So you are saying the the man who read us The Snake at least once a week doesn’t know about this already? I remember the angst on the FreeRepublic.com over the pick of Mike Pence for Vice President. That turned out to be an absolutely brilliant move. If you haven’t read The Art of the Deal, you should. We are now in this phase:
Deliver the Goods
You can’t con people, at least not for long. You can create excitement, you can do wonderful promotion and get all kinds of press, and you can throw in a little hyperbole. But if you don’t deliver the goods, people will eventually catch on.
I think of Jimmy Carter. After he lost the election to Ronald Reagan, Carter came to see me in my office. He told me he was seeking contributions to the Jimmy Carter Library. I asked how much he had in mind. And he said, “Donald, I would be very appreciative if you contributed five million dollars.”
I was dumbfounded. I didn’t even answer him.
But that experience also taught me something. Until then, I’d never understood how Jimmy Carter became president. The answer is that as poorly qualified as he was for the job, Jimmy Carter had the nerve, the guts, the balls, to ask for something extraordinary. That ability above all helped him get elected president. But then, of course, the American people caught on pretty quickly that Carter couldn’t do the job, and he lost in a landslide when he ran for reelection.
Ronald Reagan is another example. He is so smooth and so effective a performer that he completely won over the American people. Only now, nearly seven years later, are people beginning to question whether there’s anything beneath that smile.
I see the same thing in my business, which is full of people who talk a good game but don’t deliver. When Trump Tower became successful, a lot of developers got the idea of imitating our atrium, and they ordered their architects to come up with a design. The drawings would come back, and they would start costing out the job.
What they discovered is that the bronze escalators were going to cost a million dollars extra, and the waterfall was going to cost two million dollars, and the marble was going to cost many millions more. They saw that it all added up to many millions of dollars, and all of a sudden these people with these great ambitions would decide, well, let’s forget about the atrium.
The dollar always talks in the end. I’m lucky, because I work in a very, very special niche, at the top of the market, and I can afford to spend top dollar to build the best. I promoted the hell out of Trump Tower, but I also had a great product to promote.
Trump, Donald J.; Schwartz, Tony (2009-12-18). Trump: The Art of the Deal (Kindle Locations 790-797). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
And we are also in this phase: Have Fun
I don’t kid myself. Life is very fragile, and success doesn’t change that. If anything, success makes it more fragile. Anything can change, without warning, and that’s why I try not to take any of what’s happened too seriously. Money was never a big motivation for me, except as a way to keep score. The real excitement is playing the game. I don’t spend a lot of time worrying about what I should have done differently, or what’s going to happen next. If you ask me exactly what the deals I’m about to describe all add up to in the end, I’m not sure I have a very good answer. Except that I’ve had a very good time making them.
Trump, Donald J.; Schwartz, Tony (2009-12-18). Trump: The Art of the Deal (Kindle Locations 813-818). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Thanks for posting the excerpts. About “delivering the goods” I’d say that he delivered to his supporters, voters by getting elected. Now for the immediate future he has to focus on different type of supporters: those in his cabinet, in the House and Senate, and government critters.