of them were lively. But few, if any, were ever resolved.

Of course you can’t agree on what’s good about anything unless you begin with a definition of “good” that is both mutually agreeable and objective. Put differently, it’s impossible to have a useful discussion of good if by good you mean “It pleases me.”

Three people read Walt Whitman’s I Sing the Body Electric.

One person says it isn’t any good because the meter is awkward and because it does not rhyme. “I like only poetry that is regular and rhymes,” he says.

The second person says the poem is great because it evokes beautiful images. He quotes snippets: “The bodies of men and women engirth me” and “framers bare-armed framing a house.”

The third person says it’s “just okay.” What pleases him about poetry is what Ezra Pound called melopoeia – the emotional impact of the musicality of the language. “I got some of that from the poem,” he says, “but not enough.”

Such conversations are dead from the start because they don’t have an objective measure of “goodness” everyone can agree on.

But most discussions about good writing are worse than that because the participants don’t even articulate their underlying preferences. Indeed, they may not even be aware of them.

The ancient Greeks had similarly volatile discussions about what constitutes good drama. They, too, had lots of strongly held opinions but no objective criteria on which to posit their opinions. In 335 BC, Aristotle solved this problem with history’s greatest essay on literary theory: The Poetics. In that essay he attempted to articulate what made “great” Greek theater great.

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