Tag: Art of the Comeback

The Secret to Elon Musk’s Success: An obsession with risk and the management of its destructive elements

It’s certainly worth a discussion, although I had been avoiding reading the book Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson, mainly because it was a Time Magazine view of the world, and I tend not to enjoy books like that very much.  I’ve read other books by Isaacson and enjoyed them enough to learn new things.  In this case, Isaacson was given access to Elon Musk for the last few years to study him and learn all he could.  So, it was worth reading about the daily life and details of a person who is often the wealthiest in the world and runs some of the most successful companies.  But politically, I think of Elon Musk as a Barack Obama fanboy and a global greenie weenie.  But I do admire how he built Tesla.  I’m certainly not a EV fan of electric cars, but Tesla has carved out a nice little niche for themselves that I think is valuable.  SpaceX is an incredible company that is doing wonderful things.  I’m a tremendous fan of the Starship program and what has been done with Falcon 9 and the Dragon program.  I appreciate them for what they are, and I think Musk is just a unique personality to continue healthily pushing society places it needs to go.  I think of him as a great case of “dynamic intellectualism” that I talk about with the Metaphysics of Quality and the philosophy of Robert Persig.  But Elon Musk smoked pot on the Joe Rogan Show and wanted to put fart apps into his very expensive Tesla cars, so he’s not my kind of guy and people like Isaacson tend to get the surface qualities of his subjects, but not the real intellectual gist of their value.  However, after reading Elon Musk by Isaacson, the unavoidable trait of the secret to success did emerge without question, which is why I kept hearing about the book from friends and respected business leaders. 

Since the book came out in the fall of 2023, I have had at least someone once a week asking me if I had read the book since I usually read everything that comes out.  But I typically avoid the trendy stuff and lean more toward big-picture things.  I wasn’t interested in another get-rich book by people fascinated with wealth creation viewed through a popular cultural lens.  But so many people were getting the book and passing it out to their management teams, looking for some secret sauce that Musk obviously has.  So when I was at dinner with some very important people at Son of the Butcher at Liberty Center in Ohio, and under great encouragement from those people indicated that I would love the book, I left that dinner, stopped by the bookstore, and bought it just before Barnes and Noble closed for the night, and I promised them the next time I would see them, I would have read the book and told them what I thought of it.  That was on a Thursday night, so by Monday, when I would see some of them again, I had read the book, it’s a pretty big book with a lot of details in it.  Many people had bought the book, but they hadn’t made it very far through, and they wanted to know my opinion on whether to continue slugging through it.  In truth, it was a good book; Walter did a good job for a Simon and Schuster publication intended for static society audiences.  And I would say it’s one of the most important books of our time, for a lot of reasons, which I’ll spend separate articles covering.  But the secret sauce, yes, it was there and in all its glory.  I understood it, and it’s something I relate to. 

Throughout the book, I couldn’t help but think of President Trump when I think of Elon Musk and how wealth has been projected over time.  Trump’s Art of the Comeback from 1997 was about knowing influential people, supermodels, wives, exotic cars, and tall skyscrapers.  And in the part of the book where Elon Musk went through his period of wealth acquisition, Walter Isaacson seemed to be on comfortable ground.  However, in the cover inserts were exciting value changes for Elon Musk.  The things that Musk thinks are successful and what Trump thought was successful have changed a lot over time.  Musk had exhibitions of massive engineering feats displayed in his book, where Trump featured the building of skyscrapers and the New York skyline.  But while the things that wealth could buy as a value may have changed, getting there had not.  Most wealthy people have some prevalent traits they share in common, which is the concern of Walter’s books, especially with Steve Jobs.  What makes successful people successful?  And everyone talking to me about the book wanted to know this.  “If I read this book, will it make me successful?  Can we pass this book on to our super managers and sales teams and learn something from Elon Musk to help us be more successful?”  The answer is yes.  However, knowing how to be successful doesn’t mean most people have the guts to do so.  You can’t cheat that, even though that is what causes most of the corruption in the world—the desire to take the easy way to wealth to have the benefits without the downside. 

