Trump: How to Get Rich

Maintain Your Momentum

William Levitt, the master builder of Levittown, taught me the true meaning of momentum.

In the 1950s, he was the king. No detail was too small for his attention. He would personally collect stray nails and extra chips of wood from building sites to make sure his construction crews used all available materials.

He sold his company in 1956 to ITT for $100 million, which is equivalent to billions today. Then he made some terrible mistakes.

He retired.

He married the wrong woman.

He moved to the south of France and lived on the Riviera with his new boat and his new wife.

One day, ITT called. The executives in charge of the conglomerate had no aptitude for home building. They had bought huge tracts of land but didn’t know how to get them zoned. So they sold it back to Levitt, who thought he’d gotten a great deal.

He went back into business. And he proceeded to go bankrupt.

I saw William Levitt at a cocktail party in 1994, two weeks before he died. He was standing by himself in a corner, looking defeated. I didn’t know him well, but I approached him, hoping to acquire some wisdom from the master. Mr. Levitt, I said, how are you doing?

Not good, Donald, not good. Then he said the words I’ll never forget. I lost my momentum. I was out of the world for twenty years, I came back, and I wasn’t the same.

No matter how accomplished you are, no matter how well you think you know your business, you have to remain vigilant about the details of your field. You can’t get by on experience or smarts. Even the best surgeons need to be retrained regularly, to stay current on the latest research and procedures.

No matter what you’re managing, don’t assume you can glide by. Momentum is something you have to work at to maintain.

My loyal assistant, Norma Foerderer.

Get a Great Assistant

Surround yourself with people you can trust. I often say it’s good to be paranoid, but not when it comes to your home team.

Ask God for a great assistant. No joke. A great one can make your life a whole lot easier—or, in my case, almost manageable. Norma Foerderer has been with me for twenty-three years. If you want to know what a great guy I am, just ask her. But not on a Friday.

Handling me, the office, and several hundred calls a week isn’t easy. She’s as tough and smart as she is gracious. She’s also indefatigable, which helps a lot if you work for me.

My phones are so busy that I require two executive assistants, and they never stop. They alone handle, on the average, more than 1,250 calls a week. They are not only efficient and fast, but also very pleasant and beautiful young women.

You don’t have to be beautiful to work for me—just be good at your job. I’ve been accused of admiring beautiful women. I plead guilty. But when it comes to the workplace, anyone who is beautiful had better have brains, too. You need competent people with an inherent work ethic. I’m not a complacent person and I can’t have a complacent staff. I move forward quickly and so must they.

Once, I wanted to know how fast a new employee could work, so I told him I was leaving in fifteen minutes and needed something done within that time. I wasn’t actually going anywhere, but, sure enough, I had what I needed in fifteen minutes. Machiavellian? Maybe, but both of us learned something that day.

One final piece of advice on assistants, which I learned from experience and which, I admit, may not be as relevant to your career as it’s been to mine: Find a receptionist who can speak English. We had a breathtaking European beauty out front who could easily rival Ingrid Bergman in her heyday, but I discovered that her ability to recognize well-known people in the United States was limited to myself and maybe President Bush. She wasn’t so familiar with the likes of Hugh Grant, Reggie Jackson, George Steinbrenner, Jack Welch, Paul Anka, Mohamed Al Fayed, Regis Philbin, or Tony Bennett. Their calls never got through to me and their names were placed on her psycho list.

But you should have seen her. What a knockout. She’s since moved on to better career opportunities, but we’ll never forget her. Neither will anyone who ever called in. Or tried to.

Remember: The Buck Starts Here

Set the standard. Don’t expect your employees to work harder than you do. In my case, I don’t have to worry about that, because I work seven days a week and love almost every minute of it. But also realize that your company will sometimes function as an extended and dysfunctional family. It’s only natural, considering that people often spend more waking hours with coworkers than they do with their families.

A visitor in my office once mentioned that the goings-on there reminded him of a family fight in progress. I will admit that the volume level gets high now and then, and he wasn’t far off in his assessment. But if you want smooth sailing every day, move to the Mediterranean.