If we did all the things we are capable of doing, we would literally astound ourselves.
—Thomas Edison
Now that you know who you are, having analyzed your own unique talents and innate interests, and now that you’re convinced the surest way to become the richest man in town is to own your own business, you are ready to crank up the volume of your ambition. All the self-discovery in the world is useless if you don’t have the desire and the will to become the richest man or woman in town. There is also no denying the crucial role that hard work, dedication, and diligence play in reaching the American Dream. In other words, there is no wealth without ambition. Much effort equals much prosperity.
New York’s most ambitious man, Carl Icahn, believes a healthy obsession builds a wealthy bank account. Icahn is often referred to as America’s unlocker of inherent corporate value. This activist investor—who is also perhaps the most feared man in business (just ask Time Warner’s Dick Parsons or Yahoo!’s Jerry Yang)—says, “You have to be obsessive to be successful.” He loves what he does every day and can’t imagine doing anything different: “If you find something you enjoy doing, then your work is not work.” Convenience store and casino king Phil Ruffin of Wichita admonishes, “You’ve got to work hard; you’ve got to love to work; and you’ve got to have fun doing it. You can’t sit around and go to the beach. You’ve got to have high-octane ambition.” He does: In the early days of building his Total convenience store business, he notes, “I was traveling to three cities a day. It was hard, it was tiring, but I knew it was worth it.”
The level of ambition of RMIT parents seems to have had a powerful effect on the way in which many RMITs developed their personal ambition. Phil Ruffin has the same work ethic and ambition now—while buying $1 billion worth of bonds a day—as he did when he was first building his fortune. He says, “My father owned a grocery business—and all he did was work, and he was happy. I learned early that hard work makes you happy.”
Anderson, California’s Red Emmerson says, “My father didn’t have much ambition. He wanted to make just enough money to exist. I had much greater ambitions. Maybe it was because I was born in 1929. I knew I was poor and I knew I didn’t want to be that way in the future.”
Carl Icahn’s father was a struggling musician who seemed, at least to Carl, to accept his station in life. Carl had bigger plans. “As middle-class Jews, my parents were basically socialist, and I had a problem with that philosophy because with socialism there is no incentive. In politics or in business there must be incentive and accountability.” This early realization has formed the basis for Icahn’s approach to business. He believes that many Fortune 500 companies are run like socialist systems, and as a result he is determined to change the way corporations are governed. He’s currently blogging about it in his Icahn Report, which is designed to keep corporate CEOs on their toes.
William D. Sanders of El Paso, whose dad was a respected advertising agency owner, says, “My father was known for his skills and was indeed highly respected, but he was never able to turn that respect into capital—personal wealth. I always wanted both—respect and wealth. I never saw them as contradictory in any way.” Colorado Springs real estate developer Leroy Landhuis—who grew up on the farm outside a town of two hundred people—says, “My parents simply accepted their lot in life. We never left the farm except to go to church. I knew there was more and I wanted more for myself than my parents wanted for me.” Seeking a better life is a powerful motivator, no doubt, but the good news about ambition is that it can be honed.
You can’t acquire new talents, but you can kick-start your ambition addiction, you can turn up the volume of your work ethic, you can be more persistent, and you can cultivate a sense of fearlessness. You can and must be the creative force in your own life—taking personal responsibility for your success and understanding that you have the power to achieve it.
Psychologists tell us that we are all addicted to something—often to many things. The very essence of our humanness is, in fact, often defined by our personal addictions. The list of American addictions is seemingly endless: coffee, exercise, sex, cigarettes, chocolate, junk food, drugs, alcohol, love, admiration, fame, reality TV, eBay, Facebook, mail-order catalogs, online shopping, and, yes, success. You can decide which are the good addictions, the life-affirming ones versus the life-debilitating ones. But why not replace those bad addictions with good ones? RMITs do. They love to work—although, curiously, they rarely describe themselves as workaholics (New York’s Carl Icahn does, however). These qualities of persistence, diligence, work ethic, and self-belief are not genetic traits that are doled out to only a few truly gifted people. These are equal-opportunity addictions. We all have the ability to become addicted to the traits that help us seize success and create wealth. Hard work and self-belief are habits that each of us can develop and hone to a fine brilliance. Aristotle once observed: “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”
Writing is a good addiction. So is thinking through problems and developing solutions, even improving things that already work well. RMITs are often innovation junkies who refuse to settle for merely good enough. In terms of becoming an RMIT, working hard is perhaps the best addiction you can have. David Rubenstein, Washington, DC’s private equity powerhouse, believes in hard work and persistence. He doesn’t believe in what he thinks is one of the most overused words in the English language—genius. The former Carter White House aide and CEO of the Carlyle Group was described to me by some of his colleagues as a genius. He doesn’t buy it. He says, “When you get older in life, you realize there are very few geniuses in this world. Most likely, you will never meet one, and Randy, you did not meet one today.”
