Lesson from the Life of Billy Crystal

I want to continue discussing the theme we had last week on writing your thoughts, ideas and life into a journal. I have strong and passionate feelings about this process of making a record of your life, about having the ability to read over all those ups and downs and the lessons we learn along the way.

This past week, I read about the fascinating life and thoughts of Billy Crystal in his incredible autobiography Still Foolin’ ‘Em. He wrote the book when he was turning 65 and it’s really a great read. It’s packed full of very funny stuff but I was quite a bit more impressed by his deep thoughts and feelings on everything from his family including his wonderful wife, kids and grand-kids plus the big impact his father, mother and grandmother had on him, to his numerous famous friends and not so famous friends and business associates.  I’ll tell you, if you read his book you will quickly grow to love and admire this man. He inspires you and gives you some great insights into the human mind and behavior.

He and his famous friends certainly lived the philosophy of “feel the fear and do it anyway”. That is something we all need to remind ourselves to believe in and practice. I think most of us look at famous and really successful people and think that they don’t have great fears like us but nothing could be further from the truth. Everyone has fears, but the key to success and a great life is to plow right through those fears and “do it anyway”.

The other great lesson I learned from Billy Crystal, or I should say I re-learned and reminded myself to do more of, was the huge value of people networking. I was astounded at how many friends and business contacts Billy had. Even though Billy is super talented I don’t believe he would have soared nearly as high as he did without his people networking. I’m talking hundreds of incredibly influential people he got to know who helped him on his path to such tremendous success. And did he ever soar! His success was not only as a stand-up comedian but as an actor in all those wonderful movies, TV shows and even on the Broadway stage. He made us laugh which is so very good for our minds and souls plus he gave us so many hours of movie and TV entertainment. Now through his book, he is giving even more.

I certainly don’t think Billy is even close to being finished as he approaches his 67th birthday on March 14^th of this year. The biggest lesson I think we should take away from Mr. Billy Chrystal is that all of us need to record our life, our activities and, most importantly, our thinking. This can be not only helpful to ourselves when we re-read what our thoughts were at different stages of our lives but also that your autobiography will be equally helpful to others. So keep making those journal entries and leave a legacy for your family, friends and everyone to enjoy as well as learning some great lessons from your own life.

Great Insights from the Best Teacher

Have you started writing in your own journal yet? If you haven’t, I’m going to try to persuade you to start doing it. Why? Because of the many, many benefits you’ll get not just at the time you write them out, but also down the road. This will be especially true if you write more about how you are feeling and what is quietly running through your brain from day to day.

In addition to writing your thoughts down, you will also want to record what you are doing including those steps you are taking to reach your goals. By writing out your thoughts and feelings as well as your goal items, you will no doubt find, as I have, that the biggest benefits come later when you re-read and revisit those thoughts that were running through your brain at different points of your life. You really can experience some major breakthroughs and some life changing and life enhancing discoveries just by looking back and seeing where you were and what you were doing at various times in your past.

I’ve been keeping my “thought journals” since I was 19 years old. I will admit that as I go back and read some of my thoughts and reasoning it’s down-right hilarious, but I’ve been shocked more than once that some of my recorded thoughts as a young 19 year old are rather profound. It’s so interesting to me to actually learn from myself, from my own words, concepts and thoughts that I had long ago forgotten. Many of us try to learn more about ourselves and want more insights into our minds and our lives. With more insights into our minds we can make big improvements to our lives. And who doesn’t want to be happier, healthier and wealthier? Well, that is what journaling can help you with.

Now as we begin a new year I think it would be the perfect time to start your own “thought journal”. If you are already journaling your journey and recording your thoughts and feelings, keep it up. And maybe now it would be good to take some time and re-read some old entries and see what you can learn from yourself. You may even come across some old goals that you logged but forgot about and it will make you realize that it’s time to hit the reset button on those goals.

I just re-read some of my thoughts and thinking from early 2012 and they certainly got me jump started for this new year. Maybe the best teacher you will ever have is actually you! But you do need to pay close attention to yourself and to you inner thinking and be sure to capture and record those thoughts and feelings. Then you will be able to revisit in order to learn and discover great insights from you, one of your greatest teachers, at a later time.

