What I learned from 20 years following Trump’s advice (and why I am pulling for his recovery).
Today, I hope for healing for President Trump, his staff, and all the recent Senators who’ve contracted the virus.
Donald Trump played a central role in my 20-year journey to find my dream and to discover who I am. Coming out of college, I glanced through Rich Dad, Poor Dad on a lunch break waiting tables at the Macaroni Grill. There I learned a secret: the rich were living by a different set of rules than the poor. They didn’t work for money, they made money work for them. The author, Robert Kiyosaki, offered to teach me those rules and help me become rich. I was all in. I breezed through Rich Dad and then read every book on the recommended reading list. Each investment strategy required something a broke waiter was in short supply of…money.
One night, while my wife was at work, I followed a lesson I’d learned from the Vikings. I burned the ship so I couldn’t retreat. I charged $5,000 to a credit card for the chance to acquire my own Rich Dad and study under Robert Allen, best-selling author of the book Creating Wealth. He was going to teach me the principals of leverage. How to start with nothing and create wealth. In his Mastermind group, before we began financial training, we were taught visualization techniques to change how we think.
He taught us a technique of how to picture a world in which we were the stars of the movie, where things were dramatically better than they currently are. Allen suggested we pick a hero, a champion, the “best-of-the-best” in your chosen industry to model yourself after. If you were lucky, one day you might even be able to meet and study under your hero (as Allen had done with his mentor, Dr. Stephen R. Covey author of “The 7 Habits of Highly Successful People”).
Once your hero was chosen, following the ideas of Napoleon Hill, you assembled an imaginary “Council of Light.” These were luminaries from other industries you could draw on for advice. Allen suggested those like Rush Limbaugh, Jesus, Cleopatra, Margaret Thatcher, Buddha, Jack Welch, Joseph Smith, President Lincoln & Princess Diana.
At the top of the list of industry icons stood Donald Trump.
I followed Allen & Kiyosaki’s advice to the letter. I read everything I could about Donald Trump, his life, his business. I followed the advice he taught in The Art of the Deal (I only learned much later he didn’t write it). I applied the power of positive thinking. I dreamed and cultivated an idea of what my greatness looked like and gave everything I had to try and achieve its material reality.
Within 3 months, I bought and sold my first home and got out of debt. When Kiyosaki said I needed sales skills to succeed in business, I spent 2.5 years selling insurance to strangers in rural Iowa (sometimes door-to-door). Allen teamed up a protege of Buckminster Fuller named Robert Allen who invited me to join their attempt to create a collective of Enlightened Millionaires. Their goal was to achieve a butterfly effect, changing the world for good over the next ten years.
In 2003, I had a once-in-a-lifetime chance to become an apprentice of Donald Trump. A new reality TV show was airing starring the most famous real estate investor in modern history.
I’d recently burned another ship, quitting my high paying insurance sales job cold-turkey to build a real estate empire, to become an enlightened millionaire, and “stop working for money”. Some called it risky (given I had a child on the way and three mortgages to pay), but I saw it being like Trump, making big bets on myself. I would do what others could not.
Jim Rohn once said, “You’re the average of the five people you spend the most time with.” Since all my friends were broke, a bonified billionaire was my hack to throw off the curve and elevate myself to at least millionaire status. I created an audition tape with a label on the outside that said, “CAUTION: CONTENTS ARE HOT!” and sent them to the casting director of “The Apprentice”.
I made it through a couple of preliminary calls with the show’s producers, but when they chose the final cast, I didn’t make the cut. I had yet to fully prove myself.
Over the next 10 years, I set out to prove them wrong. To prove everyone wrong. To show to myself and the world I could be great. I didn’t have time for negative thinking. They were just slowing me down. However risky my choices, however self-centered and non-inclusive my dream, I convinced myself the world would be a better place for myself and my family if I was financially free.
The noble aims of my dream, my unflinching belief in the public image I’d crafted and the power of positive thinking shielded me from criticism. I would believe–even if no one else did. I would believe enough for everyone. I would bootstrap it all. They were just crabs in the bucket trying to pull me down.
For the next 10 years, I went for it: buying, building, selling, and renting 100’s of houses along the way. Trump had shown me how to cultivate a belief in myself. How to build an ego. I needed an ego for this first leg of the journey. That ego served as my rocketship, powered by belief and sheer willpower launching me into orbit. I needed to believe that change was possible. Up until then, I’d been grounded, suffering from depression, and stuck on the launchpad. I needed help to escape the pull of gravity.
Sometimes too much of a good thing leads to imbalance causing the pendulum to swing in the opposite direction. I spent a decade of countless hours building and fine-tuning that rocket. It was fast. It was fun. It looked good. It took me places and reached heights I’d never before seen. Others began to identify me with that rocket. It was Secretariat and I was the jockey (what was his name again?) Deep down though, I knew IT wasn’t ME, but I couldn’t let it go. I was never intended to live in a rocket, but this was pre-Elon Musk. We didn’t yet know how to land rockets.
Life had another chapter for me. That chapter meant facing my personal fears and crashing the rocket (something I’d never have done voluntarily). Those fears meant facing the fact that maybe the emperor wasn’t wearing any clothes. Maybe I was all smoke and mirrors. Maybe all my time pursuing my dreams, along with the accompanying lifestyle of golf, poker, and cigars was taking me from my family. Maybe I should have asked them whether my dream was inclusive of theirs. Maybe my idea of greatness had its blind spots.
It all happened so fast. The next seven years were like my personal version of 2020. Seemingly everything that could happen did. In what seemed like the blink of an eye I lost it all and was forced to face my deepest fears. Fears I wasn’t a good dad, husband, son, or entrepreneur were all staring me in the face like a pack of wolves who’d been stalking me for miles, waiting till sundown.
Someone once told me the reason you try and live a healthy life is to give yourself sufficient vitality and time to learn all the lessons you were meant to learn in this lifetime. It took all my strength to survive those years.
I learned, contrary to my opinion, there had never been a time I had been doing it alone. Like Trump receiving money from his father, my mother, father, family, wife, children, partners, investors, friends, farmers, community, planet, had all created the sand, the street, the yard, the wood, and sandbox I was playing in. I was the child pointing to my sandcastle telling them how great I was and how I did it all on my own.
With the recent news our President has tested positive for COVID-19, I hope he has the strength to recover. I hope he is ready for the next leg of his journey, even though, like me, it may look very different from the last chapter. I understand why he wants to be great. I understand how corporate shells, trusts, yes-men, and seemingly noble dreams can shield you from personal attacks that reveal your blind spots. I understand what it’s like to be facing your biggest fears: you either take the opportunity to learn, double down on your defenses, or try to make others feel the pain you feel.
I’ve learned something else. When you bring others into your big dreams, when you ask your family and your community what they dream of; when you rebuild your world so that everyone can succeed alongside you; it is in that world, rebuilt from the ground up, not of sand, that we can all truly achieve greatness.
Mr. President, I pray you recover so you can continue your journey. I pray we both live to see the day where you and I, the poor and rich, black, white and brown, men and women, young and old, and people of all beliefs, backgrounds, and orientations can achieve the true greatness our country once aspired to.