Growing up poor in 1950s Baltimore, Maryland, instilled in Rubenstein a keen sense of ambition. In our interview, he seemed to anticipate my every question and launch into the answer seemingly before I could ask it. He is one of the most intelligent men I met on my RMIT expedition, and yet he does not credit his intelligence for his success. Rather, he says, “The reason some people get farther ahead of other people is because they possess persistence.” He defines persistence as the ability to refuse to take no for an answer.
Rubenstein remembers that his life changed dramatically on November 4, 1980, when his boss at the time, President Jimmy Carter, was soundly defeated by Ronald Reagan. He also recalls how many people in the legal, political, and business circles he frequented while in his White House power seat complimented him on his intelligence and professionalism. Many of the Washington elite told him that if he ever needed a job, he should give them a call. “Ronald Reagan became president and I called those very same people who thought I was so smart, and you know what? They did not return my calls,” he says. He could have joined a local law firm, of course, but while he had been learning the ropes of politics, his law school classmates had been learning to be good lawyers. He would have been significantly behind the curve of his peer group. He didn’t want to be a lawyer anyway—that was not his perfect pitch. Rubenstein decided he wanted to start an investment company of his own, one that succeeded or failed based on his ambition, diligence, and determination. He wanted to control his future. Like all RMITs, he was tired of working for someone else, even if that someone else happened to be the president of the United States.
Rubenstein’s persistence paid off. As he was raising money to start his first investment fund, he says, “One investor said to me nine times in a row, ‘I don’t think your fund is right for me.’ But I kept going back and on the tenth time, he said, ‘Okay, here’s some money.’ He became our largest investor over time.” Rubenstein knew what he wanted, and his persistence and his ambition allowed him to get it.
O. Bruton Smith, the richest man in Charlotte, North Carolina, says, “Persistence is the mother’s milk of success.” The person he most admires is Ross Perot, one of the most successful men in Dallas, Texas, and certainly the most successful person that Texarkana has ever produced. “Ross started at the bottom and he didn’t stop until he reached the top,” Smith says. “Whether it was running EDS, Perot Systems, or running for president, Ross is always full-throttle.” Smith, the founder and chairman of NASCAR track owner Speedway Motorsports, Inc., and chairman of Sonic Automotive, knows a thing or two about full-throttle ambition, hard work, perseverance, and what he calls “essential energy.” He started out life as a North Carolina farm boy and today is a multibillionaire known in racing circles as the man who took NASCAR to Wall Street. Add to that the ownership of 168 automobile dealerships and control of thirty-four collision-repair centers. He notes: “The ladder of opportunity is rather tall. I am always trying to get to the top, but it is a never-ending ladder.” To most mere mortals, Bruton Smith has long been perched on the top rung, but in his early eighties, his ambition is not yet sated, nor has his work ethic waned. “From the time I had a tricycle, I wanted a bicycle, and from the time I had one car, I wanted another one, and I have never run out of energy.”
Smith and Rubenstein would no doubt agree with Calvin Coolidge when he posited that “nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan ‘press on’ has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.” Ambition requires Coolidge’s press-on mentality. It also demands constant care and feeding.