The downside with Musk and Trump, along with many others who have done similar things, even Jeff Bezos, is that they are addicted to risk and obsessed with it.   Elon Musk is a classic riverboat gambler who loves risk.  But has the unique personality to be very intelligent enough to know when and how to mitigate risk.  But yes, he is an obsessive gambler who would play Texas Hold ’em’ by pushing all in for every pot, blowing a lot of money in the process.  But in so doing, he would also get the biggest jackpots.  And that’s clearly how he achieved success at the level he did.  Anybody wanting to succeed would have to learn to bring more risk to their lives to have the success that comes from winning big.  A gambler like that might spend a fortune on betting.  But mathematically speaking, people like Musk and Trump know that eventually, things will swing in your direction.  What separates them from everyone else is how much you can take until you fold up on yourself, broke and destitute.  Musk certainly has a personality that could be homeless and poor beyond any reasonable scale because he is a person obsessed with risk.  I get it; I have many of those same traits.  It’s not the money someone like him is interested in.  But its success in risking and surviving, that is.  And without that risk, there would be no success.  Elon Musk would be just another person with Asperger’s and too much brain power, applying it to a static society that is not interested in risk.  They wanted everything safe and predictable and would push themselves by nature as far from the Elon Musk types as they could, to maintain their safe lives.  That’s what makes Walter’s book so good because it indeed chronicles this risky behavior in ways that the public usually doesn’t get to see in people.  But just buying the book wouldn’t make people successful by itself.  What it could do, though, was let people understand that risk is critical to business and how risk is managed is the key to all successful enterprises, which is my general opinion of the book.  Yes, people should read it.  However, they should learn from it how to put more risk into their lives without becoming destructive.  Because there is no way to cheat risk, you either develop a healthy relationship with risk or get standard, predictable results that stagnate and rot you and your culture from the inside out.  Luckily for us, there are people like Elon Musk out there who are making things exciting.  But, there should be a lot more, and maybe yet, there will be.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

Trump Doesn’t Need Anybody As A Running Mate: Republicans love America, Democrats hate it

It was all the talk after the Kansas City Chiefs won their championship game to go to the Super Bowl that a polling firm had done a study on the impact Taylor Swift could have on the upcoming election and that 1/5 of potential voters would vote on whomever she told them to.  This is after a week of mainstream media saying that Trump needed help winning the general election because he needed Democrats and moderates.  Now that it’s apparent that he will win the nomination,  Let me tell you, if Trump picked a stick to run with as V.P., he would still win the 2024 election, and people who don’t understand that are either grotesquely naive or stupid.  The guys on Clay and Buck’s show during daytime radio these days are nowhere near as insightful as Rush Limbaugh used to be.  They are in a panic, believing the statements about how moderate America is and that general elections are more complicated to win than primaries with primarily Republican voters.  They think that there are now largely independent voters who will make it impossible for any Republican to run for office unless they align themselves with more moderate voters because that’s what it would take to win a majority in America.  Well, all those assessments are wrong. Trump doesn’t need to pick Nikki Haley to pull the Republican Party together, and no, the President doesn’t need more than 90% of Republican voters to win in the general election either.  When people say things like that, what we are hearing are the gasps of a dying regime.  It’s a bluff, and nothing more so that those losing power can somehow stay close to power and perhaps control it like George Bush did with Ronald Reagan in the 80s.  We are not that kind of country anymore and will be even more different than we are now in the fall of 2024.  Fox News does not have the type of influence that many think it does if it ever did. 

I love this book!!!

Trump will win the general election because he’s selling something that all people can relate to, a good country. I have said for years now that Trump’s book, The Art of the Comeback, is the book everyone should read on how Trump plans to run for a second term. And it takes something that Taylor Swift will never have. The political left, who have managed to get Taylor Swift to endorse Joe Biden, thinks that what makes it work for Trump is celebrity and the influence that such a person has over people commercially. But as I reminded people in the last two elections, few celebrities openly endorsed Trump, especially in 2016. Remember when Obama brought all the top pop culture celebrities in Philadelphia to support Hillary Clinton? It didn’t help her one bit. Remember when no real celebrities signed on to attend Trump’s inauguration? It didn’t hurt him at all. I know many people, especially women, who were undoubtedly Never Trumpers a few years ago because they didn’t like his public approach, the tough executive persona he developed during his many years on the top-rated show, The Apprentice. And they are voting for Trump now, no matter who else is running. Do you know why? Because the economy is terrible, and they can see it at the grocery store. The proper measures of economic growth are obvious to all, and people have lost trust in media personalities because of the gross abuses seen over the last several years, starting with the many lies that were told to them with COVID-19. And that trust isn’t coming back anytime soon.

