Page 115 - How To Get Rich

decorators, technicians, assistants, producers, and directors all working
like mad. At any point, there could be twenty-eight cameras going at once.
This was a big operation.
One day after seeing this, I paused silently for a moment. What if the

show was a flop? All this work, all this energy . . . well, it just had to work.
And I was determined to do my best to make it a hit.
The reassuring thing was that I didn’t have to act. That gave me some
comfort. Mark Burnett told me that my value to the show would be in just
being myself. Is there such a thing as acting like yourself? I don’t know,
but I try not to think about it. I’m just myself.
I didn’t have to read any scripts or learn any lines. Despite having a

great memory, I don’t have time for that, anyway. Mark would appriise me
of the assignments for the applicants each week and we’d go from there. I
enjoyed the spontaneity of the process, because we don’t rehearse episodes
in our daily business life. What happens, happens.
What went on in the boardroom or anywhere else was not fabricated in
any way. If it seemed dramatic, that’s because businessis dramatic. There’s

nothing boring about it. There’s nothing passive about it, either—even for
viewer.
Seeing the eagerness and anticipation of the sixteen winning applicants
was a rush in itself. I never used the word contestants in describing them,
because this was not a game. People who think their jobs are a game aren’t
people I want to have around. A lot of these people already had lucrative
positions or businesses of their own, so they weren’t in it merely for some

prize money. We made sure they were all serious about learning something
not only after the process but during it. This also ensured that each
applicant would be a winner, no matter what the outcome of their quest
turned out to be. How many other reality shows have you seen that has
only winners? That was another reasonThe Apprentice was so appealing to

me. There would be no losers in this win-win situation. My kind of show.
I know what you’re thinking.But you fired fifteen people! Yeah, but
look what they got to do. Look what they got to see. Look what they
learned.
All of the tasks required of my would-be apprentices required
negotiation skills of one type or another. I was particularly interested in
the way the applicants approached the task of achieving maximum savings
from a list of items we told them to buy. Items ranged in value from $10 to