Customer Reviews

Conversations with Millionaires: What Millionaires Do to Get Rich, That You Never Learned About in School!

5 star:		(107)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

Bottom line, this book is worth the asking price. Many people search for specific methodologies for attaining millionaire status. The truth is, it's very difficult to reproduce the *specific* actions that other millionaires used to achieve their wealth. Instead, you need to master the thought processes that motivated the initiation of those lucrative actions of millionaires so that you can come up with your own creative sources of wealth.

I would be willing (and did) to purchase this book solely for the Jim Rohn interview. Jim teaches you in this book that success is something that you attract by the person that you become...that if you work hard on your job, you'll make a living. But if you work hard on yourself, you'll make a fortune. Jim's teachings are excellent because he focuses on how you can progress from where you are right now...by taking small steps that consist of small disciplines. "Discipline weighs ounces and regret weighs tons." His message is that you don't need a revolution or do anything spectacularly dramatic for your self-esteem to start going off the scale...just make a commitment to any easy discipline..then another one and another one until you become unrecognizable as the mediocre person you may have been up until now. Just start with some little something to prove to yourself that you're going to develop a whole list of disciplines.

Jim talks about reasons. If you have enough reasons, you can do anything. If you have enough reasons, you'll read all the books that you need to read. You'll get up however early you need to get up. Sometimes we find it a little hard to get out of bed. We want to linger. Part of that is not just being tired, or weary, or a little bit poor nutrition, some of it is just lack of the drive in terms of having a long enough list of reasons to do it.

Jim was Tony Robbins' mentor. Tony adopted many of Jim's teachings. And, as you can see, they worked very well at catapulting Tony to centimillionaire status.

I highly, highly, recommend Jim Rohn's "7 Strategies for Wealth & Happiness", and, if you can find it somewhere (...), his audio tape program entitled "The Weekend Seminar". Life changing material!

The Mark Victor Hanson interview is excellent. He talks about visualization and goal setting.

The Wally "Famous" Amos interview is fair.

The Jack Canfield interview is a fantastic one on self-esteem. His analogy of self-esteem being like poker chips, where when you have a lot of chips (=high self-esteem) you tend to take more risks, is an analogy that I have adopted and use to this day. The advice that he details that he received from Tony Robbins about masterminding is precious and is a testament to the power of influence.

The Robert Allen interview is fair with just a few excellent points sprinkled in: 1) the power of mentors (how he could have gone to a university for 50 years and never learned what his mentor taught him about real estate in 6 months); 2) the power of a mastermind group 3) Recommendation of the book "Influence" by Robert Cialdini (which I believe is a must have in anyone's library...truly a profound book!). Otherwise, Allen's interview is recycled info from his Multiple Streams of Income book in addition to pitches for his mailing list and site.

Sharon Lechter interview is fair: recycled "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" (which, save for a couple of truths about how people behave, is the king of all pitch books...the book is skewed at brainwashing the reader that learning accounting and buying the $150 boardgame, CASHFLOW, is the key to amassing great wealth) material in addition to a plethora of pitches for RichDad.com and Cashflow Quadrant.

Michael Gerber interview is fair: recycled material from "E-Myth" (which is a great book) + pitches for his other books.

The Jim McCann interview is outstanding and inspirational. Here's a man that started out as a social worker in a group home and later became the top "dot-com" company with 1-800-FLOWERS.com and hob knobbing with Donald Trump. He offers some sage advice with respect to business success. He states that the real business opportunities are done in areas that aren't particularly "sexy", innovative, or high-tech. The opportunities are in the areas that someone had a passion for them. The key or the secret: find something that you are interested in and gets your juices flowing...that you feel passionate about. He talks about how everything that you do impacts people's perception of you, which is your brand.

The Jay Conrad Levinson interview is fair: recycled material from his "Guerrilla Marketing" book (which is a good book, also). ....

A more appropriate title for this book is "Interviews with folks who are selling their own get rich or personal books, who happen to be millionaires through the product they are peddling -- Robert Allen style". This includes Mr. Amos and the 1-800-flowers guy, they are selling their own books. Besides all of the rhetoric hype, there is no valuable insight to wealth building. No meat. Each person simply explains the philosophy of their product/book and Litman announces how to goto their website plus their 800 number. There are some tidbits but they accumulate to less than 10% of this thin book. The first four interviews, nearly half of the book, contain zero value. They appear to be added as filler.

That said, two of the books featured "The Emyth" and "Rich Dad Poor Dad", are excellent books. I recommend buying these books directly instead of pecking for crumbs from this book.

Not much effort in writing this book! The writer, Mike Littman, simply transcribed conversations he has had with other self-help millionaires on his radio shows. Nine millionaires are interviewed: Jim Rohn, Mark Victor Hanson, Wally Amos, Jack Canfield, Robert Allen, Sharon Lechter, Michael Gerber, Jim McCann, and Jay Conrad Levinson. Most are promoting their own self-help books and products. For example:

Page 208 (Jay Conrad Levinson)
"I did a course called, Guerrilla Marketing for the New Millennium and its available from the same place you talked about before, Aesop.com. Thats the first placed I'd go. I say that because I wrote it for people who don't know anything about marketing but want to use marketing to grow a business. Or, they have a business and they want to make it bigger and cut down the amount of money that they are investing in marketing. All of the things that I'm saying, naturally, are in my books Guerilla Marketing.
The course that I gave called, Guerilla Marketing for the New Millennium, is up to the state of the moment. It's up to state of what marketing is doing right now."

