AH had done amazing things while working for MM, a competitor of ours. And he did just as well when he came to work for us. He built his part of our company from less than $50 million to more than $100 million in less than two years.

I asked him why he had been willing to jump ship. In my experience, superstars like AH are hard to recruit because they are well rewarded where they’re at. And, indeed, he had been well paid. (More than he initially made with us.) But he was frustrated by MM’s tendency to micromanage him, even after it was clear he didn’t need help.

As it turned out, AH wasn’t the only good employee we got from this man. Soon after AH came to us, MM’s business took a dip. The stress of that intensified his micromanaging. And that drove away more good people – people he needed to turn the business around. His business could have survived the dip and started growing again. Instead, it kept shrinking and eventually went bankrupt.

The tendency to micromanage is usually related to a CEO’s unwillingness to give his superstars the space, the responsibility, and the authority they need to do their jobs. If you ask micromanagers why they keep looking over their employees’ shoulders, they’ll give you the same answer: “I have to make sure the work is done right.”

Sometimes that’s a valid reason. But only for a brief period of time when a key employee is learning a critically important skill. More often, it’s because of the CEO’s own insecurities and feelings of inadequacy. (Which is more common than you might think.)

Micromanagement is a problem that seriously limits a CEO’s ability to grow his company. And it’s not always because he is psychologically unwilling to let go. It could be because he can’t.

This is very common in the fashion industry. It is very common in the health industry. And it is very common in the information publishing industry. It happens when the CEO is so talented at one part of the business that the product or service becomes associated with him. He becomes the brand. And the business cannot grow beyond him.

If you have this problem, or see it start to develop, there is only one way to solve it. You have to spend the time and energy to hire really hardworking, ambitious and talented people. And you must trust them to grow parts of your business independently of you, your ideals, and your expectations.

If you are a marketing genius, hire a marketing person who is as good as or better than you at some aspect of marketing. Then let him develop that part of your business without getting you involved.

Likewise, if you are the product expert – even the name on the product – hire someone who is as good as or better than you at product development. Then let him develop products that have nothing to do with your name or brand.

Or you can have your cake and eat it too… by doing what James Patterson does.

James Patterson is the most prolific author of all time. His books have sold over 300 million copies. He was the first to sell over a million e-books. He topped Forbes’s list of the highest-paid authors for the third consecutive year with an income of $95 million. His total income for the decade was estimated at $700 million.

You reach for the mug and knock it over. Hot coffee washes over your laptop.

You arrive home and realize you’ve left your bag, with all your IDs, on the subway.

Your doctor reads your EKG and says, “Hmm. I’ve never seen anything like this before.”

Life dishes out disasters, big and small. How we react to them says much about our character and our ability to enjoy a happy, successful life.

If I can’t find my wallet, I’m prone to think it’s been swiped by someone who’s going to steal my identity and empty my bank accounts.

Waiting for the results of any sort of medical test, I imagine the worst.

That, for some reason, is how I’m wired.

My wife, K, is the opposite. She’s a natural optimist. And when people like me have a worst-case scenario in our head, optimists like K will tell us not to worry about it. They’ll remind us, quite correctly, that there’s a good chance something less than the worst will occur.

But such advice is useless. For us, life is a very scary movie. Not thinking about the worst that can happen is not an option.

However, it is possible to develop mental habits that’ll help us overcome our fears and respond to crises – real or imagined – in a positive way.

Recently, my nephew got into some trouble at school and told me it had really messed him up. He couldn’t sleep, couldn’t study, could barely eat, etc.

Knowing what I knew about the situation, I believed he was overreacting. But I knew that telling him not to worry would be useless – even counter-productive because fear and anxiety are deeply planted emotions that can’t be commanded away.

It would also have been useless for me to try to convince him that his worst fears are imaginary. They are real to him and there is always a possibility that they will come true.

So I told him to do what I do whenever I am extremely anxious. I do what I call making friends with the devil.

You can tell how well an audience liked your speech if, as you walk back from the podium, you look at those seated at the end of the aisles. If you’ve done well, most of them will be looking at you, smiling. If you’ve done poorly, they’ll look away, like a jury does to the accused when they return with a guilty verdict.

There were about 400 people in attendance. Mostly older folks. They were there to learn “how to create a $10 million portfolio.” In his introduction, the emcee had told them that the speakers were going to give them a bunch of “million-dollar ideas.”