Bob Stiller, the rich roaster of rich coffees at Green Mountain Coffee in Vermont, has been one to press on indefatigably from the time he was adopted by his parents at birth, it seems. He is also a born salesman—making a pitch is his perfect pitch. He admits, though, that being an adopted child might have something to do with his strong desire to prove himself continually. He says, “I’ve just begun to understand the psychological impact of my formative years.” Even so, he took careful note of his father’s work ethic and independence as the owner of his own heating coil business. He also developed an early interest in the power of visualizing what he wanted out of life. One of the things he visualized was a shiny red Corvette. He cut out a picture of his dream and carefully taped it to the lamp in his room. As the biggest success story in Burlington, Vermont—indeed, the richest man in Vermont—he did ultimately get that visualized Corvette, though he much prefers his Jaguar XKE (his actual first sports car) and his Ferrari. Stiller has gotten considerably more than he visualized, but he still uses the power of visualization in his company and in his personal life today. “I still cut out pictures of what I want the company to achieve,” he says, “and the amazing thing is, the things that I have visualized have come to me.”
Stiller’s ambition is high-octane and highly caffeinated, no doubt, but it is packaged in a Vermont teddy bear persona. Nevertheless, he’s very much addicted to a daily cup of ambition: Howard Schultz’s Starbucks may still be on every street corner, but it is not the star of the coffee industry—Green Mountain is. With a market capitalization nearing the billion-dollar mark, Green Mountain has, in terms of profits, become the most financially successful premium coffee company in the country over the past decade. Stiller’s ambition led him to his company’s success and to what he calls “the amenities in life,” which he has attained—jets, a yacht, and a world-class art collection. He says, “Success is the ability to achieve the things you want in life.” But even though he has achieved the things he wants in life, he is still climbing—every day. He says, “We all have within ourselves the capability to accentuate our ambition and we all have the ability to choose to be diligent workers—to be doers.” He gives much of the credit for his successful thinking to a Silva meditation and mind-development course that he says changed his whole perspective on the world. “People don’t realize the power we have in our minds,” says Stiller. Destiny to him is not a matter of chance, but rather a matter of choice. Your destiny is in direct proportion to your ambition addiction.
When I asked Roxanne Quimby of Portland, Maine, what was the single best piece of advice she would give an ambitious young person looking for the success she has enjoyed, she replied, “It sounds trite, but I know it to be true: Hard work is the only sure path to success. It simply can’t be avoided. Nor should it be, because work should be enjoyable.” Jim Oelschlager reminds us of Colin Powell’s wise words—“All work is honorable.” To RMITs, work is not a four-letter word. On the contrary: Because they love what they do, because they have found their perfect pitch, work is simply what they do to get things accomplished, which in turn leads to that great by-product of ambitious achievement—financial success.
Fargo, North Dakota’s Gary Tharaldson earned very little cold hard cash on his first job as a farmworker—only $1.25 an hour. His father worked on the same farm and made a whopping $1.75 an hour. Yet Tharaldson’s father brought up six kids on that meager salary. It’s no surprise, then, that Tharaldson has never been afraid of work. He loves working. Even more, he loves outworking everybody else. He says, “Whether I was selling insurance or building hotels, I have always outworked the next guy, happily.” It is clear from interviewing these RMITs that there are varying definitions of ambition among the manifestly motivated. They all, however, agree on one thing: Work is inevitable, and it is fun—so much fun that the average RMIT happily puts in more than sixty hours per week. Miami’s Jorge Pérez proudly admits to working eighteen-hour days. “I so love doing what I do that I can’t think of anything to which I would rather be devoting my time,” he says. “My work life, family life, and social lives are all intertwined—they’re seamless.”
Pérez’s neighbor to the north in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, Wayne Huizenga, is one of the great serial entrepreneurs in American history, with a net worth in excess of $3 billion. He says, “I was always the first one in the office and the last one to leave.” At a celebration after the sale of Blockbuster Video, as war stories were being traded, he learned that many of his colleagues had enjoyed a secret game where they took turns trying to beat him to the office. “I learned that one morning a colleague, Bob Garren, arrived at the office at 5:00 a.m. determined to beat me, but I had arrived at 4:30. It wasn’t a competitive thing for me. It’s just that every day, I couldn’t wait to get to work, because I enjoyed it so much. I wanted to be there all the time.” Huizenga’s ambition addiction and work ethic led to the joke circulating through the halls of Blockbuster: “If you don’t show up on Saturday, don’t bother coming in on Sunday.” Huizenga’s talent is the ability to spot companies that can dominate an industry.
