OCTOBER 18TH, 2008
By JBUR1
When you’re hot you’re hot and Tina Fey is hot. A book deal to lock up Tina Fey got into a bidding war and it got up to $6 million for a book that has yet to be written.
Tina Fey is the ‘It’ girl right now. $6 million is serious money for a book advance. So why’s the money going there? Its pretty obvious that she’s hot because of her Sarah Palin impression and NBC has special SNL episodes on Thursdays just to get in more Tina Fey as Sarah Palin time.
The funny thing about money and success sometimes is that when it comes, it comes fast and its extremely chaotic. Tina Fey’s been on TV for awhile and has two shows and a recent movie but her likeness to Sarah Palin has blasted off her popularity to another level.
An obstacle to success for a lot of people is that they hate messiness and chaos in their lives and in an attempt to have control they slow their life down to a crawl. A jet can’t lift off the ground going 5 mph yet that’s what so many people try to do. To build any kind of momentum, a person or organization has to move quickly and handle all the mess that comes with it.
Take inspiration from Tina Fey. She’s got two TV shows going and had the honies to take on a book deal as well. She’s not trying to slow her momentum down, she’s embracing it.
OCTOBER 12TH, 2008
By JBUR1
Easy come easy go. I’m not sure where the lesson is in this story other than the obvious one of the benefits and dangers of leverage. I’m not sure what can be learned from this story but I’m posting it because of the sheer magnitude of the dollar amount, how quickly it vaporized and the size of the bets this guy was making.
A lot of the Forbes 400 are gamblers and risk takers but this takes it to a whole new level. Aubrey McClendon was truly a CEO that put his money on the line along with shareholders. Unfortunately, Aubrey was #134 on this year’s Forbes 400 list. Aubrey McClendon, CEO of Chesapeake Energy, most likely lost 100% of his entire $3 Billion net worth over the last 3 months. Check out this chart on Chesapeake Energy. It went from $70 to as low as $11in just over 3 months.
The advice from this big money story is more clear to me now than when I started this post.
Here’s the lesson. In order to become ultra wealthy, you have to have a little bit of gambler in you. Aubrey McClendon takes the prize with this story but the principle holds true. To become big money you have to place a big bet and continue to place them. Too many people expect too big of a return on a small bet, which is why the lottery is so popular. The other principle is that Aubrey McClendon bet on himself when he bought his company’s stock. As CEO, that’s definitely placing a bet on yourself which shows extreme confidence and aggressiveness.
Tying it all together, to have $3 billion to lose, you have to bet big and bet on yourself.
OCTOBER 10TH, 2008
By JBUR1
I mentioned in the last post to follow big money stories to see what the big money is up to. It does three things: 1. it gives great investment ideas 2. it helps to determine what the next big industries and companies are 3. you can get a glimpse into their thinking by analyzing why they did what they did and how they did it.
You can also pick up on their traits, characteristics and strategies for your own personal and business success.
One guy a lot of tech people follow for all these reasons is Ron Conway. He’s not exactly a household name. He’s not on the Forbes 4oo list and he’s not mentioned in the media much. I had never heard of him myself until a friend of mine told me about him six months ago. My friend was already involved in a few internet businesses and I asked him for some advice. One of the pieces of advice he gave me was to follow the moves of Ron Conway and his firm Baseline Ventures on CrunchBase. Another piece of advice is to follow the moves of all the venture capital firms on CrunchBase.com to see where the web is headed. Its interesting to check out the latest websites or firms that have received funding.
Ron Conway’s original claim to fame is that his firm, Angel Investors, was an early investor in Google, Ask Jeeves and PayPal.
Ron Conway is in the news recently. He sent out an email to all his companies and you can read it here. It was a post from the Tech Crunch blog, one of the most popular tech blogs on the internet.
Follow Ron Conway and everybody else on techcrunch.com and you’ll practically be a Silicon Valley insider.
OCTOBER 8TH, 2008
By JBUR1
Follow the Big Money wherever it goes and leave all prejudices and judgements behind. This is much harder to do than it sounds. If you haven’t always followed this advice, don’t worry, you have lots of good company. A lot of the very wealthy and large corporations have made the same mistake and its cost them untold billions.
When you’re reading the news, keep an eye out for stories that have large dollar amounts attached to them and try to figure out why the money’s going there.
One such story that is a test for a lot of people is the contract that Rush Limbaugh just signed in July, see article. His contract included a 9 figure signing bonus that went with his $400 million. Thats guaranteed up front. Nobody gets guaranteed 9 figure signing bonuses, not Tiger Woods, not Leonardo DiCaprio and not CEO’s. That’s pretty good for a 3 hour workday. You could say he’s the biggest personality around, and I don’t mean his weight. The only person that’s in his universe is Oprah.
So how does he pull it off? Working backwards, if you have that kind of money following you then you need sponsors and advertisers that pay big for your time. They’ll only pay big if your audience is big and loyal. So how did he get such a big and loyal audience?
I’ve identified five things:
He’s passionate about his work, he’s always well prepared, the show moves quickly so he gets a lot in (good value for time spent), he always has plenty of content from start to finish and most importantly, he’s formed a community of listeners that feel a sense of connection and trust him.
