The Men I Never Got to Meet

By Robert J. Ringer

As you may know, the remarkable Kirk Kerkorian passed away on June 15 at the age of ninety-eight. His rags-to-riches story is like a movie. As I’ve written about in the past, one of my great regrets is not having made the effort to meet a number of people whom I admired, and Kirk Kerkorian is at the top of that list.

Born to Armenian immigrant parents, he was a grade-school dropout who became king of Las Vegas (sorry about that, Steve Wynn) by swooping past Howard Hughes while Hughes was wasting away on the top floor of the Desert Inn Hotel. Kerkorian’s death was personal to me because he was my last living role model — and the one I most admired.

Preceding Kerkorian on my short list of role models was Howard Hughes himself, as well as two titans of the golden era of the so-called robber barons, Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller. Even though it’s probably true that Carnegie and Rockefeller, who were bitter rivals, ate little kids for breakfast, I was fascinated by their relentless drive to accumulate vast fortunes. In addition, of course, both were giant philanthropists. (Sorry about that, anti-capitalists.)

Starting in his mid-thirties, Carnegie lived a royal lifestyle that is unimaginable even by today’s multibillionaire standards, and spent a great deal of time building public libraries and funding myriad charities. I was amazed by how he started with nothing at the age of thirteen — as a dirt-poor immigrant from Scotland — and became the richest man in the world long before he retired at age sixty-six.

What titillated me about Howard Hughes — whose life also was like a movie, but for very different reasons than Kerkorian’s — was that he did whatever he wanted,whenever he wanted, and with whomever he wanted. And, unlike today’s corporate toadys, when he was forced to testify before a Senate committee regarding some of his business dealings, he had an in-your-face attitude toward the meddlesome senators who tried, unsuccessfully, to intimidate him.

Though he came from a wealthy (but depraved) family, there’s no question that Hughes was a tough guy. He once had Frank Sinatra, whom he hated (something, I suspect, that had more than a little to do with their common interest in Ava Gardner), thrown out of the Sands Hotel, which at the time he owned.

The Truth About Entrepreneurs

By Robert Ringer

As America’s experiment with socialism continues to crumble (notwithstanding the lies that are fed to us daily by the media), more and more people are coming to realize that entrepreneurship was the driving force behind America’s widespread prosperity — prosperity that few people could have imagined as recent as the mid-20th century.

Entrepreneurship embodies the spirit of

Self-Perception Rules the Day

By Robert Ringer

My recent article titled “Reality versus Perception of Reality” got me thinking about just how important self-perception is when it comes to one’s survival. In fact, I am convinced that self-perception pretty much guides every aspect of a person’s life, which places a huge premium on his ability to accurately interpret reality.

When it comes to accurate perceptions of the world around you, your challenge lies in

The Power of Nuance

By Robert J. Ringer

I’ve long believed that, to one extent or another, every person on earth is an enigma. This doesn’t mean that everyone is a hypocrite, but in one of more areas of their lives, human beings are contradictions.

For example, I’ve known people (me, for instance) who are fanatically organized in most areas of their life but disorganized in one or more other areas. What causes this phenomenon? I have no idea. It’s just one of those great mysteries of life.

And it’s not just people. Life itself is full of contradictions, which can be confusing, especially to those with right-brain issues (a phenomenon with which I am all too familiar). The right hemisphere of the brain handles such things as nuance, subtlety, and innuendo.

Thus, when the right brain is impaired, a person tends to look at things in terms of black and white, which makes it painfully challenging to navigate the gray intrusions that tend to dominate life. In psychology, this condition is referred to as rigid, orprimitive, thinking.

