Making Promises I Can’t Keep

I spent 10 days at Rancho Santana at the end of March. It was the first of what I hope will be at least a half-dozen trips down there this year and thereafter.

Key word: “hope.”

Each time I go down to Nicaragua’s Pacific Coast, I’m somehow startled by how beautiful that part of the country is. I shouldn’t be surprised. I’ve been there probably a hundred times since I first set eyes on it in 1996.

And yet I always am.

I have the same surprise every time I return to the family house in Delray Beach. I think, “Wow! What a great house! And what a great view of the ocean.” Two or three times a year, when MM is in town, he persuades me to walk across the street and take a dip in the ocean, and I think, “Man! I gotta do this every day!”

But I never do.

What’s with that? I’m the guy that has always prided himself on making life-improvement promises to myself and keeping them! I even wrote a book – The Pledge – to help others accomplish their life goals.

Oh, well.

The Challenge of Waking Up Early 

I’ve just made another promise to myself that I hope to keep: to wake up at six a.m., no matter what time I went to sleep the night before.

In my younger years, I woke when I woke – usually after getting seven hours of sleep. If I turned off the lights off at 11:00 p.m., I woke up at 6:00. If I closed my eyes at 2:00 a.m., I woke up at 9:00. I figured it didn’t matter what time I woke up so long as I got in enough work hours to complete my task list for the day.

That rationale was somewhat successful. I managed to outwork most of my colleagues and competitors, which allowed me to quickly climb the responsibility ladder of every business I was in.

I retired at 39 and spent about 18 months focusing on becoming a serious fiction writer – a goal that I had for as long as I can remember, but pretty much abandoned while focusing on making money. I had about a dozen short stories published and even won two literary awards. But an opportunity to write a travel newsletter morphed into a second career in business, which I took up with the same intensity I had given my businesses before.

Another 10 years went by, and they were good ones for me in terms of achieving new business goals and increasing my net worth. But I once again managed to sideline my writing goals.

A Book That Changed My Life 

I happened to read a book by Stephen Covey at that time – The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. In it, Covey pointed out that most people fail to achieve their youthful goals because they make the mistake of letting the urgencies of their life take priority. And that led to the realization that if I wanted to accomplish my once-cherished writing goals, I had to make that my top priority.

Making writing my top priority meant doing it first – before I got to work at nine o’clock. Which meant I had to get up early enough to be able to devote two full hours to it before I “clocked in.”

So that’s what I did.

In fact, I began writing a digital newsletter at the time to share and document my new and improved plan. I called the newsletter, appropriately, Early to Rise.

In the ensuing 20 years, I was finally able to achieve both my business and my writing goals by following the get-up-early advice I’d been urging others to follow. I managed to write and publish more than two dozen books and write and/or produce three movies.

Perhaps because of that success, I have, since I turned 70, gradually loosened up on my self-imposed “early-to-rise” pledge to the point where I was going to bed at one or two in the morning and waking up at eight or nine.

I suppose I could justify that by claiming to be “semi-retired.” But it wasn’t making me happy. I still have plenty of work to do before I shuffle off this mortal coil, including making two more movies and finishing no less than 17 half-finished books!

And so it was that, two weeks ago, I resolved to return to my six o’clock waking time to give myself one last run at the work I have yet to do.

So far, so good. I’ll let you know how things progress in the weeks and months ahead.

This Trip to Rancho Santana

I fell in love with Rancho Santana’s ocean views when I first went down in 1996.

Since then, I’ve been there at least a hundred times, and I find something new every time that startles and pleases me.

Sometimes, it’s the way the weather changes – from the dry season, to the wet season, to the windy season, and then to the winter season, which is the nicest of them all. Other times, it’s some improvement in the resort itself – a new pool, a new bike path, a pair of new horses at the stable, or the completion of some new amenity such as the gym at Fun Limón or the newly built chapel on a hill.

This year, my experience of the place was very different, because I had some first-time visitors to share it with.

Mixing Pleasure with Business 

For the first half of this 10-day visit, I had RT with me, a friend and BJJ mentor, plus his wife (AT) and daughter (VT).

RT and family 

I got in some good training with RT. He was preparing for the Pan Am Championships, which took place a few days after he returned to the States, so his pace and strength were a bit higher than average.

Here we are – RT and I – after training at Rancho Santana a few years ago.

He’s won gold something like 16 times in a row, so I’d like to believe that his training with me has had a positive effect on him as well as on me.

The Mules Trot Down 

The Mules, the book club I’ve been a part of for at least 15 years, had our March meeting in Nicaragua this year, instead of our usual place at my “cigar bar” in Delray Beach. Eleven of the 16 current members made it down to Rancho Santana. (The others were linked in on Zoom.)

When I invited them in January, I thought I’d be lucky to get six to come along. I was pleased and not a little flattered to find out how many wanted to see this resort community that my partners and I have been building for 26 years.

Rancho Santana has been getting great reviews from travel publications and websites for the last eight or 10 years. But we are billed as a five-star resort, and since most of the Mules are used to five-star accommodations, I was anxious to see what they thought of our amenities and service.