Taylor Swift or Nikki Haley aren’t needed to soften the Trump ticket. He will win anyway. I understand that many Republicans want me not to say that because they worry that it will keep people home on election night, and they believe the media narrative that it will take all Republicans and then some to get Trump back in the White House. And while I will say, don’t take anything for granted, we are looking at a guy in Trump who had over 75 million votes in the 2020 election. And we are looking at a guy in Biden who had a reported 81 million votes, primarily made up of around 20 million. I have been all over the country after the election and know people. I have also seen voter information percent by precinct in every county in America, and Biden is lucky if he even got 60 million votes from the dripping wet blue state cities. Everywhere else, labor unions, people of color, immigrants from south of the border, and Democrats upset that their manufacturing jobs have been shipped away to China through globalism are all voting for Trump. When the rubber hits the road, a majority of Republicans will vote for Trump. But all the minority groups will, too. Even Democrats. Why? People will vote for their best interest, and Trump is in their best interest. When it’s time to vote in November and many of the political pundits who are starting all these rumors already know, people will vote for Trump because they want to save America, and only one person is selling that. Democrats hate America and want to transform it. Republicans love America and want to save it. The election comes down to that one issue, and Trump understands it clearly.

Most Republicans, for a number of reasons, are very insecure. Maybe they spend too much time earning money to feel stable in their social interactions, so they are prone to peer pressure. But Republicans believe too quickly the con jobs of these social parasites who tend to run popular culture. But the truth of the matter is that Taylor Swift is one of the few pop stars left due to the tampering of the World Economic Forum, and they are trying to sell her as the second coming of Christ, essentially to save feminism. And she can’t handle it. She’s favored by default, not because people picked her. There isn’t anyone else to listen to these days, so yes, lots of young girls like her and go to her concerts. But those same people aren’t likely to vote, even if Taylor Swift tells them to. The catch with celebrity is that brand damage happens quickly once people see and meet the person up close. Taylor Swift will lose her star power if she goes against Maga openly, which is happening now that she is associated with the Kansas City Chiefs because of her relationship with the star tight end. Trump understands the limits of celebrity better than just about anybody and has been able to take it several steps further because he’s a good executive. He’s selling America back to America, which is very powerful, especially when you read his book, The Art of the Comeback. Biden can’t undo all that he has done in trying to rip the carpet out from under everyone with his anti-American actions. The sucker job of trying to make the race look close is actually to sell the original cheat in 2020, where a lot of people were involved in stealing that election, including Fox News and all their employees, of which Clay and Buck are part. They may disagree with the mainstreamers, but there are specific rules in playing in coastal media, and some of those rules these days are to deny, deny, deny until you die, what happened in the 2020 election. And even Taylor Swift is prone to this disparity. The truth is, celebrity is pretty fragile. Trump is selling something most people want: a stable country that is the best in the world. And everyone wants deep down inside to be part of a winning team. And nobody knows how to sell winning more than Trump. And people will vote for him because of it.

Mr Pfizer looks like he’s kissing his sister.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

The Art of the Comeback: A plan for the future

Even though the short-term consequences have been terrifying, the best thing that could have happened is that the secret losers who have hidden behind the curtain of world events for many decades with occult practices and hokey religions are now apparent. Their climate change occult isn’t just one that is socialist against capitalism but is against life itself in favor of protecting a planet they cleave to like a frightened child cleaves to a mother’s skirt, even as they should be grown up enough to let go and face danger with boldness. And with Trump’s first presidency, his “Art of the Deal” term in office, he showed what was possible in politics where all those manipulators had been hiding all along, and he quickly fixed much of the world in a few short years. This provoked an extreme reaction to him, revealing the truth of their nature, which conspiracy theories had only suspected over the last century. Many thought we were having an honest discussion between socialism and capitalism, for which Donald Trump was an unapologetic representative of the Reagan years of bold capitalism. It was easy to focus on the degradation of communist states in Iran and Russia. But the 90s were a different story, Reagan was out of the White House, and the Russian empire crumbled to dust, falling with its perceptions of communism. And Bill Clinton was elected as President of the United States. Compared to the 80s, when I came of age, got married, and started having children, the 90s were horrible, corrupt, and detrimental to the human condition. And during that time, Donald Trump, who had it all, had fallen into being billions of dollars poorer than a homeless person. The world was falling apart, but by the end of the decade, Trump was on top again, and his journey was written in a sequel to his Art of the Deal book, which was called The Art of the Comeback.

