Page 37 - Trump Never Give Up: How I Turned My Biggest Challenges into Success
P. 37
trum_c04.qxd 11/30/07 3:33 PM Page 16
T R UM P: N E V E R G I V E U P
We had another problem much earlier in the game when we
lost our partner, Conrad Black and the Chicago Sun-Times, to a
corporate scandal and indictment (and I hope he hangs tough,
he’s been through a lot). We made a deal to buy out their inter-
est in the project. More recently, we lost our architect at Skid-
more, Owings & Merrill when he resigned from the company.
These can be big losses, but you know what? We just dealt with
them and kept moving forward. We are prepared for problems
along the way, and like good soldiers we just keep on going. As
the general, I have to admit and take responsibility for the fact
that things work out as they will, no matter how prepared you
are, but we still do our best to plan and focus—then have the
resiliency to immediately regroup from setbacks. Our plans and
our resolve were strong enough to continue our work without
giving in to any interruptions.
There are bright sides to things, too. For example, we saved
over a million dollars by reusing the old river bulkhead from the
Sun-Times building. We were pleasantly surprised to discover
that we had less site cleanup because the newspaper had switched
to soy-based ink from petroleum-based ink back in the 1970s, so
there was much less ground pollution than we had expected.
Sometimes when you start thinking about all the problems
you’ve got, it’s a good idea to focus a little on some of the posi-
tives in the situation.
C OACH T RUMP
M AKE I T H APPEN IN Y OUR L IFE
When things happen that might be outside the outline of
your game plan, ask yourself, “Is this a blip or is it a
catastrophe?” We had some blips along the way with our
Chicago building, and we’ll probably have a couple
16