I’m a Lucky Bastard. A Lucky, Grateful Bastard.
I’m writing this on Sunday, in our room on the 11th floor of the Prince Sakura Tower, which looks down on central Tokyo, a landscape of haphazardly arranged modern, glass-and-steel skyscrapers, mid-century office buildings, and aging wood-framed houses, small restaurants, bars, and retail shops – with the occasional colonial era mansion standing in the middle of it all.
The city is quiet now. But in less than an hour it will come to life, thrumming with the movement of millions starting their day. Like New York or London or Beijing, Tokyo is electric with the dense energy of its people, which makes the infrequent visitor feel humbled and happy in equal measure.
K and I have been here now for 12 days. Our time together, which comprises roughly half of my time here, has been given to touring museums, visiting gardens, and exploring local neighborhoods that K read about in the very considerable research she does before every trip abroad. As I mentioned in my last post, we’ve spent the majority of our time in Tokyo, but we also spent two days in Matsumoto and a day and an evening in Nagano.
For me, the touring part of this trip has been a great success. I’m especially excited about the ideas I’ve stolen from two botanical gardens we visited that I’ll use to make my botanical garden in Florida more fun and picturesque for visitors.
The other half (for me) has been business – one day of preparation and five days of speeches, panel sessions, hot-seat counseling, TV and YouTube interviews, and a half-dozen promotions for my books and next year’s conference events.
I almost can’t believe the success Sean and I have had with this little publishing partnership I started in Japan. In the last 24 to 30 months, the investment newsletter we write together has gone to the top of our publishers’ charts. (Sean does the hard work – running our stock portfolio. I do the easy part – writing opinion pieces about getting rich.) And we’ve sold more of my books to Japanese readers than John Wiley and my other US publishers sold to Americans in the last 10 years.
And get this: The company that sells my ideas on business and marketing launched a new campaign that sold, in its first month, more than 1,000 copies of one of my books for $300 a book!
What lights me up is not the experiences themselves. I’ve had similar experiences throughout my career. What makes me feel so good is that I’m having all this fun at the ripe old age of 75 – a time of life when I should be retired.
I’ve tried retirement. I tried it first when I was 39 and then at 49 and at 59. I didn’t try again at 69 because by then I knew that there was nothing in the retirement picture that was attractive to me.
I feel lucky to be able to continue working at this level – waking up each morning insanely motivated to attempt to cram 12 hours of work into 6, and then waking up the next morning with the same beautifully unreasonable ambition.
I feel lucky to be able to spend the better part of my working time with men and women who are, for the most part, 20 to 30 years younger than I am. I love the challenge of keeping up with them in terms of sheer output. And although I can feel that this is a race I will one day have to cede, I am happy to know that I can – at my age (and because of my age) – stimulate their thinking and inspire them to meet or exceed my output when they reach my age.
I feel lucky to be able to spend most of a week once a year in Japan speaking to several thousand conference and digital attendees – sober, intelligent, middle-aged and older Japanese men and women who, notwithstanding the language barrier, have spent thousands of dollars and come hundreds of miles to hear what I have to say about the economy, investing, and my particular philosophy of building wealth and living a rich life.
I felt lucky the night before last, after my interview with Professor Fuji on his popular podcast, to be invited by him to spend an evening with our mutual teams at a geisha house, one of only two or three authentic geisha houses in Tokyo. I went to a geisha house in Kyoto the last time I was in Japan, but it was nothing like what I experienced here. Some of the rituals – the personal service, the music, the conversations, and the dancing – were similar. But the total geisha experience, thanks to Professor Fuji, was on an entirely different, entirely more exotic, and thoroughly more exciting level.
I remember sitting there between two ethereal beauties, being catered to like I had never been catered to before and thinking, “This is what being a sheik feels like. Better yet – this is how 007 would be treated if he were in Tokyo on a mission!”
So not a bad work week for a man who, had I accepted my culture’s view of my expiration date, would have been back in the States, puttering around the golf course or sitting home watching TV.
Here I am in the recording studio of Professor Fuji…
And here I am trying to flip him, but he knows his Jiu Jitsu and has already lowered his center of gravity (which is why he’s smiling!)…
