This book went into my reading list while reading The Third Door. In that book, the author’s first mentor asked him to read the first chapter of When I Stop Talking, You’ll Know I’m Dead.
This book is filled with wisdom. In every chapter there are so many things to learn, it is really not possible to summarize everything so I’ll stick to some of my favorite parts.
Do whatever it takes to attract and get Mentors
Mentors are THE BEST. You should really try to attract them. Unfortunately, I feel like many of us are not able to get mentors because we don’t have the right attitude. You won’t find mentors if you have a know it all, superior attitude. Weintraub did attract Mentors from an earlier age.
When I was thirteen, I got a job at Goldberg’s, a resort in the Catskills. I started as a busboy but was soon promoted to waiter. One day, I was serving a big wheel named Abraham Levitt. This is the guy who built Levittown on Long Island. He invented the modern suburbs. He took an interest in me. He asked about my parents, my plans, my dreams. This has been a theme in my life: Somehow, I have attracted mentors. Again and again, who knows why, older men have taken me under their wing. Maybe they recognized something in me, a vision of their younger selves, before their wife left them, before they were disappointed by their children, whatever. “Why are you working here?” Mr. Levitt asked. “Why aren’t you at the Concord or Grossinger’s? The big places. You’re never going to make any money at Goldberg’s.”
I told him I did not know anybody at the Concord or Grossinger’s.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll take care of you.”
The next morning, he drove me over to the Concord and introduced me to the owner, Arthur Winarick, and to his children. They gave me a job at the pool.
Build Quality Relationships
You know that famous quote about you becoming like the 5 people you spend the most time with? Jerry’s first mentor taught him the importance of building relationships.
They gave me a job at the pool. At night, I danced with the girls. I went there for years, first as a cabana boy, then as a guest, finally as a talent agent. Relationships are the only thing that really matters, in business and in life. That’s what I learned from Abraham Levitt.
If you can solve little problems, you can be an Entrepreneur
There is no secret to being an entrepreneur. Can you just decide to solve a problem you are aware of other people are having? Good, you have what it takes then.
I started my first business around this time. It began with a sudden realization, an insight. There was a dry cleaner’s on the ground floor of our apartment building. It was owned by a man named Angelo Bozanellis. I used to sit on the fire escape of our apartment and watch the men get off the train and rush into the store, then head home with their dry cleaning. I went to Mr. Bozanellis and said, “I can’t stand to watch these men struggle every night. Do us all a favor. Let me deliver the cleaning. That way, a man comes home from work, he goes directly to see his wife and children. Maybe we’ll save a marriage.”
He said yes.
I asked what I would get paid.
“You’ll make money on tips. People will give you nickels and dimes. But you gotta hustle. It’s up to you.”
Fine.
I made my deliveries every day at four, racing though the neighborhood, up and down stairs, in and out of the little, tomblike elevators, delivering the dry cleaning to housewives an hour before their husbands came home. One afternoon, I saw a regular customer coming out of the Chinese laundry with a sack of clothes, and then it hit me. The same people who were having their cleaning done were also having their clothes washed. So I went in and spoke to the owner, Louie Hong, an old Chinese man with dark, mysterious eyes. I said, “Look, Mr. Hong, as long as I’m delivering the cleaning, I might as well bring the wash, too. It’s going to the same houses.”
Just like that, I had become an entrepreneur.
But I had done a stupid thing. It did not take me long to realize my mistake. No matter how many packages I carried up the stairs, the tip stayed the same. There must be a business-school term for this: I was competing against myself, driving down my own prices. I figured out a solution. I would carry everything up in one trip, but hide the washing under the landing. First I would deliver just the dry cleaning, then loop back later to deliver the laundry. This way, I got two dimes instead of one.
Over time, the neighborhood took on a different aspect for me. I saw it with new eyes. It was no longer just streets and stores: It was needs and opportunities, money to be made. Once you see the world this way, things are never the same. It is like recognizing the pattern in the carpet. You cannot unrecognize it. The grocery, the fruit stand, the newspaper seller–I was making deliveries for all of them. Very quickly, there was too much business to handle on my own. I went to my brother and said, “Melvyn, I have a good thing going, but I need help.” We recruited a half dozen kids from the corner, and I soon had a little army of delivery boys running all over the neighborhood, with a percentage of each tip sent up the chain to me.
I learned lessons from this business that I still follow today: People will pay you to make their lives easier; always take the time to make the pitch; personal service is the name of the game; never get paid once for doing something twice.
As soon as you are comfortable, switch things up
A recipe to make no significant progress is to just stay in place once you are happy. Jerry knew better.
That’s how I ended up working full-time at the Sachs Men’s Shop while serving full-time in the Air Force. Between the military pay, the dice game, and the new gig, I was starting to make real money. Selling clothes was okay, of course, but I was ambitious. I wanted to get something bigger going. It was just as it had been with my delivery business: Once I saw the money, I could not stop seeing the money.
Now, as I said, every few days, another crew of guys shipped in from the Aleutian Islands, picked up their checks, and went on a spree. So when these guys, chilled to the bone, holding their cash, came into the street, what’s the first thing they saw? The Sachs Men’s Shop. I decided to tell a story, to package a fantasy right in the big front window. I made a beach scene there, with a guy in a bathing suit sitting beside a gorgeous girl, drinking rum under an umbrella as waves break. The men stood there, mesmerized. Then they came in and talked to me. I took some of their money and in return set them up with a whole package, the plane tickets, the Florida hotel, the clothes, the beach stuff–everything but the girl. It was the Star of Ardaban all over again.
