and Five Secrets I’ve Learned About How to Play It
A long time ago, my boss – one of the smartest businessmen I ever worked with, the man who would later become my partner – invited Jay Abraham, a California marketing genius, to visit us. We were selling investment newsletters, and our income came from only two places: the initial sale and the renewals. Jay was there to show us a third.
I’ll never forget that meeting. Jay looked like he’d just stepped out of a yoga studio, but his energy was electric, his vocabulary a fast stream of highfalutin jargon. My boss, raised on the meaner streets of Brooklyn, was not easily impressed. “Let’s talk specifics,” he said.
Jay offered an idea that had lifted response rates by nearly 30% for a women’s health magazine. My boss shot it down on the spot. “Apples and oranges,” he said, “old men and young women.”
What surprised me was Jay’s reaction. He didn’t argue the way I would have. “Okay,” he said, “here’s something else.”
My boss killed that idea even faster.
Without a blink, Jay was on to a third idea – selling our subscribers something no one had ever thought to sell them. Rare coins. “The beauty of it,” he said, “is that the supply of investment-grade rare coins is always shrinking.”
My boss liked that one.
We ran the first test early in the year, had promising numbers by February, and were crushing it by June. Before Christmas, two or three of our competitors were selling coins to their subscribers, too. It became one of the biggest winners our industry had seen.
But the idea of selling rare coins wasn’t what I carried away from that experience. What stayed with me was Jay Abraham’s complete lack of ego. I’d grown up in an academic family, where a good idea was something you defended against all comers. Jay was the opposite. If you didn’t like one of his ideas, he didn’t care – he had another half-dozen in the chamber.
There is a reason so few people are able to work this way. The heart instinctively wants to protect the self – call it ego – so the moment the brain produces a good idea, the heart goes to work building little mechanisms to own it. But the energy you burn guarding an idea you have already had is energy you cannot spend having the next one. Jay had somehow switched that instinct off, and it left him richer in ideas than anyone I had ever met.
I don’t have Jay Abraham’s gift for letting go that easily. I’ll still argue for a good idea when I think it’s being undervalued. But I learned to do the one thing that matters most: The moment someone hands me a better idea than mine, I drop mine and take theirs. That became the first of five lessons I learned about the mental part of playing the wealth-building game.
1. Keep an open mind and an open heart.
Stay open to new ideas, wherever they come from. When you meet one that’s new to you, don’t jump on it just because it’s interesting – but don’t dismiss it either. Let it settle in and keep looking.
A stray remark over dinner, a competitor’s offer you happen to read, a tactic borrowed from an industry nothing like your own – any one of them can be the seed of your next good year, if you are the kind of person who lets it in instead of swatting it away.
I have to be careful, though, because by nature I’m a yes man. Left unchecked, that is a fast way to go broke. So over the years I’ve trained myself to say “Let me think about it,” and leave it to my partners to say no and protect me from my own enthusiasm.
But when you live that way – when you are permanently on the lookout for and open to good ideas – you get a little smarter every year. Close up, and you reach the age of 60 still stuck with what you knew at 40.
2. Share the wealth.
Here is something I believed from the start, and it put me at odds with almost everyone in my industry (direct-response marketing): Hoarding “trade secrets” makes no sense. Your marketing strategy is visible to your competitors the moment you implement it. They will copy your best ideas within months no matter what you do. The only way to stay ahead is to keep testing new ones. And sharing what you know lifts the whole market – which lifts you, because a healthy competitor with a bigger customer file is worth more to you when you mail your next promotion into it.
Sharing? It still astonishes me how few of my competitors could bring themselves to do it. I watched the hoarders stall after having a few good years, while my own business kept climbing. Because they shared nothing, their own competitors had grown stingy about renting them names, handing over only their tired, old lists – so their response rates sank, year after year. And before long, they were circling each other, keeping score over who had borrowed what. They’d struck a gusher and spent their energy fighting over the well.
Generosity, it turns out, is not the opposite of building a business or building wealth. Practiced on purpose, it is one of the engines of it.
3. Always get richer, never get poorer.
I have never had a year in which my net worth went down. Not during the stock market crash of 2000. Not even during the real estate crash of 2008, when about a third of my assets were in income-producing real estate. (Yes, a forced sale of my properties would have shown a loss on paper. But I don’t value rental property by what it would fetch in a panic. I value it by the income it throws off – and that income did not go down.)
Growing up poor gave me the desire to get rich, but it also left me deathly afraid of getting poorer. So while I took advantage of almost every investment window that opened for me, my scaredy-cat instinct kept me safe by following this three-part rule:
* Diversify, so no single position can sink you.
* Size your bets. Never put more on the line than you can afford to lose, because a 50% loss needs a 100% gain just to get back to even.
* Have a Plan B – a way out, decided before you ever go in.
The real reward isn’t only survival. It is calm. When the market is nosediving and everyone around me is panicking, I have nothing to panic about, because the protection is already in place. A relaxed mind goes on making smart moves. A frightened one makes moves it spends years regretting.
4. Be intentional without being attached.
I learned this years ago from my partner at Agora who liked to say that the goal of a project is the project – not its outcome. You commit fully to the plan. You execute it as if your life depended on it. And you keep your emotions off the table when the result disappoints you, as results often do. When a goal doesn’t land, it simply evaporates, and you move to the next one carrying all the skill you built reaching for the first.
He called it “failing forward.”
I had pushed hard for a marketing campaign I was sure would work. It lost about $80,000, and I was so ashamed that I wrote him a check to cover it. He didn’t cash it. A month later, one of his own ideas failed – for a cost of at least twice that amount. He studied the dismal figure for a moment, looked up, smiled, and said, “Well, I guess that idea didn’t work.”
The point: There is always a price for testing new ideas. So long as the idea was worth testing, beating yourself up only costs you the lesson.
5. Play the long game.
Making big money takes time. There is no version of this where it doesn’t. Most people understand that money compounds. Fewer notice that everything else worth having compounds too – knowledge, credibility, friendly connections. And those things compound more powerfully than money, because they open doors money alone never will. Almost every one of my biggest wins came out of a relationship that was already a decade old when the deal closed.
When you start out, everything you have is in short supply. Limited knowledge. Limited experience. Limited skills. And a short list of colleagues, partners, and advisors you trust. But make it your business to build relationships with hardworking, intelligent, trustworthy, and loyal people – and every wealth-building move you make afterward gets easier and more productive, because you are no longer doing it alone.
As the super-successful entrepreneur Naval Ravikant says, play long-term games with long-term people. The man who plays each deal for his own short-term edge has to start over every time, with someone who doesn’t yet know him well enough to say no. He never gets the advantage of compounding, because nothing in his world stays still long enough to build upon.
Perhaps this is your takeaway…
I have practiced Brazilian Jiu Jitsu for almost 30 years. (I’m a fourth-degree black belt now, with a few world medals in my division.) It’s the only sport I know that makes it possible for a smaller, weaker person to beat a bigger, stronger one. Not with force, but with leverage, technique, and timing.
That is exactly how I have built wealth: surrounded by people bigger and stronger than me in every way that was supposed to matter, winning by paying attention and doing the right thing at the right moment.
You don’t need to be the smartest person at the table. I never was.
Keep an open mind and an open heart. Share the wealth instead of guarding it. Arrange your affairs so you always get richer and never poorer. Commit fully to your plans without clinging to how they turn out. And play the long game – because making the big money takes time.