That life is fraught with contradictions can be seen in such age-old maxims, aphorisms, and adages as:

• Does absence really make the heart grow fonder, or is “out of sight, out of mind” more accurate? Actually, both are true … at times. But how do you know which philosophy to employ with whomever the object of your affection is on any given day?
• “He who hesitates is lost” sounds like great advice until you think about another maxim that warns, “Look before you leap.” It’s much like the increasingly popular philosophy of many entrepreneurs, “Ready, fire, aim,” colliding with the legendary Wyatt Earp’s advice to “take your time and aim.”
• We’ve heard since childhood not to put all your eggs in one basket, but Andrew Carnegie, perhaps the wealthiest man in American history, said he believed that the surest way to get rich is, indeed, to put all your eggs in one basket and invest your time and energy into growing that basket.
• Even so, time and again it has been proven that diversification also works very well. Perhaps Richard Branson is the best modern-day example of this philosophy in action, at last count owning more than four hundred companies.

So the question is, what’s the best way to handle life’s endless contradictions? My experience tells me that a big part of the answer lies in a little abstract jewel known as nuance. Whether it’s computers or love relationships, dealmaking or writing, successful outcomes depend to a great extent upon one’s ability to apply those little nuances that subtly move people away from failure and toward the achievement of their goals.

This is why you should never bite on those hype-filled success ads that claim to have a “secret” or “system” that automatically produces success. Success is not about discovering a secret (Wouldn’t everyone have heard about it by now?) or following a rigid system. In real life, success — in any area — revolves around subtleties.

My dad used to call it “man and method.” To be sure, there are fundamental principles that cannot be ignored, but so long as you play within the rules of reality, your ability to employ nuance is what carries the day. In this regard, I’ve long been fascinated by counter-intuitive concepts — the epitome of nuance — that have become huge successes.

So-called experts thought Howard Schultz was crazy when he put his life savings into a little coffee house named Starbucks. He did so in the face of coffee sales that had been declining in the U.S. for years. And who in the world would ever pay four or five dollars for a cup of coffee — served in a paper cup, to boot?

And how about Costco? What a crazy hodgepodge of merchandise. The only thing flattering you can say about cofounders James Sinegal’s and Jeffrey Brotman’s idea is

In My Youth, I Probably Would Have Bought a Used Car from Bill Clinton.

By Robert J. Ringer

It’s amazing how often we automatically assume that someone’s words represent set-in-stone fact. Nothing amazes me more than when someone says, “I know that for a fact,” then, when pressed for his source of information, says that Freddie Fibber told him so.

Of course, just because someone tells you something that turns out to be false, it does not necessarily mean that he intentionally lied. For any one of a number of reasons, he might just be wrong.

For example, he might simply be repeating a falsehood that someone else told him, and that source may have gotten his wrong information from yet another source … and so on. Thus, if the original source is wrong, everyone who passes along the incorrect information is wrong as well. From whence comes the maxim “Consider the source.”

So how do you know whether or not something is true?

The Glorification of Sports Thuggery

Bt Robert Ringer

The uproar over the Ray Rice domestic-abuse incident cries out for a truthful, politically incorrect article, so I decided to volunteer for the job. Rice’s Ali-like left jab to his then-fiancée’s kisser is but a blip on the crime screen of the hoodlum-saturated National Football League. Stuff like this, and worse — much worse — has been going on at an accelerating pace since at least the late seventies.

Poor Ray just happened to get caught on tape. Heck, his “mentor” (Ray Lewis) pled guilty to obstruction of justice in a double homicide case in 2000 and got off without jail time in exchange for testifying against two friends. And now, to rub insult into the wounds of decency, he has been immortalized with a statue next to that of the legendary Johnny Unitas in front of M&T Stadium in Baltimore.

Thuggery has been a trademark in the NFL and NBA for decades. Who can forget Latrell Sprewell nearly choking his coach to death, Ron Artest (“Metta World Peace”) jumping into the stands and starting a brawl with fans, Ben Roethlisberger mysteriously not being able to avoid crossing paths with women who accuse him of rape, and, of course, Aaron Hernandez, now sitting in prison awaiting trial on first-degree murder charges, to name but a few of the more infamous acts of thuggery in pro sports?

