Life Advice Cage Match: Ross Perot vs. Felix Dennis
Two very different people who both succeeded wildly in business. Where they agree and where they diverge on how to succeed.
There’s a growing stack of books on my bedside table, most of them unread, and a few, I realize, have been there for a while. The clutter and its subtext is starting to unnerve me a little. I can hear the terrible life clock winding down now. So I’m going to stop adding to this symbolic “things I’m going to do but never do” pile — a lifetime bad habit — and I’m going to instead work on drawing it down. My plan is to read two books by two authors back to back and then compare them. The rules are simple. The books have to offer “how to succeed at life” advice. And they have to be written by or be about business people. I’m testing a hypothesis here, the title of Montaigne’s first essay: “That men by various ways arrive at the same end.”
The hypothesis is default true in the sense that however they did it (“by various ways”), they got rich and famous enough to have been the subject or author of a book that ended up in my hands (“arrive at the same end”). But, in a wider sense, I’m also curious to see if, having traveled different paths, they reach the same conclusions about life, about the things they found important enough to point out and highlight to their fellow human beings. To me, that would mean that the book of good advice (from the perspective of a life spent successfully in business) is small and full of universals. That would be helpful to know; and it would surely reduce the clutter.
In this corner, Ross Perot, the author of My Life & The Principles for Success (162 pages), published in 1996. Perot was born in 1930 in Texarkana, Texas, to parents he credits and remembers fondly. He grew up to be an intelligent, resourceful, community-minded young man. He was a star in the Naval Academy. After a chance encounter aboard ship with an IBM executive led to an offer from the company, he became their top salesman; one year, he met his annual quota in just two weeks. When IBM declined to support his idea to provide more software services to its mainframe customers, he decided to set out on his own. In his business career, he sold two companies, Electronic Data Systems and Perot Systems, for billions of dollars. He wrote The Principles for Success as a graduation present to his son. The beginning line reads: “Success is doing something you enjoy and doing it well.” The penultimate line reads: “Ultimately , the only things that really matter are God, country, family, friends, and charity.” There’s a tendency now to be skeptical of people in the public sphere who say things like this. But I get the sense that he was sincere: a man of faith, old school in words and action; and he really did try to walk the talk.
In the other corner, Felix Dennis, the author of How To Get Rich (287 pages), published in 2006. Dennis was born in 1947 in Kingston-upon-Thames, Surrey. He grew up poor. His parents got divorced after his father pulled a Hungry Heart: that is, he went out for a ride (to Australia) and he never went back. Dennis was 12. Later, still school aged, he left home too when his mother remarried. He supported himself with odd jobs, eventually landing in legal trouble for some racy drawings he published in his magazine, Oz. Having escaped with more scratches than wounds (partially because in the judge’s opinion, Dennis was “much less intelligent” than his co-defendants), he went on to have a very, very successful career as a magazine publisher (you might remember Maxim). He later became even more wealthy through a company he co-founded, MicroWarehouse, which went public on NASDAQ. He’s written several volumes of poetry. His main theme in the book, as the title suggests, is vast amounts of money and the getting of it. For me, the lines that best capture the book’s spirit are: “I was put on this earth to get rich. To collect money that already has my name on it.” Coming in a close second: “What does anything matter if you are going to die? Nothing matters. Nothing at all.”
Both men started from the bottom, now they’re both here. But they already seem worlds apart with respect to lives lived and their respective views, don’t they? My hypothesis isn’t looking good. Let’s get ready to rumble!
On Success
Dennis is laser-focused. Success means getting rich. Everything else is… not success. Everything else is giving in. Dennis spends a whole chapter exhorting his reader to Never Give In. At a low point in his journey, while trying and repeatedly failing to raise capital to start his own business, we find him unemployed, feeding scavenged furniture pieces into the fireplace to stay warm, the gas and electricity turned off to his flat because he couldn’t afford to pay the bill. His girlfriend at the time reminds him that he’s only twenty-five, that he’s still young, maybe this wasn’t the time, and that he could take a job and start a company later. He doesn’t respond. The phone rings. A friend. An employed friend. He comes by in a secondhand car, hangs out, drives the girlfriend home in the early morning hours. Dennis writes: “The next day, I went straight back to knocking on doors and punishing the phone, pestering people for capital. Learning how to swim with the fishes. No way was I going to spend my life making other people rich… I would not give in.”