Reading The Art of the Comeback now, in the 2020s, is quite a time capsule. It is interesting to see so many celebrities kissing up to Trump, who was one of the world’s wealthiest people at that time. Michael Jackson, Steven Spielberg, Tiger Woods, and many celebrities, who are now professed liberals, were hungry to get their pictures next to Trump. And compared to the 90s, our modern environment is perilously bleak and unhopeful. Covid has changed people in terrible ways; they are afraid to socially interact even years after the CDC nearly destroyed the world with white lab coat bureaucracy and misdiagnosed precautions meant to destroy capitalism at its roots. The occult of earth worship is always lingering behind the political theater and entertainment scenes. It’s a much less optimistic world than it was in the 90s when The Art of the Comeback was written.   But it didn’t need to be that way; it was a choice for the human race to penalize ourselves with politics globally. We saw something unique happen from 2016 to 2020, Trump became President, and America was Great Again. The managed decline planned for us was averted, and the political left and their minions of doom behind the global curtain were in a panic, and they would do anything to get rid of him. But in so doing, they showed us all their cards, and at least now we know what we are dealing with and where they reside. 

I’ve been saying that The Art of the Comeback needs to be the campaign model for Trump’s re-election strategy. So far, the political enemies of America First have been defining who Trump is as a political radical, an unhinged lunatic, and a far-right insurgent. But Trump didn’t ever get where he was by allowing others to define him. He always knew how to build a brand and then to control how people viewed that brand. And that’s what he needs to do now that 2024 is coming into focus. Many thought Trump was done for coming out of the 80s. He and his Trump Tower were doomed, and he was going down. These were the years of his famous divorce from Ivana Trump and his marriage to Marla Maples before Melania Trump. During these days, he took a picture with Hillary Clinton and honored the First Lady for handling pressure well. It was, in fact, that picture that kept me from thinking of him as a presidential candidate in 2015 when Bill O’Reilly was interviewing Trump’s announcement for a run. He had made nice with the Clintons; I couldn’t forgive him for that. But it looks like after he married Melania, he finally found the right woman. I’ve met Melania, and she is a really nice person. And, of course, she is beautiful. But she’s also extremely smart. She has obviously been a great stabilizing factor for Donald Trump, and re-reading his Art of the Comeback, knowing that he would eventually become President himself, the path to his comeback success is evident through his optimism combined with the right woman to stabilize his extremely A Type personality. 

And so it can be again with America. Trump has shown that he can navigate impossible odds to put himself back on top with personal success. And his book The Art of the Comeback is a guidebook for how to do it again, only this time for America. America has been the target of hostile forces for more years than many people want to admit to themselves.   And as things look now, it looks pretty hopeless that the bad guys have been winning and will continue to win. That’s why these next few elections are so important. If we can keep Democrats from cheating and put reasonable people in office positions, we have a chance. But for that to happen, there needs to be a recognizable brand that people can follow toward that success. And of all the people out there, only President Trump has a track record of that kind of success. His success was personal, but during his first term in office, he showed that The Art of the Deal was very relevant, from personal business to international politics. All that really changed was the setting. And that would undoubtedly be the case for The Art of the Comeback. I personally think it was great that Trump had a break at the end of 2020 and could have time to reflect on how things could be improved from his first term. He did a lot of things very right, but there were lots of things done wrong, particularly in his trust in the Administrative State to respect him and not work against him. He learned the hard lesson of just how hard that snake can bite. And people needed to see just how bad liberals really were when they were suddenly on the clock and under pressure to perform. Knowing that they had to steal the election to put their guy in power, they knew time was not on their side, so they had to rush forward all their initiatives, which has scared America because now they saw what was always behind the curtain. And that’s a good thing. It might bring short-term pain, but knowing who they are would only help long-term planning, which is at the heart of it all and is what matters next. 

Rich Hoffman

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