Chapter 15
The Rich Person's Mind-set
The Really Rich think differently. While the Safely Prosperous get that way by avoiding mistakes and debt, the rich are heavily in debt, and cheerfully make a lot of mistakes. The Safely Prosperous avoid risk like the plague, but the Really Rich take carefully calculated risks by the carload. The difference? The mind-set!
Art Linkletter is one of my most treasured friends. He is undoubtedly the best investor in start-ups in the world, and he is one of Hollywood's richest men. Once when he was on a cruise with us, he told me something that has changed my life.
“Howard,” he said, “I have invested in a lot of deals. Some worked out, and some didn't. When we had a good one and we got together with other investors to get our payoff, we toasted each other and congratulated ourselves for being so smart. To tell the truth, I can't even remember what most of them were. For sure, I never learned anything.
“But if the deal failed, we would get together for as much as two weeks for a postmortem and try to find out why it didn't work out for us. Sometimes it was the entrepreneur we were betting on who failed. Sometimes it was just bad luck. Sometimes it was an idea whose time had not yet come. Sometimes it was poorly executed or a bad idea. But as we dissected the corpse, we learned and learned.
“Howard, I never learned a thing from a success. Everything I know I learned from my failures.”
RICH PEOPLE'S MIND-SETS #1 AND #2
Don't Be Afraid to Fail, and, ...
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