Not surprisingly, they were visibly disappointed by what I had to say.

What I said was something I’ve been saying for as long as I’ve been writing about building wealth: Unless you have at least 30 years for compound interest to work its magic, you are not going to become wealthy by investing in stocks.

Here’s how I put it many years ago:

The investment business – and in that I include brokerages, private bankers, and insurance agents, as well as investment publications – is a huge and hugely profitable industry that provides a generally useful service. But it is populated with smart, ambitious people who promote one teensy-weensy lie.

The lie is that you can grow wealthy in less than 30 years by investing in stocks and bonds.

 It’s not a big, black lie. There is plenty of evidence that strategic investing can provide returns that exceed costs (brokerage fees, management fees, subscription fees, etc.) and even produce positive returns after inflation. But for that to work, you need time.

Say you start with $50,000. And you follow a tax-deferred investment strategy that has been proven to deliver 10% annually, year after year.

At the end of 10 years, your $50,000 will have increased to $129,687. At the end of 20 years, it will have grown to $336,375. And at the end of 30 years, it will be $872,470.

$872,470 will give you $87,200 of income for 10 years, which might come to about $65,000 after taxes. That’s okay. But it’s hardly wealthy.

Besides, you probably don’t have 30 years to wait before you would want to begin spending that income.

So what’s an earnest wealth seeker to do?

For most people, next to the fear of dying, public speaking is their greatest fear. And what’s more difficult than giving a long speech?

Giving a short one!

“It’s such a little thing,” you tell yourself. “It should be easy.”

Problem is, with a briefer presentation – whether spoken or written – you have less time/space to make your point. (I’m reminded of the quip attributed to Mark Twain, among others: “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”)

 So next time you have to write a short-but-important letter… or make a persuasive business pitch… or deliver a brief wedding speech or eulogy, consider the following advice:

 From the guy who has coached thousands of TED Talk presenters:

1. Restrict your talk to one idea.
2. Begin with a statement – a single sentence or two – that arouses curiosity. (This is important. Listen to some TED Talks and you will see that this is commonly done and done effectively.)
3. Build your idea one clearly defined step after another. (This is very, very important. I don’t do it very well, but I am working on it.)

Gary North, an economist, Christian philosopher and good writer whom I’ve known for 30 years, once gave me life-changing advice.

We were talking about our careers. Our backgrounds and lifestyles are very different. We dress differently, speak differently, and even think differently. But somehow we’ve stayed connected through a common devotion to trying to figure things out.

I’d been troubled by some of the advertising copy I’d been writing. It was working very well and making my client a great deal of money, but I felt the message was wrong. I was worried that I was promoting a wrong way of looking at the world. Oddly it was a Weltanschauung that Gary’s conservative and religious mind embraced.

I expected Gary to persuade me that I was in fact spreading the good word. I might have even been hoping he would do so to ease my conscience. But instead he said something very simple that shook my soul. He said, “Mark. If you want to have a life of spiritual peace – and it’s clear that you do – you should never do anything for money that you wouldn’t want to do for free if you were rich and didn’t need money.”

This was more than 20 years ago. And I’ve thought of it a thousand times since then. I am still sometimes troubled by what the ideas and sentiments advertised by my clients and/or by my own businesses. But nowadays when I do I can at least recognize the issue and make my opinion known. And as for my own writing, I’ve never written anything since that I didn’t believe and wouldn’t be happy to say for free.

I don’t talk to Gary any more. Nothing happened. We were never close friends and our careers just gradually drifted apart and his reputation as a financial analyst and prognosticator was temporarily diminished after he jumped neck deep into the YK2 Panic – the fairly widely held belief back then that the worldwide economy was going to be thrown into chaos as the digital calendars clicked into the second millennium.

He was wrong about that but he’d been right about so many more important things that I was disappointed when he seemed to disappear from my reading view. Happily about ten years ago I discovered he was writing a weekly blog: Dr. Gary North’s Weekly Tip, which I read regularly.

The profound, life-changing advice is not there (perhaps he’s publishing that elsewhere) but the blog is very good at giving smaller, very practical tips on living more simply and sensibly.