Along his golden-paved journey, he spotted many. He bought and built a bottled water company, a pest control company, a chain of dry cleaners, and a uniform rentals company. As America’s ace of acquisitions, Huizenga offers his personal business success secret when he says, “I don’t buy companies, I buy industries. That’s why I got into the automobile business forming AutoNation—because the automobile industry is a trillion-dollar industry, and a small piece of a big pie is very tasty.” His Midas touch certainly continued with AutoNation, which went from a simple concept with zero revenue to $20 billion of sales in two years, making it the largest automobile dealership company in the country with 375 dealerships. Hard work and healthy ambition have served Huizenga well.
But bear in mind that hard work for hard work’s sake is not the point. Boston’s Pete Nicholas, the co-founder and chairman of Boston Scientific, the $20 billion medical devices company, points out that ambition has its limitations. “Generic ambition without a sense of purpose will not take you very far,” he warns. “You’ve got to have conviction around a single idea that you believe in so intently, you can’t envision anything but greatness coming from it. Then you’ve got to be willing to work hard to make that idea become a reality.” Jim Oelschlager also knows the importance of having a sense of purpose. He cautions us not to mistake activity for accomplishment when he says, “Don’t confuse mere motion with progress.” Meridian, Mississippi’s Hartley Peavey places focus at the top of his list of traits critical to success: Without focus, you waste your energy. In his slow Southern drawl, his quick, highly focused mind says, “If you chase two rabbits, both will escape.”
For RMITs, work is both honorable and fun, so why do so many of us hate the thought of hard work? Hartley Peavey, using a common RMIT pilot’s analogy, says, “Most people fly in ground effect. They operate at the minimum level of acceptance, which means that point in their work effort where they are doing just enough not to get fired or just enough to get by. But they aren’t willing to flap their wings to fly above ground effect. I spend a lot of my time encouraging the people of Peavey to rise to their greatest level, to dare to be different. Maybe 3 percent of the people get the message and internalize it. The others are just warming the chairs.”
Many RMITs believe that fear of failure is often the reason for this just-warming-the-chairs affliction. Sheldon Adelson—once worth over $28 billion and the richest man in Las Vegas—has said to anyone willing to listen, “If you are afraid of losing, you will never succeed.” This fearlessness requires supreme self-confidence, something RMITs possess in spades. They believe in themselves and they believe in investing in themselves. Adelson, who grew up on the wrong side of the tracks as the son of a taxi driver in Boston, says, “If you don’t have a conviction about what you are doing, you are never going to make it.” And what conviction he must possess. Recently, his personal fortune has been deflated by over $20 billion. Adelson’s Las Vegas Sands Corporation, which owns the Venetian Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas and the Venetian Casino in Macau, the former Portuguese colony near the coast of China, lost more than 90 percent of its value in one year. He and many other casino moguls believed fervently that Macau would become the hottest hotel and casino location in the world, but Chinese leaders believed differently and curtailed mass-market visas to visit the black jack tables of Macau. Although it remains to be seen whether Macau will become the next gambling mecca and salvage Adelson’s fortune, for now, he seems characteristically stoic. Perhaps because of his track-record or his supreme confidence, he hasn’t lost his conviction. He is still not afraid to fail. Before Adelson became the RMIT in Vegas, he owned COMDEX, the first computer dealers’ trade show, which he sold to Japanese investment company Softbank in 1995 for $862 million. Not only is he fearless, he knows when to exit a business—COMDEX no longer exists. When opening the fifty-story Palazzo Resort Hotel and Casino on the Vegas Strip, Adelson boasted to USA Today regarding his competitors, “We will cannibalize them.”
With statements like that, making friends as a means of influencing people is clearly not what Adelson is all about. And his highly debited checkbook proves the point. This may be an example of what Pete Nicholas of Boston calls “ambition without a conscience,” the dark side of ambition, and that is not what he or most RMITs strive for. Rather, they strive to be the best they can possibly be, to harness their ambition to a good purpose. Ambition addiction comes with the side effect of supreme self-confidence, but ambition without a purpose can lead to an overdose. There is a difference. The former is the belief you can succeed; arrogance is the belief you can’t fail.
