Big Winner

Over the past few months I’ve read a lot of material in the archives of personal finance blogs. As with my post about 7 Million in 7 Years, my favorite blogs are those that go beyond the simple personal finance steps (reduce spending, cut debt, etc) and go into greater detail about building wealth.

Personal finance blogger Julie Rains wrote a post about her childhood meeting with billionaire entrepreneur C.D. Spangler along with some lessons drawn from a Harvard Business School interview with Spangler.

The lessons Julie picks out include:
1. Make your mistakes when you’re young so you can learn and recover from them.
2. Leverage wisely.
3. Know what the worth of the business (or item) that you want to sell.
4. Get rid of lousy leaders and ineffective managers.
5. Hire people who are smarter than you, especially those who have talent in specialized fields.
6. Don’t hire or hang around people just like you are.
7. Prioritize your challenges.
8. Look soberly at the numbers from the real world, not what’s on your projections.
9. Get financing for business ideas if you want to earn a return on your investment.
10. Let someone else be first to come up with a solution so that you can second it, and make everyone feel that you’ve made a good decision collectively.
11. Solicit the opinions of others.

Julie’s post has more details on each of these points and the entire interview is a great read. Here’s my favorite part:
Harvard Business School overloaded you with work, and you never felt you were finished with it. That’s exactly the way real life is. I’ve come to the conclusion that having a single problem is overwhelming. I think that having ten problems is easier to handle since you can move from one to the other as you make a little progress, take a break when you’re not exactly sure what to do, then come back to it. Having to handle only one problem would drive me up a wall. Having ten problems seems to be an easier way to run my life. You also learn how to put things that are more important to the front of the line so that you spend less time on things that are less important, or you defer those things until a time when you can give it better attention. This kind of time management is what I’ve seen other executives do, too. I think you have to learn to operate like a computer, which performs simultaneous activities…several things at the same time. You have to be able to go from meeting to meeting and be aware that the current meeting is not the same as the one before. As a university president, I would manage switches from what the students might want me to think about to what the faculty might want me to think about to what an alumni group or the General Assembly might want me to think about. All those groups wanted me to think about something different. They all had their own agendas. Being able to relate to them required a pretty agile ability to set aside what I had just come from and work on something new.