Page 82 - How To Get Rich

I’ll conclude this with a story aboutHoward Cosell, a spectacular
sportscaster who I got to know during the last ten years of his life. People
either loved Howard or hated him—there was no in between—but he was
really the best at what he did. As Howard grew older, though, he became

nastier, even toward the people who loved him and had helped make him a
success. He always felt that being a sportscaster was beneath him. He
longed to run for the U.S. Senate.
Howard could sit on a dais with sports figures he hadn’t seen for thirty
years and quote their exact statistics. His memory was amazing. Then he
wrote his final book and knocked almost everyone he knew, from Roone
Arledge to Frank Gifford, one of the finest people around. It did a lot of

damage to him, because all of his friends turned against him. I remember
saying to him, Howard, you can knock twenty percent of the people,
maybe twenty-five percent or thirty percent of the people, but you can’t
knock everybody. You didn’t say anything nice about anybody in the book.
It was the wrong thing to do. I believe in knocking people, but you can’t
knock everybody.

That’s a rule I try to follow, in this book and in my life.

A Week in the Life
InThe Art of the Deal and in my other two memoirs, I included a
chapter about a typical week in my life. When I met Mark Burnett, the
creator ofThe Apprentice, he told me it was his favorite chapter in the
book, and a lot of other readers have told me the same thing. So, back by

popular demand, here’s an example of what an average eventful week was
like in the fall of 2003.
This chapter doesn’t have any specific advice on how to get rich, but it
will show you how I have fun, and I doubt I’d be as successful as I am if I
weren’t having such a good time.

MONDAY
9:00A.M. I have a meeting with architect Costas Kondylis, an elegant
way to start the week. Costas and I have worked on several very successful
projects together, including the Trump World Tower at the United Nations
Plaza, Trump Park Avenue (at Fifty-ninth Street and Park Avenue, just
completed), and, together with Philip Johnson and Skidmore Owings and
Merrill, Trump Place, my sixteen-building development along the Hudson
River. Some of you might remember that site as the West Side yards,