Think Big And Kick Ass In Business And Life – Chapter 1

The title of this chapter is “Do You Have What It Takes?”. For the most part, the chapter discussed about how the top 2% of the people in the world all share a similar trait and how you can’t see life in a fairy tale way, so to speak. Trump is pretty blunt on how it’s tough in the real world as people are going to cheat and steal from you and that you have to be prepared to fight back. He then devised this little quiz that you could take to see if you fit the mentality of a person who has the right attitude to succeed in his view.

For the most part, the best answers with his system seemed to be a fairly straight forward way of thinking from a business point of view anyways. There were two questions that caught my attention though. One of them asks “What is your attitude towards people?” with one of the choices being “I believe people are generally good and would never lie, cheat, or steal from me”. That caught my attention because this year there is a situation where I thought there would be an exception to that and so I did put my guard down by a lot more than normal. Sure enough, it did happen eventually in a big way and fortunately I did not get knocked down cold over it while being prepared to fight back.

The other point talked about marriages and the use of a prenuptial agreement. Obviously with Trump’s personal experiences, he would consider that as the right/smart thing to do. I’m guessing this one would probably generate the most controversy as I’m sure there are a lot of people who would say something along the lines of you shouldn’t even get married if you can’t trust the other. Touchy subject for a lot of people though. Afterwards, Zanker throws in his bit about how one needs to be persistent in order to succeed.

Overall, I was surprised at how blunt the message was in this chapter in terms of the possibility of getting hurt is large and how you have to develop the plan/attitude to be able to rise from the occasion. It wasn’t done in a negative way but rather from a realistic point of view which I thought was great.