It was a short trip for them, arriving Thursday night and leaving Monday morning, but they managed to see and enjoy a lot – the bike and hiking trails, the horseback riding, the Spa, the beaches, and the food.

The Mules at La Boquita, one of Rancho Santana’s four eateries

It was all good. Good food. Good daytime activities. Good conversations over tequila and/or rum after dinner. But the best part about it turned out to be something I don’t think any of us expected.

How to Explain? 

Over the many years we’ve been together, we Mules have had plenty of time to get to know one another.

And we do… in a limited way.

* We know who is always punctual and who is always late.

* We know which of us are well prepared and which are not.

* We know that CL will talk about the believability and likeability of the book’s characters, that BS will comment on the story’s moral implications, that SL will bring his copy with passages tagged to read to us, that GG will ask us why we didn’t see the obvious biblical allusions – and that by the end of the back-and-forth, we will all feel the value of these diverse and equitable contributions.

In short, our book club has given us the value of knowing each other’s way of thinking and manner of expressing opinions and ideas…

But until this trip, we were, in fact, an amalgamation of several different groups of people. There was the original group, consisting of a half-dozen men who knew one another well that I joined as a new member. And then there were three additional groups: three friends of mine that were at one time colleagues in the direct marketing industry, two guys in their early fifties that I knew from my cigar bar, and three guys in their mid-thirties that I befriended through Number Three Son.

Since I knew all of them quite well, it never occurred to me that the different groups knew very little about the other members on a personal level. However well they understood their book club personalities, they knew very little about their personal stories or their interests in a whole world of things outside of books.

And that’s what most of our conversations were about this time – conversations that were being had throughout the four-day weekend.

So by the time we were saying our goodbyes, there was a shocking number of bro-hugs and “love-ya-mans” going on. We had extended our bookish acquaintanceships into emerging friendships, and that seemed to be a happy development for everyone.

Note: When I recounted this to K, she rolled her eyes and said, “You men. You’re unbelievable! How could you know each other for years and have gotten to know so little about each other!”

Was Yesterday “Liberation Day”? 

Trump has been talking about tariffs for a long time – at least since he ran for president in 2016. He talked more aggressively about them on the campaign trail in 2024.

So if he does what he said he was going to do – and he’s so far had an unusual fidelity to last year’s campaign promises – the US economy, and that of the entire world, will be different by the end of this year. Possibly greatly different. Whether that will be good for Americans and our trading partners is yet to be seen. But it should be a wild ride.

No, I’m Not an Expert on Global Trade Theory

I was late to taking a serious interest in economics. As a high school and college student, I was seduced by second-hand Marxist theory. In protesting against the Vietnam War, I was also (I thought) protesting the evils of Capitalism.

My views began to change when I got married and had a family. Making enough money to take care of my own was a serious obligation. I took it seriously and put my Marxist views away.

In 1982, after accepting a job as editor-in-chief for a company that published business newsletters, I began to read in some depth about how companies thrive and survive in a free market economy.

When, several years later, we began publishing investment newsletters, I was exposed to the realities of the real economy. I could no longer hold any of my former Marxist views, although I maintained the humane sentiments that I always believed were the moral bedrock of Socialist theory.

And then later, when I decided to “get rich” and began starting and owning businesses, any vestigial inclination to government control of the economy disappeared completely.

But I Have Read Hayek, von Mises, and Friedman!

I began my formal education in the early 1990s by consuming the works of Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and other prominent thinkers of the Austrian School of Economics.

But it wasn’t until recently that I exposed myself to Milton Friedman. I devoured his essays and watched videos of his speeches and debates, and I loved everything he said.

Friedman’s logic was simple and compelling: Tariffs (or import quotas) raise prices for consumers, waste resources, and ultimately cost more than they benefit.

In one famous critique, he argued that it’s “utter nonsense” to insist on reciprocal tariffs – after all, “exports are the cost of trade, imports the return from trade, not the other way around.”

In his view, even if other countries protect their markets, the wise course for America is to move unilaterally toward free trade, rather than “adding insult to injury” by imposing its own restrictions. This free-trade idealism became part of my DNA. I believed that free trade benefits all economies in the long run and that any form of protectionism was a step backward.

So when Donald Trump burst onto the scene with a tariff-centric trade strategy, it clashed with everything I thought I knew. I had long equated tariffs with economic self-harm. To me, his aggressive stance on trade felt like watching someone light a match near a powder keg. As a faithful Friedmanite, I was skeptical from the start.

In this issue, I give you the history – or perhaps I should say the evolution – of my thinking about Trump’s tariff plans since he was elected last November. I’ll tell you what the traditional thinking is and what the new thinking is, and how they are probably both wrong. At least to some degree.

Many people – perfectly smart and well-educated people – think that trade policy, including tariffs, is an obscure, academic subject that doesn’t rate in importance compared to… say… discrimination, social justice, and crime.

If you feel that way now, I hope you’ll continue reading so you can decide for yourself what this means.