Newsletter May 07 v6n5
The Perry Marshall Marketing Letter Volume 6, Issue 5 Between the idea And the reality Between the motion And the act Falls the shadow -T.S. Eliot Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth's surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid. -Bertrand Russell
At our last Roundtable meeting, Joe DiSorbo handed me a book, “How to Get Rich” by Felix Dennis. “You just might like this.” Dennis is a publishing tycoon worth something like $500 million, the man behind such successes as Maxim and Computer Shopper. The cover itself hints at what kind of book this promises to be. You can’t tell in this Black and White photo, but here Mr. Dennis sports an orange tie and slightly darker orange socks, with a beige suit and white shoes. You can’t help but think to yourself, this guy didn’t climb up the same ladder most other people do. Dennis didn’t write this book for the royalties, he wrote it ‘cuz he’s a bit of a curmudgeon who definitely has something to say. He likes to write (his pastime escape is poetry) and one day he decided it was time to tell the world how it really is. Not everything in this book resonates with me – he is, after all, the publisher of Maxim and he freely admits to a lavish life of hallucinogens, prostitutes and wonton pleasure. But hey, how can you not love a guy for being honest? Jesus Himself had an awful lot of friends like Felix. Anyway, today, some soundbytes from Mr. Dennis’s book, which I highly recommend. On Accessories vs. Action: “Sports Shoes Don't Win. Athletes do.”
Perry Marshall’s Renaissance Club
©2007. All rights reserved
Page 1
The poor man’s way to wealth [poverty]: “The lottery is merely a pleasant name for organized racketeering.” Glamorous professions vs. dirty jobs like, say, operating a landfill: “Too many people want to make a blockbuster movie and live in Beverly Hills. Not enough people want to dig holes.” On borrowed money: “What are banks and venture capitalists but usurers who offer you an umbrella when the sun is shining and snatch it away the instant a few rain clouds appear?” Learning on somebody else’s dime: “Promotion is always welcome and brings with it the opportunity to learn more, but you are there to ensure that you take every opportunity to suck out of the marrow of what you need to know, to understand it and place it within a greater context for a future purpose. The purpose of getting rich.” Teamwork vs. Individualism: “Team spirit is for losers, financially speaking. It's the glue that binds the losers together. It's the methodology employers use to shackle useful employees to their desk without having to pay them too much. While lives may depend on it in a few professions, like soldiering or fire-fighting, in commerce it acts as a subtle handicap and a brake to ambitious individuals. Which, in a way, is what it's designed to do.” Risk and reward: “An honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay is not risk taking.” Cost containment vs. Opportunity: “Keeping costs down is vital in almost any business except government (how I wish I owned a government) but it should not be the main focus of senior managers.” What motivates certain kinds of people: “You won’t get far if you attempt to financially ‘incentivise’ the salt of the earth. Praise, the ability to discern when a good job has been done and the courtesy to say so, fairness, integrity and camaraderie should be employed instead. It takes more trouble than bribery, but it produces wonderful results.” Luck: “No one can pretend that luck – or chance, at least – does not exist; in life, in love, in business and in the getting of money. If you reject any notion of the supernatural whatever, even if you are a true atheist or a humanist with a capital ‘H’, then you must also accept that life itself on this planet arrived by luck. You can’t have it both ways.” “Most predators are lucky most of their lives, unlike their prey.” Personal vs. Corporate Finances: “Never personally underwrite business loans for your company unless you absolutely, positively are forced to.”
