Get Rich or Die Trying

Trump: The Art of the Deal is not a treatise on how to succeed in the business world. Although it doesn’t quite make the empty promises of its more recent successors (“Make it happen in business and life.” – Trump: Think Big) the book sells itself as a distillation of the secret business skills of one of New York’s most successful real estate entrepreneurs, a description which is false. What Trump: The Art of the Deal really is, behind the gloss, is an autobiography. It pays lip service to its title with a brief chapter outlining 10 basic aspects of a deal in no real detail, but the rest of the book is just a walk through Trump’s history of real estate success – which you won’t learn how to emulate by reading the book. Donald Trump, as he explains quite thoroughly in The Art of the Deal, is the son of a fairly wealthy real estate developer in New York and he learned about real estate from a young age (the book has a photo of him inspecting building foundations, aged 12) . He went to a very good college, Wharton School of Finance, and undertook a development project with his expert father, which meant his personal wealth was $200,000 when he graduated. I strongly suspect these experiences had a greater influence on his future success than if he had read a book by some other real estate millionaire.

My distaste for the false pretences used to sell the book aside, I actually rather liked it. Trump had enjoyed great success when this book was written in the 1980s and I enjoyed reading about the projects he undertook. The way the book is written is engaging, with Trump’s brash and arrogant style brightening up every page, and the content is great – Who doesn’t like big skyscrapers and deals worth hundreds of millions of dollars?

When I was forced to take a day bus from Chiang Rai to Bangkok, my MP3 player had no battery and all I had was this book. Over the 14 hour journey, I think I read it cover to cover three times, so I’m well-versed in the content. The distinct chapters mean it’s good to re-read – my favourite story in the book is when Trump renovated the ice rink in Central Park in 1986. He did it in 5 months for under $3 million, whereas the City of New York had previously spent 12 years and $13 million not completing it. You can’t argue with that, even if he has terrible hair.

Clearly the book is very one-sided and there’s probably a little more to most of the stories than Trump lets on, but as a bit of light reading that at least makes you look at real estate with a little more interest, I recommend it.

If by some miracle one of the four people who read this blog has also read the book, why not let me know what you thought of it?

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