* The last time I was in contact with my Finnish counterpart a few years ago, he was Finland’s ambassador to France.
* Stone was an acolyte of Napoleon Hill and Think and Grow Rich. Yet Hill was a failure financially and an alcoholic (Stone told me) and had to be rescued by Stone to survive.
* Why doesn’t anyone make their fortune by auditing every financial prophet at year-end and showing the results over a three-year period? Why isn’t that on 60 Minutes?
* From Act III, Lady Windermere’s Fan (1893).
* I admit some of you might not consider that a failure. It was night school, during my days at Prudential. I was seeking a student deferment.
* Chapter 10 addresses “no fear.”
† Quoted in Sun Sentinel, November 9, 2012, http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/2012-11-09/sports/sfl-mike-tyson-explains-one-of-his-most-famous-quotes-20121109_1_mike-tyson-undisputed-truth-famous-quotes.
* This is why I lost badly in the first round of the TV game show Jeopardy to a dancing waiter from Iowa. I kept trying to buzz in early and was locked out for five seconds. I guess he had better rhythm.
* Well, I’m asked about what happens if I die. I respond that I’m Catholic and assume I’d go to heaven.
* “You were alive when Kennedy was shot?!” he exclaimed at dinner one night as my wife and I recalled the Dallas disaster. “Yes,” I said, “but you should have been with me at Ford’s Theatre!”
* Vitally important, given same-sex marriage, life partners instead of spouses, and so forth.
* There is some debate about this, since some historians feel he was an educated person who used proper grammar, but the quote remains with us and is instructive.
* See my book, with Richard Citrin, The Resilience Advantage (New York: Business Expert Press, 2016).
* The Palisades are a topographic “intrusive sill.” Read the epilogue to find out how I know this and why it’s important.
* See the appendix if you’d like to know what they are, with my compliments.
* See my books The Great Big Book of Process Visuals (East Greenwich, RI: Las Brisas Research Press, 2009) and Son of Process Visuals (East Greenwich, RI: Las Brisas Research Press, 2011).
* For those of you who eschew modern entertainment, this was the movie in which the protagonist is forced to keep living the exact same day over and over.
* My source for this is Charles H. Kepner and Benjamin B. Tregoe, The Rational Manager (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965). I was with their firm for eleven years, a combination of a boutique McKinsey and Mad Men.
* I didn’t know it at the time, but I was an early adherent of positive psychology, and realized that you can’t “change” negative patterns of behavior; you have to replace them with positive ones that generate the same or a better reward.
† Primary motivators are actually gratification in one’s work and autonomy.
* According to a variety of sources, including the Association for Talent Development, annual expenditures for training surpass $60 billion in the U.S. alone. Yes, that’s ten zeros after the six.
* For the entrepreneurs reading this, add “monetization” to the list of innovative traits. If it doesn’t generate new revenues at a profit, it’s not true innovation.
* The Innovation Formula, with Mike Robert: (Cambridge:Ballinger/Harper & Row, 1988).
* Dan Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness (New York: Knopf, 2006); Martin Seligman, Learned Optimism (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2011).
† Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, On Death and Dying (New York: Macmillan, 1969).
* “Better it is for philosophy to err in active participation in the living struggles and issues of its own age and times than to maintain an immune monastic impeccability, without relevancy and bearing in generating ideas of its contemporary present” from “Does Reality Possess Practical Character?,” 1908; “And while saints are engaged in introspection, burly sinners run the world” from Reconstruction in Philosophy, 1920.
* The idea that the government can keep secrets for years, despite regularly being hacked and secrets being leaked, is beyond belief.
* The story goes that the great dancer Fred Astaire’s original audition card read, “Thin voice, balding, dances a little.”
* Case in point: As I noted earlier, one of the most important, growth-oriented pieces of advice I ever received was from a therapist for $120 per fifty-five-minute session: “Alan, life is about success, not perfection.” You’ll find that theme throughout this book and most of my other ones.
* Note that all answers are useful. If you never graduated from high school, that’s quite a story given what you’re doing today. There are no poor responses.
* The Kardashians are not a new phenomenon. The Gabors—mother and three daughters—were doing the same thing easily in the much smaller world of the 1950s, and with primitive technology.
* Historically, there are only shreds of evidence of Jesus’s existence but tons of writing attributed to Paul and verified. We would know very little about the early church and about Jesus’s life if not for Paul, who is far more important than even St. Peter, who has been acknowledged as the first pope.
* You can’t accept just everyone. Politicians are continually embarrassed by support and financing offered by people with poor ethics, disturbed views, and offensive techniques.
* This is why we love the late Yogi Berra’s oxymorons: “No one goes there anymore, it’s too crowded.” It’s an example that contradicts itself. Allen quote: Wikiquote, https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Woody_Allen.
* For a detailed discussion of these techniques see my book The Language of Success, coauthored by Kim Wilkerson (New York: Business Expert Press, 2016).
* Famously uttered by counsel Brendan Sullivan defending Lt. Col. Oliver North during the Iran-Contra scandal in the late 1980s. Committee chair Senator Daniel Inouye had suggested that Sullivan allow North to speak for himself.
* Ironically, the problem is seldom talent but rather simply creating the awareness that you exist!
* That sounds counterintuitive, but it’s not. People will pay more for intimacy but don’t expect it all that often. See Million Dollar Consulting (McGraw-Hill, fifth edition, 2016) for a detailed discussion of value and fees.
* I gladly wrote a foreword for a colleague’s new book, and “Foreword by Alan Weiss” went on the front cover, though I never requested it.
* http://www.cnn.com/TECH/space/9909/30/mars.metric
* Compare this to the observation of Eleanor Robson Belmont, stage actress and later wife of a billionaire: “A private railroad car is not an acquired taste. One takes to it immediately.”
* For the record, my book Thrive was written years before Arianna Huffington’s.
* As quoted in François Gilot and Carlton Lake, Life with Picasso, reprint edition (New York: Anchor, 1989).
* Noun, pronoun, verb, adverb, adjective, conjunction, preposition, interjection.
* I’m not telling you; look it up.
* See the books 1491 and 1493 by Charles C. Mann (New York: Knopf, 2005 and 2011, respectively).
† http://newsbusters.org/blogs/mark-finkelstein/2008/11/06/odd-job-matthews-says-his-role-make-obama-presidency-success
* Essentially, people meet expectations, fail to meet expectations, or exceed expectations. That’s it; anything else is superfluous.