Perry Marshall’s Renaissance Club
©2007. All rights reserved
Page 2
Negotiating: “Few of us are any good at detailed negotiations. That includes your opponent, by the way. Most negotiations are unnecessary. Don’t enter into them. Remember that ‘the fortress that parleys is already half taken.’ Save serious negotiations for serious occasions.” Chasing money: “If you chase money desperately in the earnest belief that you can never be happy without it and seriously think that the chase is a meaningful occupation, I doubt very much you will succeed. You have to be fiercely determined, true. But an appreciation of the absurdity of the chase helps enormously.” Ownership: “I once made a half a million by selling a magazine I had not even published yet to a rival. Half a million pounds for a day’s work. And why? Why? Why? Because I owned it. I owned it all.” Passive Income: “Absentee landlords never prosper. I am not absent. But I am not exactly toiling with the troops side by side, every minute of every day. My days of toiling in those particular mines are well and truly over. To be honest, I suspect my managers prefer it that way. They certainly get to take more scary decisions more often.” On Raising Funds: “Beware of anyone who tells you that there are short cuts to obtaining even a small amount of capital. Outside of family and friends, there are none that I ever heard of. Look on the bright side. Those lazy bastards who turn away from this odious task are going to be your employees. They are going to make you rich.” Towards the end of the book, Dennis offers warning to those who would trade the next 20 years of their life attempting to become fabulously wealthy: “Excessive idolatry of money will corrode both self-belief and love. It will stretch integrity on the rack. It will ‘take’ the fortress and it will not be a pretty sight. Seeking substantial wealth is almost always a fool’s game. The statistics show that very few people ever succeed. Most of them should never have made the attempt in the first place. They aren’t suited to it. And if that sounds defeatist, then consider the fact that the search will take up a great deal of your waking life for many, many years. You cannot get rich without ‘wasting’ that time. Not unless you were born lucky… “I have yet to meet a single really rich happy man or woman – and I have met many rich people. The demands from others to share their wealth become so tiresome, and so insistent, they nearly always decide they must insulate themselves. Insulation breeds paranoia and arrogance. And loneliness. And rage that you have only so many years left to enjoy rolling in the sand you have piled up.” There is a fine line here. I well know that the primary reason you subscribe to this newsletter is so you can get more dough, right? And yes, the list of people who have more dough because they read this newsletter grows by the day. Yet I know all too many who have more money than they can spend in ten lifetimes, on a mercenary mission to get more and more. They’re never happy. Their personal lives are empty. They have no friends outside of work, no hobbies. Their highest consolation is the respect of others who play the same game as them. When you do business with them you often feel like they won and you lost. That success for them is a socially acceptable way for them to get their pound of flesh outta somebody else.
Perry Marshall’s Renaissance Club
©2007. All rights reserved
Page 3
Dennis is frank about this and talks candidly about the dark side of being rich – including the escort services, the booze, the lavish parties and the weeks spent in rehab. You may well read this book and get some great advice about how to run your company… and decide that trying to be as rich as Mr. Dennis is for the birds. That was one of my takeaways. To worship money is to pray the unanswerable prayer. Many who would never admit to consciously worshipping money grant the smallest of decisions to its control. Money must always be your servant, not your master. One of the best ways to get more money is to give more away – it liberates you from worrying about how your stack is doing: “The faster you give it away, the more money will flow back to you. Not because of ‘karma’ or ‘universal cosmic forces’, but because you then spend less time defending it and more time making more of it.” 3000 years ago Solomon, the wealthiest ruler of his time, said: Don’t wear yourself out trying to get rich. Be wise enough to know when to quit. In the blink of an eye wealth disappears, for it will sprout wings and fly away like an eagle. My philosophy of money is: •
• • • •
Everybody’s gotta earn a certain amount of keep – pay for the house, buy the groceries, get the kids through school. I figure you could wake up every morning and do that – but it’s not much to aspire to. The greater thing is: wake up every morning and do something that matters. My primary financial objective has always been to get money out of the way so I could then do exactly that. There are only three things you can do with money: (1) Spend it, (2) Invest it in or for yourself, and (3) Invest it in the service of God and in worthwhile causes. From him who is given much, much is expected. We all eventually answer for what we do with our money. "Eventually, everyone sits down to a banquet of consequences." -Robert Louis Stevenson I don’t believe in retirement. Why spend the most exciting years of your life working your ass off just so you can have a bunch of boring years at the end? That makes no sense. Retirement is: Freedom to do _______. Money is not the boss. You are. Sometimes you need to show you’re the boss the same way you show anybody else who’s boss: By firing it. By demoting it. By giving it a performance review. By choosing something or someone else instead. By subjecting it to rules and policies and higher standards. By walking away from it – regularly. You neither want nor need every deal that comes along.