Immoveable Deadlines

While I was preparing for a trip to Kauai a few days ago, I was suddenly hit by a pretty powerful thought.  The thought came as a result of my packing and getting hundreds of things organized before I was to leave.  I noticed how really organized and efficient I was becoming–making lists of items I needed to take, the things I must do before I left, and the people that I needed to meet with or email or call.  I will be gone for months so I knew all these things needed to be done, without question, and there was definitely a dead line on all of it–my flight out.  This kind of deadline pushed me to become an almost perfect picture of efficiency and effectiveness.

In the midst of my packing, I stopped for a few moments and observed what I was doing, how I was I was plowing through dozen of tasks so quickly and quite smoothly. Of course the motivation was obvious. I had a very fixed and non-movable deadline that I couldn’t easily be changed without a huge expense and hassle. But the thing that struck me was that this packing was a goal with a deadline I was not willing to miss.

Especially now at the beginning of a new year, as I am setting goals for myself, I realize how important this is–goals need to be set with time deadlines we are not willing to miss. Deadlines, ones we adhere to, are a huge key to pushing ourselves to be more effective, more efficient and ultimately more successful!

Think about that a moment.  Look at your own habits and behavior when you know you have a flight or other seemingly immovable deadline to meet. Don’t you get done what needs to be done? The great lessons here are:

1. We all need to recognize how very beneficial it is to have deadlines attached to our goals.
2. We must become tougher on ourselves by setting goals with absolute time deadlines attached to them.

Never forget that you and I only live, on average, about 700,000 hours, so it’s critically important to use our time wisely. If you want to accomplish a lot in your life and do big things for yourself, your family, your friends, and for mankind, you need to be efficient and well-motivated.

So with your next goals, pretend that your deadline is like a flight you have booked to Paris or Hawaii and if you miss it or have to postpone the flight it will cost you many thousands of dollars.  Depending on what your goals are, missing a time deadline may actually be more costly than a few thousand dollars. In the long run, a missed goal could cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars or even worse if you have a huge loss of confidence or damage your self-esteem.  Bottom line here is, make time deadlines your biggest friend, helper and partner by seeing them as the important, unnegotiable deadlines they really are.

 

A Time to Give, a Time to Live

What a great time of the year!  You can feel something different is in the air.  Of course, that great old Christmas music helps encourage that feeling of giving, loving and gratitude.  Whereas it’s true that the human brain craves novelty and unique experiences, our minds are also soothed and comforted by the familiar sights and sounds that the holiday season brings us.

I’m pretty sure you are like me, and most other people on this planet, in that you get that warm comforting feeling when you give a gift, whether it’s something fancy or a simple thing or you are giving of your time by doing something special for someone else.  Because, yes, to give is to live more fully.

You may have seen on the news recently, where some anonymous person gives away, at Christmas time, $100,000 dollars in $100 dollar bills to people who look like they are down on their luck and really are in need.  This year, he did it in cooperation with the police force.  And he has the officers give his gifts out.

As I watched how it all played out on a TV spot this year, I was quite emotional.  What the cops do is drive around looking for older, banged up and aging cars with people driving that look like that they don’t have a dime to their name.  Then they pull the people over as if they are going to ticket them.  Of course the drivers, as they see the cop walking up alongside the car, are wondering what they did wrong and as they roll down the window, filmed by body cams the cops were wearing, you can see the great distress on their faces. The drivers were obviously distressed. Some were defensive, others belligerent and others were simply and quietly upset.  But then when the officer reaches in and hands them a $100 dollar bill and says “Merry Christmas”, the drivers face is instantly transformed. Some looked shocked and some even started crying.  One woman said, through her tears, that now she could give her kids a Christmas present when she thought she would not be able to give them anything.

The cops were as touched as the people were by that act of giving, even though it wasn’t their money.  As I watched, I couldn’t help but catch the feeling and the emotions those camera caught and, yes, I teared up a bit myself.

I am pretty darn sure that the more we give, give, give, the more we live, live, live!  I sincerely hope you have a tremendous season of giving and you receive the great rewards that giving gives!  Merry Christmas!

 

The Rug Merchant of Tangiers

Today I’d like to add a footnote to last week’s blog on the theme of negotiation.  Many years ago I took a group of investors to Tangiers in Northern Africa, both for fun and for a seminar I was to put on for them. And what a seminar it was! The best part, however, was a lesson that was learned from a rug merchant in Tangier’s.

