Tuesday, April 30, 2019, Delray Beach, Florida


Notes From My Journal

This Is Why I Can’t Stop Teaching/Writing

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I met TR maybe 10 years ago. He came to the only seminar I ever gave on entrepreneurship. It was expensive – 10 or 25 grand for three days. (Can’t remember.) It was designed for people that were already in business.

He was a practicing doctor, trying to build a series of clinics in order to promote his ideas about preventative medicine and to, well, you know, get rich.

He did.

He recently sent me an update: His clinic business was up to $40 million in revenues with 20 clinics and 450 team members operating in four states.

He said:
I just spent 4 days with AS [an internet marketing superstar]. I was with him because I wrote a new book and I’m trying to figure out how to publish and promote it, so went to see what he does. He told me that you don’t know it, but you changed his life. Made me wonder how many people would say the same thing, including me.    

That’s what keeps me going.

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Worth Reading

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Commander in Cheat: How Golf Explains Trump by Rick Reilly

A shamefully delicious exposé on Donald Trump’s longstanding reputation for cheating at golf. Having heard the rumor for many years, sportswriter Rick Reilly spoke with golf professionals and celebrities who have played with the president to see if it was true.

Apparently, it is.

“To say ‘Donald Trump cheats’ is like saying ‘Michael Phelps swims,’” Reilly wrote. “He cheats at the highest level. He cheats when people are watching and he cheats when they aren’t. He cheats whether you like it or not. He cheats because that’s how he plays golf.… if you’re playing golf with him, he’s going to cheat.”

Let’s start with Trump’s handicap. He claims a handicap of 2.8. That is very low. In fact, it’s lower than Jack Nicklaus’s. “If Trump is a 2.8, Queen Elizabeth is a pole vaulter,” Reilly wrote.

LPGA player Suzann Pettersen told Reilly she believes Trump’s caddy is in on the cheating. “No matter how far into the woods [Trump] hits the ball, it’s in the middle of the fairway when we get there.”

My favorite story was told by ESPN football announcer Mike Tirico. He said that one time, playing with Trump, he hit one of the best shots of his life. “I was convinced it landed close to the green,” he said. But by the time he reached the green, his ball was mysteriously 50 feet to the left of the hole and in a bunker.

He was flummoxed. After the game, Trump’s caddy pulled him aside and said, “You know that shot you hit on the par 5? It was about 10 feet from the hole. Trump threw it in the bunker. I watched him do it.”

I golf once a year with half a dozen high school buddies. Half of them are Trump supporters and are likely to defend him on all political issues. This, however, they could not excuse.

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Worth Quoting

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“If you are caught on a golf course during a storm and are afraid of lightning, hold up a 1-iron. Not even God can hit a 1-iron.” – Lee Trevino

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A Word to the Wise

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Bamboozle (verb) – To bamboozle (bam-BOO-zuhl) is to deceive by trickery, deception, flattery, etc. As used by Walter Lippman: “Successful politicians are insecure and intimidated men. They advance politically only as they placate, appease, bribe, seduce, bamboozle or otherwise manage to manipulate the demanding and threatening elements in their constituencies.”

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Fun and/or Interesting

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If you are a Bruce Lee fan (and who isn’t?), you’ll like this…

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Sunday, April 28, 2019, Los Angeles, California


From My Work-in-Progress Basket

The Chicken Entrepreneur Approach I Used to Become a Valued Partner in Dozens of Multimillion-dollar Companies

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I write a lot about entrepreneurship and real estate investing. And since I’ve started a bunch of multimillion-dollar companies and own dozens of properties, I feel confident to talk about what I’ve learned from these experiences.

But If you asked me for the one skill that had the greatest effect on developing my wealth, it would be something I’ve written about only occasionally. That is the skill of rising to the top of every business I’ve been involved in.

I started my career in the information publishing business nearly 40 years ago as a rank-and-file employee. I rose – relatively quickly – to an executive position and then to a CEO position and finally to the level of junior partner. That journey took me from a negative net worth to a positive one. More than $10 million.

After 18 months of semi-retirement, I went back into business. I was officially a consultant to about half a dozen secondary clients and one main one, but my job was always the same as it had been when I was a company’s number-one employee: to work closely with the founder/CEO to grow the business quickly but safely.

Being a “growth” consultant may sound like a much better job than being an employee, and it was in that I didn’t have a boss per se. However, it was tougher because my job had zero security. If I failed to keep the business growing, I was out. Simple as that.

When I talk about the way I worked during that time, I usually describe myself as an intrapreneur or chicken entrepreneur. An entrepreneur in the sense that I held myself responsible for developing strategies to increase the business’s long-term profits. A chicken because I wasn’t risking my own money – which also happens to be one of the primary benefits of being a company’s number-one employee.

As I rose to the top, I’m sure I made more mistakes than I can remember. And I’m sure I had victories I’ve forgotten. But along the way, I discovered many “rules” that seemed to work with remarkable regularity.

I’m mentioning 20 of them below – with this caveat: They may not work for everyone. Nor will they work in every business. To make them work for you, you’ll have to be willing to work as hard and as purposefully as I did. You will also have to be judicious in terms of the companies and people you work for.  READ MORE

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A Word to the Wise

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Crapulous (adjective) – Crapulous (KRAP-yuh-lus) means intemperate; marked by gross excess in drinking or eating. As used by Jack Kerouac: “Oh little Cody Pomeray if there had been some way to send a cry to you even when you were too little to know what utterances and cries are for in this dark sad earth, with your terrors in a world so malign and inhospitable, and all the insults from heaven ramming down to crowd your head with anger, pain, disgrace, worst of all the crapulous poverty in and out of every splintered door of days….”

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