Dennis, interestingly, doesn’t conflate rich (the success state) and happy. “Happiness? Do not make me laugh. The rich are not happy. I have yet to meet a single really rich happy man or woman — and I have met many rich people.” There’s a melancholy part near the end of the book where he reflects on this and considers (but not quite reconsiders) the point of it all, all the enormous, single-minded, manic effort that was necessary for him to get rich. “Am I happy?” he asks. “No” is the first response, “occasionally” the second. He had fun, so much fun ("$100m on sex and drugs and rock'n'roll!") that it led to health scares and a visit (visits?) to death’s door. He doesn’t mention loving or being loved by anyone, at least not enough for me to remember. He feels he’s earned his wealth; he’s worked hard for it. But he concludes that the point of accumulated wealth is to give it away, and giving it all away would be “something to be proud of.” He started in with charity work in his later years, but he never felt the need for a full “I once was lost, but now I’m found” kind of repentance. He liked his approach to life too much. "The thing is, I still want to live dangerously, otherwise what's the bloody point?" He said that in an interview a year before his death.
Perot, meanwhile, writes that success is “doing something you enjoy and doing it well… The best way to measure success is in terms of personal accomplishment and personal satisfaction.” He does add, though, that for a person to be “every bit as successful” as “the person who makes a great deal of money,” he or she must be the best in his or her field. Success, even when it’s personal, is still reserved for the most driven, most ambitious, most accomplished. No awards for participation.
The way to succeed is to “Size yourself up… Plan for a career that centers around your strengths, not your weaknesses. Commit yourself to that career. Learn how to do it better than anyone else.” Successful people aren’t geniuses. They’re honest and do what they say they’ll do. People trust them. They have a great deal of self-discipline. They take pride in what they do. Their most dominant characteristic is toughness or resilience, the ability to pursue a problem “through many disappointments or failures.” “Again and again, you will find their brilliant business careers are built squarely on the rubble of their early failures.” Much of this echoes Dennis’s observations on personal qualities necessary for success — though he may have given more leeway on the honest part.
Perot disagrees with Dennis on the question of how to get rich: “The best way to make money is not to have making money as your primary goal.” People he knew who thought only (or primarily) about making money failed, almost without exception. He diagnoses it as: “They missed the real essence of learning to do something well, of building something better than anyone else.” Dennis, though, does point out the central importance of execution for getting rich: “If you never have a single great idea in your life, but become skilled in executing the great ideas of others, you can succeed beyond your wildest dreams.” Execution and “the real essence of learning to do something well” are, to me, two ways of saying the same thing. So when it comes to getting rich, Perot and Dennis differ on motives (whether it’s OK to put getting rich front and center) but not on means (you have to be pinpoint when it comes to executing).
Finally, when it comes to the topic of money and happiness, Perot sees it a virtue to live within one’s means. When the means increase beyond reason, it’s good to still remember that “the acquisition of tangible things does not bring happiness.” In fact, he sees that “financial success and happiness are unrelated.” Which is a different take from Dennis, who says the rich are uniformly unhappy.
On Luck
Perot invokes a compassionate “there but for the grace of God” attitude towards people in more difficult circumstances than his own. It’s true, he believed in hard work, self-reliance and other individual virtues. But, in the book, he flatly states (and accepts) that “Luck plays a big role in your life.” Some things are out of your hands. Luck isn’t a random phenomenon, it’s evidence of Grace — in very much a Will of God kind of way. He gives an example.
Perot connects the Naval Academy to all the later good that happened in his life. It was a crucial step for him. He was appointed despite a broken nose that he earned while breaking horses in Texas. The broken nose would ordinarily have been disqualifying because of the strict medical requirements to become a recruit. (A more capable and accomplished friend also failed the physical, and Perot describes how that altered his life course.) Perot didn’t have the money for an operation to get his nose fixed. But he managed to get in anyway, and he always wondered how. A man who had been an aide to the senator responsible for Perot’s appointment called Perot during his Electronic Data Systems years to tell him.
He said, “I was cleaning up the senator’s office one day and said, “Senator, we have an unfilled appointment to the Naval Academy.” The senator asked, “Does anybody want it?” I said, “Well, there’s this boy from Texarkana who has been trying to get it for three years.” The senator said, “Give it to him.” The man tells Perot, “Ross, your name never came up.”