While on this trip we all took a tour. The talkative guides took us through the narrow, winding back streets, through the open markets with their pungent odors and all kinds of interesting and colorful people.  Then, after half an hour’s stop at the Kasbah, we finally ended up at a rug merchant’s large second-floor shop.

Even though I was paying for this tour, no one had bothered to tell me where we’d end up. It was there in the next hour or so that the big lesson was learned by all of us, a lesson in the art of negotiating.  We were all hot and tired but sitting comfortably on mounds of beautiful Oriental rugs. Our gracious host began telling the group about the uniqueness of his rugs then his troupe of articulate salespeople went on to sell their captive audience on the quality of the rugs.

Interestingly enough, they also explained the custom of haggling over price.  They would be offended if we were to accept their first price without some sporty bargaining. Priming the crowed into a jovial joking mood, the merchant asked someone to make an offer on a rug he said was for sale at $4500 dollars. One of the guys in my group offered $500 dollars. After a lot of back and forth the rug was sold for $1200 dollars. The buyer had been assured that its value was over $2000 dollars. I found out later that the buyer had it appraised in the USA for a mere $600 dollars.  Oops! There was lesson learned there for certain, a lesson that happens to be about one of the oldest tricks in the old negotiating handbook. That is, you start with a very high price to give the illusion of a bargain when the price is dramatically cut.

I’ve used this method many times on both the buyer’s side and when selling a property and you probably have too. You can read more about the rug merchant and related negotiation techniques in my book How to Wake Up the Financial Genius Inside You.

 

 

Using a little Jaw Jaw

I am in the process of updating 4 of the 8 books I’ve written, which has been a fascinating and mind opening task.  First of all, it’s quite a stunning experience to read your own words that were written many years ago and then to come across something that you find to be very profound. I found myself saying “Wow, this is a pretty good money making method and is quite inspiring stuff. Did I write this?” then I’m thinking,   “I can’t believe I wrote this. Where did this come from?” However, I must admit some of what I wrote also brings on thoughts like “Ugh! This is kind of simple minded and even stupid. I’ve got to change this!”

While updating and re-writing some of my book The Courage to be Rich, I was struck particularly hard by what I wrote about the huge power of negotiating and the incredible financial rewards that come just from smart and calculated discussions.  Yes, just by using your head and your words you can make huge financial returns on your money! Winston Churchill said “Jaw Jaw is better than war war” and I will add that, Jaw Jaw alone can make you 100% in returns on an investment too!

With good negotiations you can take a mere 5% discount combined with another 5% in earnings and come up with a 100% return on your money. Sound impossible? Not at all. I have done it myself a few times and others I know have done it. It’s in the numbers.

For example let’s say you found a very attractive piece of real estate and the seller was very motivated to sell it. With good negotiating skills you could convince him to sell the property for just 5% lower than its fair market value and maybe even a little beyond that and then you buy it with just 10% down. Now, using another round of skilled negotiations, you convince a buyer to pay 5% more than the property’s fair market value by making the property sound better than it may appear to be. Of course, fixing it nicely helps too. Then, guess what? You’ve just scored a 100% return on your money; you invested 10% then saved 5% on the buy and made 5% on the sale of it for a 10% profit, or 100% of what you put down on it!

If you get tripped up at the point where I say you are only investing 10% on the property, that’s not hard to do either. Further negotiations can convince the seller to carry the mortgage or you can use a bank for the mortgage and a signature loan so in total you have 90% financing.

Go ahead and run your own numbers on any size property with those percentages and you’ll always come out with that huge fat return of 100% on your money by just using your brain and your words to convince people of what great deal you make them. These are just some of the gems you can find in my books which are available online on places like Amazon and on my website.

The Determination Factor

Last week I examined the word determination and talked about how critically important and life changing determination can be in anyone’s life. It really is a huge key in the lives of successful people in virtually every human endeavor. The definition of determination is “the quality of being resolute; a fixed purpose or intention.”  If you want to hear about having a fixed purpose beyond, or at least equal to, anything I’ve ever heard about, then you need to hear the story of Joe Simpson. If you and I can muster just a fraction of his determination as we set any goal for our lives then I am confident that we could each reach our goals.