What most everyone misses is that violent acts such as these are

Chaos Theory and You

By Robert Ringer

Oversimplified, chaos theory is about the underlying chaos that exists in seemingly orderly systems. The so-called butterfly effect comes into play here, because a small change in initial conditions can dramatically change the long-term behavior of a “system.” A system, of course, can be just about anything — the weather, a mathematical formula, a sporting event, a student’s school experience, even a business career.

Of course, the ultimate chaos-versus-order showcase is the

A Warrior Lives by Acting

By Robert Ringer

There are two basic kinds of actions. One is proaction, which puts you on the offensive and, all other things being equal, gives you a great deal of control over events. The other is reaction, which puts you on the defensive and relegates you to an inherent position of weakness.

An interesting way of looking at inaction is that it’s really just a negative form of action — a sort of black hole of action that sucks energy away from you much the same as the black holes of the universe pull matter into the deep recesses of their cosmic bowels. This is why inaction often yields consequences by default. If you wait for something, or someone, to act on you, you likely will be unable to control the consequences.

Homeostasis, a trait that all human beings possess to one extent or another, is (in psychological terms) the tendency to live with existing conditions and avoid change. Which is ironic, because resistance to change defies both the laws of nature and the laws of the universe.

The earth, the universe, and life itself are in a perpetual state of change, and so, too, is secular life. Weather changes, laws change, the economy changes, the reins of power change, technology changes, and, perhaps most significant of all, your age changes every second of your life. In addition, with the generation and dying of cells in our bodies, each of us is in a constant state of change physiologically, from birth to death.

Homeostasis is the ultimate defense against taking action, which is why most people stubbornly resist change, particularly major change. Outwardly, of course, we fabricate excuses that attempt to justify why we aren’t able to take action just yet, the most common one being that “the time is not quite right.”

Through the years, my own experience has convinced me that the time is never “right.” There’s always something that’s in the way of taking action. If you’re looking for excuses not to take action, you don’t have to go very far, because life is fraught with so-called problems — and they follow us wherever we go.

The truth is that, with few exceptions, the best day to take action is today. You can make a sales call today. You can start working on that important project today. You can start preparing to move to the city of your choice today. You can begin to pick up the pieces and start a new life today.

The issue isn’t about today being the first day of the rest of your life; the real issue is that today could be the last day of the rest of your life. And, as Mark Twain put it, “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do.”

Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com, put an exclamation point on Twain’s thought when he said (with regard to taking the plunge to start Amazon), “I knew that if I failed, I wouldn’t regret that. But I knew the one thing I might regret is not trying.”

When people cling to the excuse that the time isn’t quite right to move forward with a plan or change of one kind or another — particularly starting a business — it’s often because they get caught up in the “how” of the situation. No one is omniscient. No one can foresee every problem and know, in advance, how to solve it.

The reality is that all start-ups are dysfunctional. What makes a person an entrepreneur is that he has the determination, perseverance, and resourcefulness to overcome the dysfunction of a new enterprise. Paul McCartney put it well when asked in an interview about how the Beatles got started. McCartney answered, “Nobody knows how to do it. You just start a band.”

I should also point out that people often fail to take action because they tend to confuse the word hard with impossible. It’s not impossible to change occupations right now; just hard. It’s not impossible to move to another city right now; just hard. It’s not impossible to start a new business right now; just hard.

Hard is the very thing that gives value to an objective. Everything worth accomplishing is hard. If you’re waiting for everything to be just right before taking action, you’re in possession of a foolproof excuse for failure.

Never allow change to make you fearful. Instead, embrace it as one of the most exciting aspects of life. Think of action as an opportunity to make mistakes, mistakes that give you a front-row seat in the Theater of Learning.

Carlos Castaneda explained it perfectly succinctly when he said, “A warrior lives by acting, not by thinking about acting, nor by thinking about what he will think when he has finished acting.” Thinking is a good thing to do — but not nearly as good as action.

