Trump: How to Get Rich

Be Patient

I like to move quickly, but if a situation requires patience, I will be patient. The speed depends on the circumstances, and I keep my objective in mind at all times. This alone can be a patience pill. I’ve spent from five minutes to fifteen years waiting for a deal.

One good tactic for speeding up a deal is to show a lack of interest in it. This will often make the other side rekindle their efforts to get something going. I was very interested in a deal once, but I had a hunch that it wasn’t a good idea to look too eager to these people. I would put off their calls and do my best to appear aloof. Then I said I’d be traveling for a couple of weeks and would get back to them after that. While I was traveling, they used the time to modify their position and present to me almost precisely what I’d been hoping to get. It saved us all a lot of negotiating time.

A good tactic for slowing down a deal is to distract the other side. One way is to drop hints about whether a certain aspect of the deal should be looked into further, or to mention other deals and properties as examples. That will set them off in a direction that consumes their time and focus. While they’re off on a tangent, you’ll still be on target.

One time, I was in the middle of a negotiation that seemed to be speeding out of my control. I suddenly asked the other side if they knew the history of a particular development, implying that their understanding of it might be crucial. They figured the development must have had some bearing on what we were trying to accomplish together, so they backed up a bit, took some time to investigate it, and gave me control of the negotiations with enough time to assess everything at my leisure. I got the upper hand.

Life at the top means the phone calls never stop.