You may have read the story about Joe Simpson in his book Touching the Void or saw the movie documentary by the same name. But even if you already know the story it is so very worth hearing it again, because there is so much we can learn and profit from his story of determination.  I will have to say that it would be tough to really have as much determination as Joe had because his life was on the line, but I do believe that it’s possible to push one’s thinking to the point that we see that our life, at least part of it, really is on the line.

Joe Simpson was hiking and climbing with his buddy Simon Yates in the frozen mountains of Peru when disaster struck. Joe slipped and fell and slid down the icy glacier. Simon dug into the ice and snow as deep as he could and held onto the rope that tethered them together. But eventually he began to be pulled toward the edge and at the last minute he was forced to cut the rope that held his friend. Joe fell a very long way and ended up in deep crevasse. Simon was certain that Joe was dead and made his way back to camp feeling absolutely devastated.

But Joe didn’t die. With a compound fracture in his leg, his shin bone shoved up into his kneecap, and knowing his life was all but over he still became determined not to die. He stumbled, hopped, and crawled for days to get himself down off a 3000 foot glacier covering more than 8 miles in freezing conditions without water or food. His true stroke of genius was the numerous 20 minute goals he set to help his brain deal with the huge distance he knew he had to travel. He would spot a rock or block of ice a hundred meters or so in the distance and crawled or hopped toward it while keeping track of the time.  Joe Simpson’s great, or I should say HUGE, determination factor and his simple plan saved his life.

You and I need to remember this story and try to implement that kind of determination when we set goals for ourselves. Even though our lives might not literally depend on those goals, how our lives are and what they will be do depend on reaching our goals. There is so much more to Joe’s story and how to use determination to reach even the most impossible seeming goal in Chapter 6 of my book How to Ignite Your Passion for Living.

 

Speaking of Determination

I just happened to pick up a little book today and it opened to a page that had this quote “some people succeed because they are destined to, but most people succeed because they are determined.” That was Elmer Towns Minute Motivators for Leaders by Stan Toler.  Great quote, a great truth and a great thing to think and about and do something about. Determination–what a great word and a great human attribute. That’s if you use it.

When I think about my own successes, whether they have been in my tennis tournaments and matches, or attaining great health or great wealth, I can clearly see the greatest common denominator for each one of my successes has been this great thing called determination.

But how does one boost or improve his or her level of determination? Researchers in human behavior studies have observed that most people can get a BIG BOOST in their own determination abilities and in their own self-control just by merely reading about or observing in other people’s examples; people who have expended a great amount of self-control or determination in various parts of their lives.  Just to know of those studies should motivate us to hang out with the kind of people that exert large amount of determination or at least we should seek out and read stories of people that use a ton of self-control and determination.

Personally I never seem to tire of observing and or reading those kinds of stories. They truly drove me to success, especially when I was in my 20’s, 30’s and 40’s. When I was younger it motivated me in sports. Later on it was all about making more money and, wow, did those people that I hung out with and the stories or others who made millions and billions push me to do more and more, and bigger and bigger.

Now at my age the people and the stories in the health and fitness department motivate me to stay the course of great health and try to do even better every day.  These stories lift me up and inspire me and even seem to give me more and more energy to do more with my life and do more to help other people with their lives.  If you really want to push and motivate yourself to levels beyond what you ever thought possible, try changing your thinking and convince yourself that your life is on the line, because in some ways our lives are on the line regardless of what we set out to do.  I’ll talk more about that next week. In the meantime, seek out stories and people who are all about determination and see if that doesn’t get you motivated to do more.

Money Can Buy Novelty

It’s too bad that much of the time money, especially having a ton of it, gets a bad rap. The negative view of money probably started a very long time ago, maybe even before the Christian bible made the comment that “the love of money is the root of all evil.” I do believe that tons of money can ruin some people’s lives, especially if they come into that money overnight and not by their own hard work over many years. But let me talk about one super wonderful thing that money can do for you, especially if you are wise enough to do the right things with that money.

It seems that way too many people think that the best thing to do with lots of money is to go out and buy a lot of stuff, especially fancy and high status goods. But that stuff can quickly become worn out and/or very boring. Consider the following as an alternative and one that can, and will, jump start and excite your brain as well as lasting a very long time.