Dennis dedicates an entire chapter of his book to luck. For him, luck is a lady, and she does what she wants. No one above is deciding or willing. Dennis assumes an at once practical and superstitious attitude toward her. He quotes Seneca: “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.” He further points out, “The only truth about luck, good or bad, is that it will change. The law of averages virtually guarantees it.” But then also, “Bad luck is contagious” and “She won’t come calling to anyone who needs her or needs to worship her.” So, “Don’t seek her out. Let her come to you.” “Make your own luck.”
On People
Perot was a family man. He learned from his parents that his actions and the example he set had consequences for people he loved. He and his wife, Margot, were partners in building a life. He cared about the qualities that he was nurturing in his children. He used the word principles (fundamental truths, foundations for a system of belief) for the ideas he shares. Dennis, meanwhile, preferred the word secrets, with its implication of “what they don’t want you to know.” He was always a free agent, never tied down, never married. He’s credited with the quote, “If it flies, floats, or fornicates, always rent it.” In his view, the individual faces off against the social world to get from it whatever he can. Even his charitable work in later life, his giving back, focused on the natural world — planting trees — and not the social one. He no doubt enjoyed the social world, its various and dazzling offers. He acknowledged and respected its cooperative nature. But I think he held no illusions about its fallen and corrupted state. I think he couldn’t really believe in it or trust it.
They both, however, saw that they couldn’t achieve their goals without the help of others. Perot writes, “One person is nothing more than a straw in the wind.” Dennis says the same thing, sort of. “If you own a company and that company’s purpose is to make you wealthy, you will be content, delighted even, for any amount of glory to go to anyone who works there, providing you get the money. It is in your best interests to delegate whenever it makes sense in such circumstances.” Both men saw the importance of building a great team of people and motivating them to succeed. (“Any company managed and run by plodders and jobsworths will be lucky to survive, let alone prosper,” in Dennis’s words.) This included compensation, of course, but also the chance for the ambitious to lead; Dennis observes that there are many capable and talented people who want control but who are also risk averse. Both men realized that if their companies developed a reputation for doing outstanding work, talent would come to them. They recommended acting accordingly. “Avoid corporate politicians like the plague.” That’s Perot’s advice. Dennis’s version is, “Fire malingerers, incompetents, toads and glory hounds mercilessly.”
Other things they agreed on: a first-class finance team and the importance of staying on top of this area; the devil is in the detail when it comes to serious negotiations — make sure to have another set of eyes and advisors to pay attention when you might be distracted; be generous with your star performers, keep an eye out for when they might need a change of scenery.
The Verdict
Dennis says there’s one kind of success; Perot says many. They emphasize different personal qualities and attitudes needed for success. Perot focuses on ethical, principled behavior and always trying to do right by others: customers, employees, partners. Dennis is more individualistic; what matters is persistence, self-belief, instincts. He says you have to treat people, particularly employees, well, but only in so much as it helps you to get rich. They both agree on the importance of knowing and playing to one’s strengths. They agree that you can’t even play the success game without the table stakes: self-discipline, hard work, and focus. They agree on the decisive importance of execution. They agree that money doesn’t bring happiness. They disagree on whether it’s OK to be naked in the pursuit of it.
They agree on the importance of luck, one of them seeing it as the random element and the other, I think, as the divine element. They agree, as a matter of advice, on the need to push through bouts of bad luck, to see setbacks as tests of the individual’s resilience and determination. Perot gives examples of friends whose life course was altered by luck (bad timing, born in the wrong circumstances), but they persevered and ended up living a full and productive life. Dennis, with his harsher view of humanity, gives an example of a relative who, late in life, complains of his relatively poor lot. The relative claims he was held back by children and “responsibilities” from fully pursuing ideas that would have “changed the world.” Dennis warns his reader that there are many people like this, negative influences who, unhappy with their own life, will try to take the air out of other people’s ambitions. Ignore them is Dennis’s advice.
Perot was a Christian and a family man. Dennis was not. Perot offers principles, Dennis shares secrets. Perot paraphrases Tocqueville: “America is great because her people are good.” The individual needs and relies on community. Dennis was far more skeptical and critical of human nature. What matters is you, the individual, and the individual has to be constantly alert to other people’s weaknesses and flaws, and for the traps and snares they lay for him. It seems apparent that their early backgrounds settle most of the differences in their views and advice.
The verdict? Well, money didn’t care about their differences. It filled both their plates to overflowing. Yes, they were very different people, traveling different paths. They looked to different stars to navigate. But, on practical matters, their views on getting things done overlapped too much to ignore. They used the same tools.