The idea is to be bold and take more swings at pitches that aren’t perfect, which will result in your getting your share of singles and doubles. Which is important, because singles and doubles make it possible for you to still be at bat when that perfect pitch finally arrives. Then, if you’re prepared, you’ll be in a position to hit one out of the park. The more action you take, the more results you get. It’s that simple.

Not surprisingly, Albert Einstein’s said it best: “Nothing happens until something moves.”

ROBERT RINGER is a New York Times #1 bestselling author who has appeared on numerous national radio and television shows, including The Tonight Show, Today, The Dennis Miller Show, Good Morning America, ABC Nightline, The Charlie Rose Show, as well as Fox News and Fox Business. His books includeMillion Dollar Habits: 10 Simple Steps to Getting Everything You Want in Life and To Be or Not to Be Intimidated?: That is the Question 

To sign up for a free subscription to his mind-expanding daily insights, visit www.robertringer.com.
Copyright © 2014 Robert Ringer

When Politicians Use the Word “We,” …

By Robert Ringer

When politicians use the word “we,” it’s usually a signal that they are advocating government force to bring about change that those in power deem to be desirable. This is the essence of statism. Don’t buy into it.

Instead, work on developing the strength and self-discipline to ignore the intimidating demands of politicians and the masses that you act altruistically and “do your patriotic duty.” When you look closely at those who make such demands, you’ll usually find that what they are really demanding is that you do what is in THEIR best interest.

Thanks, but no thanks. Liberty is about your right to live your life as you please, without interference from others. Never forfeit that right — for anybody or anything..

ROBERT RINGER is a New York Times #1 bestselling author who has appeared on numerous national radio and television shows, including The Tonight Show, Today, The Dennis Miller Show, Good Morning America, ABC Nightline, The Charlie Rose Show, as well as Fox News and Fox Business. His books includeMillion Dollar Habits: 10 Simple Steps to Getting Everything You Want in Life and To Be or Not to Be Intimidated?: That is the Question 

To sign up for a free subscription to his mind-expanding daily insights, visit www.robertringer.com.
Copyright © 2014 Robert Ringer

A Lesson in Entrepreneurship: Do You Know the Name of the Guy who Actually Wrote the DOS Program that Bill Gates Bought for $50K?

Robert Ringer makes a lot of important points below, including the importance of marketing. I see many, including strangely some in the libertarian movement, who look down at marketing, which I think is pretty bizarre and one reason their efforts tend to fail. Wasn't it Mises and Hayek, who taught us that advertising is important and that not all knowledge is dispersed throughout the world to everyone simultaneously?  Marketing is about dissemination of knowledge, to diss marketing, or even to fail to understand the very important role of marketing, is just another example of  how knowledge, in this case knowledge about the value of marketing, is not dispersed to all minds equally. In fact, such dispersion is not even close the occurring equally and it never will.

In this essay Ringer also discusses the role of the "dealmaker." What Ringer calls the dealmaker here, I would consider the essence of entrepreneurship. It is not necessarily about "creative destruction," "disruption" or about putting risk capital to work. These factors all have roles in an economy, but the essence of entrepreneurship, in my view, is one that is similar to the view held by Israel Kirzner (SEE: Competition and Entrepreneurship). It is a kind of arbitrage between where assets are and where they can be employed more productively (i.e. profitably). -RW

By Robert Ringer

If you look at the great entrepreneurs throughout history, the one thing they've all had in common is that they were, and are, great dealmakers. They understand the efficacy of hiring others to handle their day-to-day operations while they work on identifying and closing lucrative deals. Andrew Carnegie set the standard in this regard.

All across the occupational spectrum, entrepreneurs have used their dealmaking prowess to build great empires. Wolfgang Puck is undoubtedly a

It’s counter-intuitive thinking, but …

By Robert Ringer

It’s counter-intuitive thinking, but it’s been my observation that often there is not strength in numbers, but weakness.