Gary Tharaldson of Fargo, North Dakota, shows a healthy self-confidence when he says, “If I had to do it all over again, I know I could.” Believing you can is the crucial first step to any success, let alone a billion-dollar bank account. He adds, “The height of your success will be proportionate to the depth of your self-belief.” Jon Huntsman of Salt Lake City agrees, saying, “You must believe you can succeed or by definition you have failed.” When I asked Fred Levin of Pensacola who he considered the smartest person he ever met and what he had learned from him or her, he said, “Good question… hmmm… I have never known anyone who thinks as logically as I do.” That’s the confidence and self-belief of an RMIT. After a few beats, he offered up his law partner, Martin Proctor, as one of the most “effective” people he has ever known because of his outstanding organizational skills—skills that Levin covets highly. Levin’s response to this question was not unique. Pete Nicholas said, “There has been no Disraeli-like figure in my life, though many people have touched and influenced me in many ways.” Most RMITs had a hard time answering the question of who is the smartest person they know because, let’s face it, they are that person.
Thirty-something Philadelphia boy wonder, technology guru, and venture capitalist Josh Kopelman is one smart RMIT—no doubt the smartest guy he knows, though he would never admit it. He would admit, however, that he knows how to spot a good opportunity, and that he knows a thing or two about good ambition addiction. He sold his company Half.com to eBay in 2000 for $355 million, at the age of twenty-nine. “I’m hoping to step up to the plate dozens of times in my lifetime,” he says, “and I’m hoping that my lifetime batting average is high—that’s what it’s all about. There is always a next rung on the ladder of success.”
But as you climb those rungs of success, Chicago’s Sam Zell says, the real secret to success is what he calls his eleventh commandment: “Thou shalt not take oneself too seriously.” Even so, Zell is described by most who know him as audaciously ambitious, but he simply calls himself a “professional opportunist.” He recently availed himself of the opportunity to attempt a much-needed turnaround of the 165-year-old Tribune Company, the media conglomerate that owns the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, the Baltimore Sun, the Chicago Cubs, and twenty-three TV stations. Often a contrarian, he still believes that old media like newspapers have some life left in them in the Internet age. When asked what his greatest achievement is, he says, “I don’t ever respond in terms of epiphanies or greatest achievements because I’m still achieving. One day, I’ll be judged by the body of my work, but right now I’m still working!”
“Still working” also characterizes Wayne Huizenga, Fort Lauderdale’s colorful billionaire. At seventy, he continues to have the keen ambition and desire to spot new opportunities. Even with the successes of Waste Management, Blockbuster, Auto-Nation, Extended Stay America, and enough other companies to stretch to the sports stadium he owns in Miami, Huizenga is always thinking about the next wealth-creation opportunity. When asked what the future holds for his old company, Blockbuster, in this digital age, he says, “I don’t own the stock now.” While he may not be bullish on the company as it currently exists under New York RMIT Carl Icahn’s auspices, Huizenga can’t help but ponder another possible future for his old home. “Blockbuster has fifty-five hundred stores, and if you and I could figure out what to do with them, we could create the next great American business,” he muses. “We could acquire the company for half a billion dollars, and if we could put the right things in those fifty-five hundred stores, we could hit a huge home run. Blockbuster’s real estate is either a huge opportunity or a huge liability, but if we could turn those fifty-five hundred stores into something else that the public really needs, we could create another multibillion-dollar company.” Like the typical RMIT that he is, he never stops thinking, searching, or questing. He is as ambitious today as he was when he started out hauling trash for a living.
Bob “Mr. Alaska” Gillam, like Huizenga, never stops thinking about the future—and like Sam Zell he never takes himself too seriously. He says, “I employ a sense of fun and adventure in everything I do.” He is as ambitious in his extracurricular activities as he is in managing money. That sense of adventure leads him to fly airplanes, go snow skiing, and invest billions of dollars around the world through his investment company, McKinley Capital Management. He says, “In the early ’90s when I started McKinley Capital, people thought I was mad to start a money management firm in Alaska, but my ambition drove me to prove them wrong.” That ambition allowed him to jump some big hurdles, not the least of which was his remote location; at that time, Anchorage was not a major communications center. “We couldn’t afford T-1 lines,” Gillam says, “so we were one of the first investment firms to use satellite for data transfer.” RMITs find solutions to often-vexing obstacles because their ambition and confidence allow them to take on what might seem like insurmountable problems to the less ambitiously addicted.
