Trump: The Art of the Deal

by Donald J. Trump

Sometimes it pays to be a little wild.

That experience taught me a few things. One is to listen to your gut, no matter how good something sounds on paper. The second is that you’re generally better off sticking with what you know. And the third is that sometimes your best investments are the ones you don’t make.

but they will never lift a club or swing a racket and therefore will never find out how great they could have been. Instead, they’ll be content to sit and watch stars perform on television.

Unfortunately, life rarely works that way, and most people who try to get rich quick end up going broke instead.

To me it’s very simple: if you’re going to be thinking anyway, you might as well think big.

Most people think small, because most people are afraid of success, afraid of making decisions, afraid of winning.

One of the keys to thinking big is total focus. I think of it almost as a controlled neurosis, which is a quality I’ve noticed in many highly successful entrepreneurs. They’re obsessive, they’re driven, they’re single-minded and sometimes they’re almost maniacal, but it’s all channeled into their work. Where other people are paralyzed by neurosis, the people I’m talking about are actually helped by it.

If you plan for the worst—if you can live with the worst—the good will always take care of itself.

Of course, if they hadn’t chosen my site, I would have come up with a third approach.

The worst thing you can possibly do in a deal is seem desperate to make it. That makes the other guy smell blood, and then you’re dead. The best thing you can do is deal from strength, and leverage is the biggest strength you can have. Leverage is having something the other guy wants. Or better yet, needs. Or best of all, simply can’t do without.

You need to generate interest, and you need to create excitement.

But to me, that’s like hiring outside consultants to study a market. It’s never as good as doing it yourself.

The final key to the way I promote is bravado. I play to people’s fantasies. People may not always think big themselves, but they can still get very excited by those who do. That’s why a little hyperbole never hurts. People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole. It’s an innocent form of exaggeration—and a very effective form of promotion.

Like a moth to a flame

But my experience is that if you’re fighting for something you believe in—even if it means alienating some people along the way—things usually work out for the best in the end.

One of the problems when you become successful is that jealousy and envy inevitably follow.

There are people—I categorize them as life’s losers—who get their sense of accomplishment and achievement from trying to stop others.

My answer is that the day I can’t pick up the telephone and make a twenty-five-cent call to save $10,000 is the day I’m going to close up shop.

it’s not how many hours you put in, it’s what you get done while you’re working.

My philosophy has always been that if you ever catch someone stealing, you have to go after him very hard, even if it costs you ten times more than he stole.

He was still in a rage, but he left. Irving probably saved his own life, just by showing no fear, and that left a very vivid impression on me.

You can’t be scared. You do your thing, you hold your ground, you stand up tall, and whatever happens, happens.

We put a clause in the contract of sale saying that all representations contained in it were as of the signing of the contract—not as of the closing,

The other thing I did was to insist on a clause in the contract in which they guaranteed they’d close, or else pay a huge penalty.

Leverage

I’d rather fight than fold, because as soon as you fold once, you get the reputation of being a folder.”

in your best interest to convince the seller that what he’s got isn’t worth very much.

and probably the most important, was to sell myself to Victor and his people. I couldn’t sell him on my experience or my accomplishment, so instead I sold him on my energy and my enthusiasm.

But in fact, you need advertising the most when people aren’t buying.

Suddenly it dawned on me why my deals kept coming apart: if you’re going to make a deal of any significance, you have to go to the top.

Realizing that the positive approach wasn’t working, we tried to play to their guilt and their fear and their sense of moral obligation.

This guy was what I call an institutional man, the type who has virtually no emotion. To him it’s purely a job, and all he wants to do is go home at five and forget about it.

But when a machine says no, it’s very tough.

I was taking a chance, because right then and there the whole financing could have fallen through.

It was a dead issue. Even so, I didn’t give up. I began writing letters to Franklin Jarman.

was relentless, even in the face of the total lack of encouragement, because much more often than you’d think, sheer persistence is the difference between success and failure.

The key, for a guy like Hanigan, was that he came to companies without any emotional attachment to its people or its products.

As a result, he had no trouble being ruthless. He was a tough, smart, totally bottom-line-oriented guy.

It just shows you that sometimes making a deal comes down to timing.

but I didn’t want him to think that a partnership with Equitable was my only option. Then he’d just feel free to drive a much harder bargain with me.

leaseholds on prime property—meaning the land under buildings.