For example, suppose you want to help “the poor.” Rather than waste time becoming involved in the muddled bureaucracy of some organization where you would have to confer with others over such questions as who qualifies as “poor” and what, precisely, should be done for such people, it’s a whole lot easier, faster, and more efficient to make all of those decisions unilaterally and take immediate action yourself.

All you would need to do is decide which person or persons you deem to be poor, then decide how much of your OWN money you would like to give them. In fact, you could personally deliver the money to them — no middleman necessary. And just think, you could do all this without having to stop and consult anyone else.

Having accomplished your objective, you could then go on to other pursuits without harassing friends, neighbors, or strangers about your charitable beliefs. Simple, efficient, immediate results — the kind of results that are all but impossible to achieve through group action.

This is especially true if the group happens to be, or is involved with, the government.

ROBERT RINGER is a New York Times #1 bestselling author who has appeared on numerous national radio and television shows, including The Tonight Show, Today, The Dennis Miller Show, Good Morning America, ABC Nightline, The Charlie Rose Show, as well as Fox News and Fox Business. His books includeMillion Dollar Habits: 10 Simple Steps to Getting Everything You Want in Life and To Be or Not to Be Intimidated?: That is the Question 

To sign up for a free subscription to his mind-expanding daily insights, visit www.robertringer.com.
Copyright © 2014 Robert Ringer

Political Correctness Has Evolved into Comedy

By Robert Ringer

There is a fundamental misconception about dignity in our age of artificially created “rights.” Political-action groups love to babble about being treated with dignity, as though dignity were a right. But dignity is no more a right than love or friendship.

The reality is that no one can be forced to treat you with dignity. Through a variety of applied pressures, someone might feel that it’s in his best interest to pretend to treat you with dignity, but such false dignity breeds only hatred and resentment.

So-called political correctness is a perfect example of this, so much so that it has evolved from resentment to comedy. When a concept is no longer taken seriously, where’s the dignity?

Am I missing something?

ROBERT RINGER is a New York Times #1 bestselling author who has appeared on numerous national radio and television shows, including The Tonight Show, Today, The Dennis Miller Show, Good Morning America, ABC Nightline, The Charlie Rose Show, as well as Fox News and Fox Business. His books includeMillion Dollar Habits: 10 Simple Steps to Getting Everything You Want in Life and To Be or Not to Be Intimidated?: That is the Question 

To sign up for a free subscription to his mind-expanding daily insights, visit www.robertringer.com.
Copyright © 2014 Robert Ringer

Dealing with Delusions

By Robert  Ringer

Perception is a topic that has always fascinated me. When a person is revered, the reverence quickly disappears if something happens that changes the public’s perception of that individual. If, for example, the person on the receiving end of the adulation is exposed as a fraud or falls into disgrace, admiration soon turns to contempt.

I thought about this while watching a show about

Attitude and Odds

By Robert Ringer

Billionaire J. Paul Getty was once asked to write a magazine article about how he became so rich, to which he responded, “Some people find oil. Others don’t.” Talk about playing into the hands of randomness advocates. I acknowledge that there’s a lot of luck involved in the way life turns out. But luck isn’t the only factor in the equation of life, so it’s unwise to depend on luck to guide your destiny.

The law of averages determines the long-term inevitability of things, i.e., it establishes odds. However, when it comes to the human experience, there’s an important additional

The Fundamental Transformation of Glenn Beck

By Robert Ringer

Glenn Beck recently announced his latest “fundamental transformation of Glenn Beck” when he said, “I am in the final phase, I think, of a massive transformation.  One that will take me to rough terrain, uncharted landscape and lonely woods.  This may end up being the biggest

Is it just me, or is there something fundamentally wrong with our system of electing public “servants?”

By Robert Ringer

The story of Richard W. Sonnenfeldt, author of Witness to Nuremburg, is one that every person who is concerned about tyranny should read.

Sonnenfeldt fled his German homeland for England at age fifteen when it became clear that Jews were increasingly at risk under the new Nazi regime.  After some stranger-than-life twists and turns, he settled in Baltimore, Maryland, at age twenty and became a U.S. citizen.