By the time of my discharge, I was running the show. I was not sure I would ever again have such a firm handle on things. Mr. Sachs asked me to stay on as a civilian, but this made me laugh. I was anxious to get back. This much I knew: As soon as you feel comfortable, that’s when it’s time to start over.
Be willing to be lucky
For the point of this argument, you need a little context. I highly recommend you to read the complete excerpt. The basic point is, you can’t wait for things to happen. Take some risks, do things you aren’t ready for in your own opinion.
Act like you’re in charge
This anecdote is a great segue from the previous lesson. Jerry shows how effective it is to act as if you are in charge. The example might be silly, but imagine how much more serious people will take you in everyday life if you just apply a little bit of initiative.
And now I had to get Arthur Godfrey.
I waited until the end of the day, then went down Broadway to the theater where Godfrey taped Talent Scouts. There was a security guard with a clipboard and a gun. I have a theory. If you act like you’re in charge, no one will stop you. So I go up this guy with a piece of paper in my hand and ask him a bunch of questions–“How long is your present shift?” “Did you find your training adequate to the task?”–say, “Thanks, you’re doing a great job,” pat him on the shoulder, then walk past him to the elevators. No problem. When I get up to the floor, I wander around until I find a dressing room with Godfrey’s name on it. He was one of the biggest stars in the country–you were not supposed to just bang on his door, but, you know, the fourth lemon, the fourth lemon.
Knock, knock, knock.
“Who’s there?”
“Jerry Weintraub.”
The breakthrough comes usually when everyone else has given up
Persistence–it’s a cliche, but it happens to work. The person who makes it is the person who keeps on going after everyone else has quit. This is more important than intelligence, pedigree, even connections. Be dogged! Keep hitting that door until you bust it down! I have accomplished almost nothing on the first or second or even the third try–the breakthrough usually comes late, when everyone else has left the field.
Be careful not to out promote yourself out of your favorite job
You shouldn’t create a company just because it might be cool to do so. Only build a company if it makes sense. If you want to scale something you do. GaryVee for instance noted that he built VaynerMedia to make a scalable version of himself. If you just build a company without analyzing if it makes sense, you might run into a situation where you spend time doing things you don’t really love doing.
The company existed for less than four years. In this time, we made a handful of movies–these were distributed by Columbia Pictures–including Fresh Horses, The Big Blue, and My Stepmother Is an Alien. I promoted these films every way I knew how–George Bush, then president, was at the premiere of My Stepmother Is an Alien, generating a shower of publicity. But the trouble was evident early on. What makes a major a major is its ability to float a sea of debt. This is needed less to make movies than to weather flops. You need enough not merely to survive one dud, but to survive a season of duds, a worst-case scenario not at all infrequent in the business. In the case of a small studio, even one that has been well financed, the margin of error shrinks. With each flop, debt accrues and pressure grows. Each new movie is more important than the last. As the stakes increase, so does the fear, until the mood in the office and on the sets becomes intolerable, exactly the wrong atmosphere in which to make a movie. There was bickering and second-guessing; some people quit, others were fired. Part of it had to do with bad luck–a movie opened at the wrong time, it rained that weekend, and so forth–part of it had to do with bad planning. If I had known two years would go by without a hit, I might have made fewer films–but most of the problems resulted from a basic flaw: The movies were not very good.
This, in turn, resulted from a still more fundamental error, a flaw in the very conception of the business: I loved making movies, which resulted in hits, which increased my love, which sparked a desire for control, which caused me to start my own studio, which–and here is the paradox–took me out of the movie business and put me into the company running business, occupied not with writers and artists, but with health-care plans, office rivalries, and infighting. I had, in a sense, promoted myself right out of the job I always wanted, which was telling stories, producing. I lost touch with the films, which were now being made for me instead of by me and thus were no longer Jerry Weintraub Productions.
Of course, if the movies had been good, if they had drawn audiences, if they’d had kids doing the crane kick in the parking lot, everything else would have taken care of itself. But the movies were not good. I realized this little by little, then in a great rush. Success had caused me to cease doing what made me successful. More important, it had caused me to stop doing what I loved. I recall this period reluctantly. People say you learn more from failure than success; it’s true. From this period, which runs like a ridgeline between my middle years and my true adulthood, I learned the great lesson of business: If you find something you love, keep doing it.
Never be afraid to try
Life is strange. I used to be a kid, sitting at the feet of giants, hanging out with the last of the old-timers. Now, all of a sudden, I am the old-timer, the alter cocker who’s been around forever, has known everyone and seen everything. When I look back, I see key moments. Because I did not want to go into the jewelry business. Because I would not wear tights. Because I did not want to return the messages on the call sheet. I see patterns, too. Whenever I felt the urge to obfuscate, as when Lew Wasserman asked, “Were you on the WATS line last night?” I told the truth instead. I asked if I did not know. I listened when someone else was talking. I sold with joy, so my products were fun to buy. Most important, I was never afraid to fail, which meant I was never afraid to try. I was never afraid to look silly, which meant I was never threatened by a new idea. I see the road ahead, too, a stretch that bends into the undergrowth. I do not know what will happen there, but I do know, whatever it is, I will rush to meet it with joy. This is, after all, a Jerry Weintraub Production.