Here’s an example from last Friday, September 8^th:

Over the years, I’ve learned a lot about direct-response (DR) marketing. In particular, how to be successful as a publisher of financial information. When I’m talking about the business to new employees (and even old-timers when they seem adrift), these are the important points I try to make:

1. DR publishers are different than literary publishers. Literary publishers are small businesses that target a tiny microcosm of readers, the academics and critics that determine literary prizes. On the contrary, DR publishers are large businesses that build their reputation (and profits) by discovering best-selling writers/analysts.

2. The job of financial writers is not to be smarter or righter than the rest of the pack. (A futile endeavor.) Their job is to write best-selling newsletters, blogs, and special reports. They should strive for big ideas that can make a big impact on their readers. Ideas that are just beyond the conversation of popular financial pundits.

3. In conveying their ideas, financial writers have a responsibility to make those ideas accessible to the average reader. The easiest way to do that is by using the online FK readability tool and keeping their score below 7.5.

Like every great performance artist, great interviewers make the interview look easy. Unfortunately, the apparent ease of what they do encourages too many unskilled and unimaginative sorts to start their own interview podcasts. (At last count, I heard there were more than 250,000 of them. And that’s just in English. Worldwide, there could be millions.)

Doing an interview podcast makes a lot of sense when you are starting out to establish yourself in your field. You need only a few hundred dollars’ worth of equipment and a list of people that have agreed to talk to you for some length of time.

If your interview subject is an expert in your field or has accomplished something impressive, the interview itself – you’d think – would be a good one. Your audience, having subscribed to your podcast because of a shared interest in that field should be captivated by what he says.

But the fact is that most interviews with experts are deadly dull.

Why so dull?

I believe it is because the interviewers ask the same obvious questions the expert has been asked over and over again. So what you get are answers that he has given at every previous interview. He himself is tired of saying the same things, and that fatigue is evident.

Some podcasts are dedicated to celebrity interviews – with movie stars or professional athletes or well-known gurus. You’d think that these interviews would be automatically interesting. But, again, most of them are not. Still, fans are usually willing to wade through the stuff they’ve heard again and again in hopes of catching the rare statement that is new and fresh and allows them to know this fantasy person a little better.

Political interviews? They are even worse than expert and celebrity interviews. You know ahead of time that the questions will almost never be answered directly. What you get instead are prefabricated comments whose only purpose is to sell whatever idea the politician is selling that day.

There are exceptions. There are a handful of people that know how to make an interview come alive.

I’m thinking of Howard Stern, in particular, which may surprise you. If you don’t listen to his show, you probably assume he’s still the shock jock he was 20 years ago. But he’s matured in many ways and has become very skillful.

More about Howard Stern – and how he does what he does – in a minute. But first, let me tell you why I’ve never done a podcast…

When I was writing Early to Rise, I had a large readership – almost a million people at one time. Because of the size of that audience, podcasting would have made good sense. And I was urged to do it many times.

But I knew that in order to draw attention to my podcast in the sea of other podcasts, it would have to be both good and distinct. I had some ideas about how to make it distinct. But the “good” part meant a serious commitment of time.

For every minute of taped podcast, I figured I’d have to put in at least four minutes of research. This meant that a weekly hour-long podcast would require four hours of research plus two or three hours of actual recording and another hour or so of editing. The equivalent of an entire 8- to 10-hour day.

So I backed away. And every time someone suggests that I do a podcast, I remind myself: “If you aren’t willing to do the work, the product – your product – will be shit.”

This brings us back to Howard Stern.

Despite how casual his demeanor and spontaneous his remarks seem to be, his interviews are evidently the result of a great deal of preparation.

Keep in mind that Howard’s been in the radio business for more than 40 years. He began interviewing celebrities maybe 30 years ago. For the first 10 years or so he didn’t do many interviews because people refused to be on his show. And with good reason. His interviews back then were primarily about embarrassing the guest.

It wasn’t a smart political move. It was a very dumb business strategy. Most importantly, it wasn’t funny.

Over the years, he’s taken a different approach. Now, it seems to be about getting his guests to talk more openly and freely about themselves than they have ever done in public before.

And his interviews are very, very good. IMO, Howard Stern is light years ahead of late-night hosts like Jimmy Kimmel, better than syndicated pros like Larry King, and equal to the great Charlie Rose.

I’ve noticed certain things that he does so consistently I’d call them conscious interviewing techniques: