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ISSUE #1
From Dan Peñ a - "The Money Messiah" and Mentor/Coach for The New MillenniumDear Friend and Subscriber I’d like to extend you a warm welcome to the first issue of my Quantum Leap Advantage? Internet Newsletter. From time to time this newsletter, in addition to exposing you to well-tested and proven precepts to make your business grow, will test your various traits and/or abilities to succeed in thereal world of trench warfare. No one in the world teaches the methodologies and precepts you will get here. How do I know that?Because every idea comes from my own experience. Including the thirty years and more than65,000 business decisions. More than 500 financial presentations on five continents. Billions raisedwhen you couldn’t raise any! Millions of miles in travel and thousands of nights in hotels!Thousands and thousands of meetings! More than 250,000 business phone conversations! Countlesssuccesses and many, many failures!!"CONVENTIONAL WISDOM - WRONG" All our lives we are told by the pundits our goals arenot realistic. Our dreams are too far-fetched. Our expectations are too high. We are told you have toremember who you are and where you came from. We are preached to that those "things" are for the"other" people; you certainly can’t expect that for yourself; whom are you kidding? You’ll onlydisappoint yourself. It will be a big letdown. You know how you are when you get disappointed. Isay Crap! CRAP!POPULAR CONSENSUS RECIPE FOR FAILUREThe aforementioned rhetoric is what we and every other human being have been told since GuthrieMan. Conventional wisdom has been holding people back for tens of centuries. Being in themajority is a recipe for disaster. A famous man once said, "A sure formula for failure is to try and please everyone." Some might say I built a career on doing just the opposite of pleasing everyone.SETTING GOALS FOR SUCCESSHow many times in your business life have you been told your goals are unrealistic? And youacquiesce to conventional wisdom and lower your goals? Our lives are a series of loweredexpectations year after year. We got pounded by everything around us. Just like our parents andtheir parents. We are products of our social and economic milieu. And we ask ourselves why thereare barrios and ghettos? Remember, you will become whom you hang around with. What if youwere judged by the people you surround yourself with? By your advisors, associates, and closefriends. What would people think? Forget people! What do you think? How would you judgesomeone like yourself? Pretty scary, huh?What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant, intelligent child and the feeble mentality of the average adult. (Freud)
ACHIEVABLE GOALS - NOT!
Conventional wisdom says you want to set achievable goals. My life was changed a number of years ago when I heard Ted Turner of Time Warner/Turner Communications (now AOL/TimeWarner) fame say "set goals you cannot accomplish in your lifetime." Does that sound like anachievable goal? Does that sound like a goal with a set time frame? Doesn’t conventional wisdomsay "you must set a time limit for your goal?" B.S.! The pundits tell you that a set time frame willact as a benchmark. Actually it acts as the opposite. It’s really a ceiling. How many times have weseen someone give seven days, a month, or sixty days to do something? What happens? It takesexactly that long to accomplish the act. Doesn’t it? Instead we should say - as fast as humanly possible! What happens when you’re told "I need it now?" It gets done now!
 
You see, all super high performance people go against conventional wisdom. Turner, Iacocca, Ford,Dell, Edison, Gates, Jobs, Tom Watson, Perot, Fred Smith, Knight, Bezoes, and probably anysuperstar you know all subscribe to do what others felt was wrong. And in every case, probablysomething that was not considered achievable. In other words, the very opposite of conventionalwisdom. That same conventional wisdom that is preached in our schools. And we wonder whywe’re not more successful! Why our children are not high achievers! We wonder why kids are soill-prepared for life! We wonder why there are so many dufuses! (I’ll write a great deal aboutdufuses in future issues). Wouldn’t you like to have some chances back again? The things youdidn’t do. And you say you can’t. Why? Because of your responsibilities, family, kids, etc. Becauseothers say so? Because time has passed you by? Because you are too old now? Because you don’thave the energy any more, or even because you’re too young? Because! Because! Because!Conventional wisdom says you can’t, that’s why!Colonel Sanders was 65 years old when he decided to sell fried chicken in a cardboard box.Grandma Moses was in her 80’s when she decided to paint. How old are you? Is your idea any morefunky than Sanders? Grandma Moses’? Is your idea any stranger than Ross Perot’s idea to build acompany that could outsell IBM at what they did better than anyone in the world? Cheaper?Starting with $1,000? Or what about a teenage Bill Gates wanting a computer in every U.S. home! Idon’t think so! Who’s kidding who?What about the proliferation of dot.com companies, my own included - 3Clix.com! (Click here andsee) There are literally thousands of dot.coms founded by 20-year-old kids to senior citizens. Think about the following: In 1994 there were virtually no dot.coms. In 1999 over 300 dot.coms had IPO’sfor a market capitalization of a trillion dollars; and it’s estimated in 2000/2001 over 900 dot.comswill come to market. The 294 companies doing the most business on the internet have an averagemarket cap of $18 billion. That’s 30 times the average NASDAQ non-dot.com company’s marketcap! It’s a changed world! Are you changing?If you never read another "Money Messiah" Quantum Leap Advantage Internet Newsletter or never attend one of my seminars then only follow this simple precept for super success: ConventionalWisdom is Almost Always Wrong. You will leave your progeny and/or family a much larger estate(if that’s important to you). Forget leaving money. You’ll have a much fuller life because moneyallows you choices.If you think money doesn’t buy happiness, you don’t know where to shop. (Linda Peñ a)As an aside, at one time in my life, I was going to leave all my money to The Society for thePrevention of Cruelty to Animals. But I let conventional wisdom change my mind. We are allsusceptible. And remember, I said conventional wisdom was almost always wrong! Needless to say,my kids support conventional wisdom here!To Your Quantum Leap,Daniel S. Peñ a, Sr. P.S. People often ask me to reveal the "Secrets" of what really makes a super successful, high performance person. There are no secrets that I know. On these pages I will give you the truths(albeit brutal sometimes) about making a lot of money. Not the half truths, misinformation, and B.S.you’ve already heard ad nauseam. I want to save you from making a lot of mistakes. Mistakes I’ve personally made.P.P.S. Before you buy any self-help book, audio or video tape, or put your butt into a seminar seat,ask yourself "Is this person where I want to be? Has he ‘been there, done that’ in a major leagueway? Would I want him as my mentor? Do I really respect his business acumen? Does he haveworld-class credentials? Or did he make his money selling as a seminar guru?"
 
ISSUE #2
From Dan Peña - "The Money Messiah" and Mentor/Coach for The New MillenniumDear Friend and Subscriber: NEARING 55As I said in May 1993 when I was beginning my coaching career, I would cut back my seminars,etc. in 2000 to coincide with my 55th birthday, which I have done! Now as I sit here by the pool gazing out at the Gulf of Mexico (no, I haven’t moved to Florida yet),I contemplate my family. My wife and 13-year-old daughter are in New York City for Spring Break going to shows and museums and, of course, shopping. My 16-year-old son just spent 10 days withme here boating and golfing. It was the first golfing since my serious accident last year andsubsequent "fix-it" surgery in January 2000. Suffice it to say, the 5" titanium plate holding my rightshoulder together and the bone graft taken from my 54-year-old hip aren’t conducive to a good golf swing yet! My game was quite ugly.When I was deciding what I would write for my second QLA Internet Newsletter, it didn’t take melong to decide my topic. One of the most misunderstood topics in business:LITIGATION AS A BUSINESS TOOLFrom Bill Gates at the end of the last century to John D. Rockefeller at the end of the previouscentury; from Rick Scott, founder of Columbia Health Care, to AT&T: from Richard Branson andBritish Airlines to Dan Peña and The Financial Times; from government, banking, insurance andevery other facet of world commerce - to grow geometrically and stay around, litigation must be(prudently) used and mastered.I will, as briefly as I can, memorialize the salient points of using litigation as a business tool. Now before I start, I want it on the record, some 50% of my 30-year track record of litigation has hadnothing to do with winning money, i.e., many lawsuits have been over principle, some were to righta heinous wrong such as slanderous remarks made about me; and some were because an entity justneeded a good comeuppance and nobody else would carry the flag into battle. I, like Don Quixote,have fought many a windmill.As you’ve heard me speak and write about, when building your "Dream Team," you want Big Fiveaccountants and a large national or international firm of lawyers - the best representation you can’tafford!Unlike the success-oriented fees I coach you to use when facilitating transactions, no law firm willlitigate initially on this basis. Perhaps if your case is especially strong, they will do it on acontingency basis. Unfortunately, you will be using, from time-to-time, litigation as a positioningtool and your case may not be something you can seriously leverage.A year or two ago, being left with a pig-in-a-poke, I had to litigate a case having specious facts at best to support my desired outcome. Fortunately, our (my) apparent lust for litigation was stronger than their desire to fight a hard fight, so a reasonably good settlement was finally arrived at. Of course, during this process my good lawyers counseled us, advising our case needed to be muchstronger, etc. Even with great lawyers, it is their job to tell you the downside risks. Again, whathappens is you are often scared from pursuing your case.Good lawyers win so-so lawsuits. Great lawyers can win lawsuits in which you have little or nochance to win. Three of my favorite litigators over the years are Steve Susman and Cyrus Marter IVof Susman Godfrey in Houston, Dallas, Los Angeles and Seattle and Tim Harris of CharlestonRevich & Williams in Los Angeles. All three have dug me out of some pretty big black holes. I’vedealt with them 10 and 20 years respectively. They are worth every penny they charge!Our judicial system works, but we grow up being afraid of it. It’s way out of our comfort zone so
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