“Solving the seemingly unsolvable is what I do best—it is what turns me on most,” says Philadelphia’s Josh Kopelman. Gary Tharaldson, the richest man in Fargo, notes, “I have created the greatest ESOP [employee stock ownership plan] the US has ever seen.” That’s confidence. It’s confidence with caring, however, because creating his company’s ESOP was his way of sharing the wealth with those who have helped him create his near-billion-dollar fortune. “I wanted to share the wealth, even with the maids in my hotels.” Tharaldson Enterprises operates more than three hundred hotels and motels nationwide. “From my youth,” Tharaldson continues, “I always wanted to create something on a big scale. I wasn’t sure what that would be, but I knew whatever it was, it was going to be big.” He has good ambition addiction. Ambition, then, at its most essential, seems to boil down to the love of hard work in a business you love. Solving the seemingly unsolvable is hard work; creating a fortune is hard work; managing and motivating a staff of people is hard work; and being a great financial engineer is hard work. But to RMITs, hard work is great fun. It’s what drives them each morning with a sense of anticipation and excitement.
Every morning in my youth, my father used to wake me by saying, “Get up, boy—you can’t make a crop lying in bed!” This exclamation is the good-morning greeting that I awaken my three sons with today. Like my father, I grew up on a red-clay Georgia farm, though I can’t honestly say we raised “crops” as he had when he was a boy. His family raised cotton, corn, and sugarcane. By the time I was ready to work, the Jones farm was not the typical Southern cotton plantation. Instead, we raised chicken and a nice herd of beef cattle. Even though my involvement with my family’s farm was minimal—at least that’s what my brothers claim—I understood from an early age the significance of that statement “You can’t make a crop lying in bed.” To this day, every time I even think of sleeping in, I’m haunted by my dad’s all-too-true philosophy.
Joe Taylor, the former CEO of Southland Log Homes and current secretary of commerce for the state of South Carolina, puts it this way: “It’s not an elephant hunt. I always tell young people there is no substitute for hard work and diligence. It takes eight hours a day of hard work to be a success, but it takes most people twelve or thirteen hours a day to do eight hours of good work.” It seems so cliché to say that there is no substitute for hard work in becoming successful. How many times have we heard this from our parents, mentors, and loved ones? Ben Franklin’s suggestion in The Way to Wealth, first published in 1785, was right then and continues to be right today: “Diligence is the mother of good luck.”
While the alchemy of hard work, dedication, and perseverance create ambition and the resultant good luck, Scottsdale, Arizona’s Bruce Halle, the Discount Tire dynamo, doesn’t discount the power of regular old sheer, dumb luck. “Yes, you make your luck, but sometimes luck can make you. I love snow, because when it snows, we sell more tires. We call those lucky winters, so each winter I always hum, let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.”
Luck, no doubt, plays a role in becoming the richest man in town, but it is ambition that fires the imagination of these folks. RMITs make their luck by showing up, by hard work, and by a high-octane ambition. Bob Gillam’s voice became deeper and more resonant as he made this serious statement: “When things go wrong—and they always do at some point, for all of us—the answer 100 percent of the time is three words: go to work. Activity and sadness are completely incompatible. The minute you start feeling productive is the minute the depression dissipates. It is the moment when possibilities emerge; it’s the moment when hope is once again alive. You can always work your way out of failure, loss of self-esteem, or short-term depression when you become productive.”
Jon Huntsman, the richest man in Salt Lake City and a risk-taking chemical baron, comments, “I don’t give myself credit for having the golden touch as much as I do hard work. I think that is the very definition of an entrepreneur.” Every RMIT in America knows both victory and defeat, but their ambition, their persistence and diligence, and their ceaseless appreciation for hard work have made them the great successes they have become. Says Frank Hickingbotham of Little Rock: “The greatest gift in our life is the ability to work.” David Jones of Louisville, Kentucky, sums it up perfectly: “There is no mystical magic to success and great wealth creation, just hard work, dedication, and a big dose of diligence.” Benjamin Franklin would be proud.
• Replace bad addictions with good addictions—and in particular, high-octane ambitions.
• Hard work becomes great fun when you’re pursuing your perfect pitch.
• Persistence, diligence, and self-belief are the cornerstones of ambition addiction.
• Great wealth is the by-product of ambition addiction.
• Work is empowering: the only sure cure for failure.