This is all about giving your brain a huge dopamine boost through experiencing new and novel things. You see, the human brain craves novelty, and money makes it so much easier to give yourself novel experiences. Gregory Berns in his book Satisfaction says, “Novel experiences are the surest route to satisfaction.”

As I write these words my wife and I are on a flight to the French Rivera. Just minutes ago we had lift off and as we did, believe me my brain got a big dose of dopamine and that’s just the beginning. We’ll be staying in Cannes at the Carlton Intercontinental Hotel and then later in another 5 star hotel in Nice. Then we’ll drive to the Italian town of San Remo to meet an old Swiss friend, Reto Moro, who I met 30 years ago on a tennis court in the south of Germany. We are visiting places, some of which are totally new to me or, in other words, ‘novel’.

Castles, old churches, new restaurants and all that I will see will pump my brain with dopamine. As you probably know dopamine is the natural brain chemical that makes you feel so very satisfied. I just love it. For years I didn’t have a clue about this thing called dopamine that was making me feel so good, but I certainly knew that I got a huge charge and brain boost by my visits to new places, so much so I came up with my bucket list of trying to visit every country in the world. I currently have hit 84 countries and my wife tells me that since I am now 70 years old I better pick up the pace—there are, at present, 196 countries in the world!

I guess I could have spent my money on fancy new cars and other expensive stuff but I’m pretty sure the novelty of a new car wouldn’t last very long. Traveling to new places has given me great memories that will last for many, many years, especially since I can easily re-stimulate my brain chemicals with so many pictures and videos!

The bottom line is, it’s true that money can’t necessarily buy happiness, but it can open up so many possibilities and make it easier to obtain more novel experiences. It gives one more time to carefully and creatively design, plan and carry out a wide range of novel experiences. So now I hope I have given you another good reason to push yourself to earn, save and invest your earnings.

 

Leverage to Lift Your Profits

Today I’m going to continue talking about making those huge returns that I touched on last week. Remember, with only a $30k salary and saving just 10% for only 5 years, you can bring in as much as $21 million dollars by age 70! How is it done?  It’s done by using two different types of leverage.

No. 1: Financial leverage. This is Other People’s Money (OPM) as in mortgage loans, personal loans, signature loans, loans from family or friends, or even through having family and friends as partners.

No. 2: Labor Leverage. This is Other People’s Efforts (OPE). You bring on other people, including employees, part time contract labor, day laborers, contractors and the like, to do the fix up work that will create added value in an asset.

Basically what these two types of leverage can do for you is help lift something that is bigger than you can take on yourself. To paraphrase what Archimedes said, give me a long enough lever and a place to stand and I could by myself lift the earth.

Using these two levers is exactly how it is very possible to receive a return of 15% or 20% or even more, turning a meager income of $30,000 into $21 million! The math is pretty simple. As I said in my July 25th blog, if you go out and buy a $500,000 dirt bag type property, one that needs some fixing up, and do this with a $100,000 down payment (a down payment that itself may be borrowed) and then go out and use some OPE and improve the value by $50,000, that gives you a 50% return on your money,

But of course it will have cost you something to fix it up. Let’s say it cost $30,000 in material and labor to fix it up. That puts you at a 20% return. Now keep doing that on additional properties and you’re looking at a cool 21 million by the time you hit 70 years old. Let me emphasis that you can only do this if you control your own money and do the work or have others do the heavy physical work.

Anytime someone comes along and offers you a 20% or 30% return on your money without you doing a thing, grab your wallet and check book and run away as fast as you can.  These very high returns are possible but, for the most part, only with your efforts or the efforts of other people that you control.

Think of it this way … if you are making 30% or more on most every deal you do, why would you go tell others about it? Wouldn’t you just borrow more money at 5% or 6% and take home the difference? You certainly wouldn’t give someone else a big fat return of 20% or 30% in passive income for not doing a thing to help.

I’m not saying these returns are easy and take no effort and there are other details such as income tax that will eat into that profit (although there is a way–see the IRS 1031 section of the tax code to help delay some taxes) so these numbers aren’t exact. But what I am saying is that it doesn’t take as much savings capital as most people think.  In fact it takes relatively little savings to reach some very big financial levels.

By the way, I’ve had more than a few deals that have topped the 100% return level. Compound that for a few years and your eyes will pop out! That’s the potential. Now, doesn’t that get you motivated?

 

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