I had an interesting experience the other day with one of the millionaires I’d been pursuing for an interview. I’d left him two messages on his cell phone, and I was starting to wonder if I had the guts to really keep harassing this man until he spent some time with me.
Then on a Saturday at about 5 pm my cell phone rang with a number I didn’t recognize.
Me: “Hello?”
Caller: “Hello Mark, this is Nathan, I was just returning your call.”
Me: (Stammering) “Uh, hello Nathan, thanks for the call back.”
Nathan: “No problem, I got your message and I thought it was interesting. Tell me more about what you’re doing.”
I explained my goal of interviewing as many financially successful people as possible, to which he replied:
“Well I have about ten minutes I can spend with you, go ahead and fire away.”
Now, normally I record the calls and then transcribe them basically word for word, so I asked him if I could drive to my office (which was just a minute or two away) where I was set up to record. His response was great:
“Well, like I said, I’ve got about ten minutes, so we should probably just go ahead.”
It doesn’t come across in a blog post, but his tone of voice said “You’ve got ten minutes, sport. Get on with it.” He wasn’t rude at all, just letting me know that he had other things to do on a Saturday night besides accommodate me.
I bring that part of the story up for two reasons: First, I’m glad I persisted in trying to get in touch with him, because the conversation we had was interesting.
Second, when you’re talking to somebody who is financially out of your league - whether it’s a sales prospect, a potential mentor, or your boss - you need to be both bold and flexible. I’m glad I asked him if I could record the call even though he said no. The request didn’t hurt, and I would have liked to have the recording. The flexibility came in when he said no, and I just had to take what I could get.
I think that’s true in any situation where you’re trying to get something you want. Very often things don’t pan out exactly as you’d like. Take what you can get, keep your bigger goal in mind, and keep working.
So we spent the next fifteen or twenty minutes together (another lesson: people often forget their ‘10 minutes’ when you get them telling stories about themselves) and he shared some great insights with me. The background information on Nathan is that he’s a 47 year-old commercial real estate developer who has made the majority of his money creating luxury resorts on the Hawaiian island of Kauai. Here are a couple of his thoughts:
The most important attributes a person can have are a sense of humor, boldness, and integrity.
“When I was young I wasn’t afraid to call people older and more established than me. I knew I had to if I wanted to succeed in those circles.”
That statement made me think of my own time in sales and also of the interactions I’ve had with network marketers. People tend to do what I call “selling down” or in network marketing - “recruiting down” which means you only try to pursue and persuade people you feel are less successful than you.
This habit comes from the idea that “Who am I to ask that person for…” The reality is that success requires you to sell and associate “up” which means you need to seek relationships with people that are more established and more successful than you. If you are the most successful person in your peer group, you need to challenge yourself to expand, or replace, that peer group.
And as far as honesty and integrity go, he said this:
“No matter how smart or talented the person, if they lied to me I let them go. It’s just not worth it. On the other hand, if you’re always completely honest with people, they’ll sense it. You’ll start to get noticed. Inevitably you’ll move up the chain. Success will be inevitable.”
Nathan said this was the best financial advice he could offer:
“Take lots of risks and chance when you’re young. You have to take them if you want to get ahead, so you’re wise to get them out of the way early. When you get to be my age (47) you’ll have a lot further to fall if a deal goes wrong. I don’t risk money anymore. I’m ready to retire and move on to more important things than money.”
Some of you may say “I’m already way past ‘young’. What do I do with this advice?”
My opinion is you can change this quote to be “Take lots of risks at the beginning of your path to financial freedom. You have to take them if you want to get ahead whether you’re 25 or 55, so you might as well get them out of the way as soon as possible. Once you’re secure financially, don’t take risks that jeopardize what you’ve built.”
My favorite quote from my conversation with Nathan:
“At some point you have to decide how much is enough. You can go on making more money forever if you want to. At some point you have to stop and think about more important things you could be dedicating your life to.”
For Nathan that meant leaving his normal life to dedicate three years to a religious mission that will start this summer.
Hopefully a lot more of us will have the opportunity to decide enough is enough and move on to more important things.
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