No conversation about money would be complete without addressing the fear of failure. We ALL have it. Dennis sez: “Try for just a single day, a whole day when you refuse to acknowledge fear of failure, fear of making yourself look like an idiot, fear of losing your lover, fear of losing your job, fear of your boss, fear of anything and of any kind. Fear will creep back, usually at three in the morning. Laugh at it and tell it to take a hike. Smash it in the teeth. Spit on it. Put your arms round it and make nicey-nicey. Then slip a sharp blade into its stinking throat just as you’re French-kissing it.” When you do the thing you fear, you control fear. Carpe Deim, Perry Marshall
Perry Marshall’s Renaissance Club
©2007. All rights reserved
Page 4
At our last Roundtable meeting, Joe DiSorbo handed me a book, “How to Get Rich” by Felix Dennis. “You just might like this.” Dennis is a publishing tycoon worth something like $500 million, the man behind such successes as Maxim and Computer Shopper. The cover itself hints at what kind of book this promises to be. You can’t tell in this Black and White photo, but here Mr. Dennis sports an orange tie and slightly darker orange socks, with a beige suit and white shoes. You can’t help but think to yourself, this guy didn’t climb up the same ladder most other people do. Dennis didn’t write this book for the royalties, he wrote it ‘cuz he’s a bit of a curmudgeon who definitely has something to say. He likes to write (his pastime escape is poetry) and one day he decided it was time to tell the world how it really is. Not everything in this book resonates with me – he is, after all, the publisher of Maxim and he freely admits to a lavish life of hallucinogens, prostitutes and wonton pleasure. But hey, how can you not love a guy for being honest? Jesus Himself had an awful lot of friends like Felix. Anyway, today, some soundbytes from Mr. Dennis’s book, which I highly recommend. On Accessories vs. Action: “Sports Shoes Don't Win. Athletes do.”
Perry Marshall’s Renaissance Club
©2007. All rights reserved
Page 1
The poor man’s way to wealth [poverty]: “The lottery is merely a pleasant name for organized racketeering.” Glamorous professions vs. dirty jobs like, say, operating a landfill: “Too many people want to make a blockbuster movie and live in Beverly Hills. Not enough people want to dig holes.” On borrowed money: “What are banks and venture capitalists but usurers who offer you an umbrella when the sun is shining and snatch it away the instant a few rain clouds appear?” Learning on somebody else’s dime: “Promotion is always welcome and brings with it the opportunity to learn more, but you are there to ensure that you take every opportunity to suck out of the marrow of what you need to know, to understand it and place it within a greater context for a future purpose. The purpose of getting rich.” Teamwork vs. Individualism: “Team spirit is for losers, financially speaking. It's the glue that binds the losers together. It's the methodology employers use to shackle useful employees to their desk without having to pay them too much. While lives may depend on it in a few professions, like soldiering or fire-fighting, in commerce it acts as a subtle handicap and a brake to ambitious individuals. Which, in a way, is what it's designed to do.” Risk and reward: “An honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay is not risk taking.” Cost containment vs. Opportunity: “Keeping costs down is vital in almost any business except government (how I wish I owned a government) but it should not be the main focus of senior managers.” What motivates certain kinds of people: “You won’t get far if you attempt to financially ‘incentivise’ the salt of the earth. Praise, the ability to discern when a good job has been done and the courtesy to say so, fairness, integrity and camaraderie should be employed instead. It takes more trouble than bribery, but it produces wonderful results.” Luck: “No one can pretend that luck – or chance, at least – does not exist; in life, in love, in business and in the getting of money. If you reject any notion of the supernatural whatever, even if you are a true atheist or a humanist with a capital ‘H’, then you must also accept that life itself on this planet arrived by luck. You can’t have it both ways.” “Most predators are lucky most of their lives, unlike their prey.” Personal vs. Corporate Finances: “Never personally underwrite business loans for your company unless you absolutely, positively are forced to.”
