Page 67 - How To Get Rich

I like to move quickly, but if a situation requires patience, I will be
patient. The speed depends on the circumstances, and I keep my objective
in mind at all times. This alone can be a patience pill. I’ve spent from five
minutes to fifteen years waiting for a deal.

One good tactic for speeding up a deal is to show a lack of interest in
it. This will often make the other side rekindle their efforts to get
something going. I was very interested in a deal once, but I had a hunch
that it wasn’t a good idea to look too eager to these people. I would put off
their calls and do my best to appear aloof. Then I said I’d be traveling for
a couple of weeks and would get back to them after that. While I was
traveling, they used the time to modify their position and present to me

almost precisely what I’d been hoping to get. It saved us all a lot of
negotiating time.
A good tactic for slowing down a deal is to distract the other side. One
way is to drop hints about whether a certain aspect of the deal should be
looked into further, or to mention other deals and properties as examples.
That will set them off in a direction that consumes their time and focus.

While they’re off on a tangent, you’ll still be on target.
One time, I was in the middle of a negotiation that seemed to be
speeding out of my control. I suddenly asked the other side if they knew
the history of a particular development, implying that their understanding
of it might be crucial. They figured the development must have had some
bearing on what we were trying to accomplish together, so they backed up
a bit, took some time to investigate it, and gave me control of the

negotiations with enough time to assess everything at my leisure. I got the
upper hand.
Life at the top means the phone calls never stop.

Be Strategically Dramatic

In 1999, I began construction on the tallest residential tower in the
world, Trump World Tower at the United Nations Plaza.
The location was terrific—the East Side of Manhattan, close to the
United Nations, with both river views and city views. It was hot stuff, but
not everyone was happy about it, especially some diplomats at the United
Nations, who didn’t want their thirty-eight-story building to be outclassed
by our ninety-story tower. According to CNN, UN secretary general Kofi