Sonnenfeldt ultimately ended up in the Army and, at the end of World War II, was one of the soldiers who marched into the Nazi’s Dachau concentration camp.  When U.S. troops arrived there, the guard towers were empty, abandoned by Nazi guards who fled when they realized the end was at hand.

Sonnenfeldt could not believe what he saw — unburied corpses piled one on top of another … thousands of emaciated human beings who were barely alive … prisoners beating a German shepherd dog to death in retribution for the way prison-camp dogs had terrorized them.  As he stared at the horrors before him, he thought to himself that he was one of the luckiest people in the world to have escaped the fate of the millions who were tortured and murdered.

Following the end of the war, Sonnenfeldt went on to

The Illusion of Misfortune

By Robert Ringer

People often misread an event or circumstance as an adversity or setback.  The problem is that we tend to judge events on the basis of their immediate impact, but, as life repeatedly teaches us, the long-term consequences of an action can be quite different from what we initially observe.

The bad is superficial and obvious; the good often takes investigation and long-term observation.  It’s important to recognize that

The Individual versus the State

By Robert Ringer

My last article, “Shame on Walmart,” evoked a spirited and healthy debate among readers.  In the broadest sense, the debate boiled down to free-market capitalism versus government intervention.  I say broadest sense, because many readers stated, either directly or indirectly, that the government should only intervene “a little” when it comes to regulating business and helping people who do not have the means to fend for themselves.

In real terms, what government’s helping “a little” equates to is a so-called mixed economy, which the late, great Henry Hazlitt meticulously explained, in Economics in One Lesson, does not

Shame on Walmart

By Robert Ringer

Forget that Walmart employs 1.4 million people in the U.S. alone.  Forget that it saves consumers billions of dollars each year on retail purchases.  Forget that its employees, on average, earn about double the minimum wage.  The raw-meat crowd is salivating.  Bring out the class-warfare script.

The word from some disgruntled employees is that Walmart doesn’t treat its employees “fairly” — whatever that’s supposed to mean.  But, definitions aside, this is your lucky day.  Because if you think Walmart is “unfair,” guess what?  You

A Lethal Quiet Moral Revolution

By Robert Ringer

The other day, a friend of mine was lamenting about how the America we grew up in had become a totally different country in such a short period of time. In a discouraged tone, he asked, “How did it happen?”

“It’s pretty simple,” I told him. “It happened while Americans were watching the NBA playoffs, sipping their bottles of Miller Lite, and stuffing themselves with triple-cheese pizzas. They simply ignored what was happening, because to comprehend it would have required thinking — and thinking takes effort.”

In the meantime, while everyone was focused the life of bread and circus, a lethal quiet moral revolution — that few people took seriously — was taking place in the shadows. I say lethal, because the moral standards of a civilization constitute its very foundation. And when that foundation is degraded, the civilization itself is in danger of being displaced by an entirely different civilization based on different moral standards.

The result of America’s moral revolution is that it caused a 180-degree shift America’s generally accepted code of conduct. Through gradualism, the barbarians inside our gates have persuaded (or intimidated) a large percentage of Americans into accepting the notion that many of our most cherished values and beliefs of yesteryear are immoral, and that, in our brave new world, some of the worst vices of the past are to be applauded and encouraged.

As a result, we now live in a world turned upside down, which means that most people today are ─ morally speaking — standing on their heads. That said, might I humbly suggest that this might be a good time to get out your moral compass and study it carefully? And, while doing so, keep in mind that one man or woman with courage is a majority.

… just sayin

ROBERT RINGER is a New York Times #1 bestselling author who has appeared on numerous national radio and television shows, including The Tonight Show, Today, The Dennis Miller Show, Good Morning America, ABC Nightline, The Charlie Rose Show, as well as Fox News and Fox Business. To sign up for a free subscription to his mind-expanding daily insights, visit www.robertringer.com.

Copyright © 2014 Robert Ringer