Perry Marshall’s Renaissance Club
©2007. All rights reserved
Page 2
Negotiating: “Few of us are any good at detailed negotiations. That includes your opponent, by the way. Most negotiations are unnecessary. Don’t enter into them. Remember that ‘the fortress that parleys is already half taken.’ Save serious negotiations for serious occasions.” Chasing money: “If you chase money desperately in the earnest belief that you can never be happy without it and seriously think that the chase is a meaningful occupation, I doubt very much you will succeed. You have to be fiercely determined, true. But an appreciation of the absurdity of the chase helps enormously.” Ownership: “I once made a half a million by selling a magazine I had not even published yet to a rival. Half a million pounds for a day’s work. And why? Why? Why? Because I owned it. I owned it all.” Passive Income: “Absentee landlords never prosper. I am not absent. But I am not exactly toiling with the troops side by side, every minute of every day. My days of toiling in those particular mines are well and truly over. To be honest, I suspect my managers prefer it that way. They certainly get to take more scary decisions more often.” On Raising Funds: “Beware of anyone who tells you that there are short cuts to obtaining even a small amount of capital. Outside of family and friends, there are none that I ever heard of. Look on the bright side. Those lazy bastards who turn away from this odious task are going to be your employees. They are going to make you rich.” Towards the end of the book, Dennis offers warning to those who would trade the next 20 years of their life attempting to become fabulously wealthy: “Excessive idolatry of money will corrode both self-belief and love. It will stretch integrity on the rack. It will ‘take’ the fortress and it will not be a pretty sight. Seeking substantial wealth is almost always a fool’s game. The statistics show that very few people ever succeed. Most of them should never have made the attempt in the first place. They aren’t suited to it. And if that sounds defeatist, then consider the fact that the search will take up a great deal of your waking life for many, many years. You cannot get rich without ‘wasting’ that time. Not unless you were born lucky… “I have yet to meet a single really rich happy man or woman – and I have met many rich people. The demands from others to share their wealth become so tiresome, and so insistent, they nearly always decide they must insulate themselves. Insulation breeds paranoia and arrogance. And loneliness. And rage that you have only so many years left to enjoy rolling in the sand you have piled up.” There is a fine line here. I well know that the primary reason you subscribe to this newsletter is so you can get more dough, right? And yes, the list of people who have more dough because they read this newsletter grows by the day. Yet I know all too many who have more money than they can spend in ten lifetimes, on a mercenary mission to get more and more. They’re never happy. Their personal lives are empty. They have no friends outside of work, no hobbies. Their highest consolation is the respect of others who play the same game as them. When you do business with them you often feel like they won and you lost. That success for them is a socially acceptable way for them to get their pound of flesh outta somebody else.
Perry Marshall’s Renaissance Club
©2007. All rights reserved
Page 3
Dennis is frank about this and talks candidly about the dark side of being rich – including the escort services, the booze, the lavish parties and the weeks spent in rehab. You may well read this book and get some great advice about how to run your company… and decide that trying to be as rich as Mr. Dennis is for the birds. That was one of my takeaways. To worship money is to pray the unanswerable prayer. Many who would never admit to consciously worshipping money grant the smallest of decisions to its control. Money must always be your servant, not your master. One of the best ways to get more money is to give more away – it liberates you from worrying about how your stack is doing: “The faster you give it away, the more money will flow back to you. Not because of ‘karma’ or ‘universal cosmic forces’, but because you then spend less time defending it and more time making more of it.” 3000 years ago Solomon, the wealthiest ruler of his time, said: Don’t wear yourself out trying to get rich. Be wise enough to know when to quit. In the blink of an eye wealth disappears, for it will sprout wings and fly away like an eagle. My philosophy of money is: •
• • • •
Everybody’s gotta earn a certain amount of keep – pay for the house, buy the groceries, get the kids through school. I figure you could wake up every morning and do that – but it’s not much to aspire to. The greater thing is: wake up every morning and do something that matters. My primary financial objective has always been to get money out of the way so I could then do exactly that. There are only three things you can do with money: (1) Spend it, (2) Invest it in or for yourself, and (3) Invest it in the service of God and in worthwhile causes. From him who is given much, much is expected. We all eventually answer for what we do with our money. "Eventually, everyone sits down to a banquet of consequences." -Robert Louis Stevenson I don’t believe in retirement. Why spend the most exciting years of your life working your ass off just so you can have a bunch of boring years at the end? That makes no sense. Retirement is: Freedom to do _______. Money is not the boss. You are. Sometimes you need to show you’re the boss the same way you show anybody else who’s boss: By firing it. By demoting it. By giving it a performance review. By choosing something or someone else instead. By subjecting it to rules and policies and higher standards. By walking away from it – regularly. You neither want nor need every deal that comes along.
No conversation about money would be complete without addressing the fear of failure. We ALL have it. Dennis sez: “Try for just a single day, a whole day when you refuse to acknowledge fear of failure, fear of making yourself look like an idiot, fear of losing your lover, fear of losing your job, fear of your boss, fear of anything and of any kind. Fear will creep back, usually at three in the morning. Laugh at it and tell it to take a hike. Smash it in the teeth. Spit on it. Put your arms round it and make nicey-nicey. Then slip a sharp blade into its stinking throat just as you’re French-kissing it.” When you do the thing you fear, you control fear. Carpe Deim, Perry Marshall
Perry Marshall’s Renaissance Club
©2007. All rights reserved
Page 4