In my opinion, the book was written with the sole purpose of making money both for the author and for the interviewees. Don't buy it! The same information can be found in greater detail in other books.

I bought this book to get a few business ideas, nuggets of wisdom or advice from people who've been there, done that and came out on the other side victorious. I wanted a down-to-earth entreprenurial insight into the process of building successful enterprises.

What I got was a bunch of infomertials-in-print for self-improvement books. The great majority of chapters (except two) were conversations between the author(?) of this book and authors of other self-improvement books. A "mutual adoration society". All those people (except two) did was think of some vague idea about ways to achieve goals in life. Then they went ahead and published them. End of story. That's the million-dollar secret.

The one star I gave this book goes for one tangible idea I got from one of the two actual entrepreneurs - Jim McCann, who stated 1-800-FLOWERS. The idea is: "High margins attract a lot of talent, i.e. competition. Very talented people will eventually knock down the margins. The difference will have to come out of your product and service".

Then I thought: How come this book has such rave reviews? I went ahead and skimmed all 66 of them. Some curios facts emerge. For example: the are 11 five-star reviews betw. 11/13/2001 and 11/15/2001. There are other bunches of five-star reviews since this book came out. They seem to follow a not-so-good review and stretch for several days. How about that?

Stay away and don't let them make another buck off of you...

I recently purchased Conversations with Millionaires, after receiving an email from Joe Vitale, author of Spiritual Marketing. At the time, I had no idea who Mike Litman was or what was the concept of the book, but the title was catching to me and I thought,"What the heck". The book arrived and sat in my "To read pile" for a few weeks. On a recent business trip I decided to bring it with me. Well, from the moment I started reading I didn't want to put it down! I decided it was in my best interest to read one interview at a time so I could actually take in the information being delivered to my heart.

I encourage you to purchase and read this book...be prepared to take notes and have your highlighter ready. I have read a zillion books by the great business authors including Hill, Carnegie, Blanchard, Robbins, etc...this book takes knowledge from great people and shares with the world tools that REALLY can work for everyone and they are in one place. Read it, try on and practice the tools that these great people are willing to share. This book is an inspiration for those who have a vision and dreams.

What we have here are (presumably edited) transcripts of conversations conducted by Litman during broadcasts on a small radio station on Long Island. Even on the printed page, they are lively because of Litman's exuberance and his guests' authentic enthusiasm about what they discuss. Although the guests share much in common (e.g. passion about what they do, a high energy level, an eagerness to take on new business challenges, and a delight in principled competition), each has a quite distinct personality and remarkably diverse views on what are generally referred to as "the secrets of success."

I disagree with those reviewers who dismiss the interviews as an extended infomercial. True, Litman celebrates his guests' success and urges listeners to purchase the materials they have created. He thinks highly of the various books, tapes, etc. to which he refers. I have no problem with that. As I read each of the interviews, I felt as though I were listening to the conversation as broadcast on the radio. Repetitions, jumbled syntax, digressions, and emotional reactions all give the interactions with Litman an immediacy and an authenticity which few (if any) anthologies of brightly polished essays possess.

Here are three brief excerpts which will, I hope, give those who read this review a sufficient indication of what this volume offers to them:

Advice from a mentor, Earl Shoaf: "`Set a goal to become a millionaire for what it makes of you to achieve it. Do it for for the skills you have to learn and the person you have to become. Do it for what you'll end up knowing about the marketplace, what you'll learn about the management of time and working with people. Do it for the ability of discovering how to keep your ego in check. For what you have to learn about being benevolent. Being kind as well as being strong. What you have to learn about society and business and government and taxes and becoming an accomplished person to reach the status of millionaire is what's valuable. Not the million dollars.' That was one of the best pieces of philosophy I have ever heard in my life." Jim Rohm, author of dozens of books, cassettes, and courses on success, on living a full life, on fulfilling potential.

On his success plan: "First of all, you've got to figure out what you really want. In my case and in [co-author Jack Canfield's] case, we didn't want a best-selling book. We wanted a mega best-selling book, Chicken Soup for the Soul. The clearer you are, the easier it is to execute. Number two, you put it in writing and where I differ from all my peers is, I say you must have too many goals. I've got over 6,000 in writing. Three, visualize it. What you see with your inner eye....[Jack and I] cut out the New York Times Bestseller list. Then we put our names at the top before we ever got to the top in real life. Then we put it on my mirror and we put one up at Jack's office, on his mirror. So in our mind's eye, when we were shaving or the ladies were doing cosmetics, we owned the concept that we were best-selling authors before we actually were best-selling." Mark Victor Hansen, author or co-author of various Chicken Soup books as well as Dare to Win and How to Achieve Total Prosperity.

On business opportunities: "Most of the great business ideas we have seen in the last 20 or 30 years start out as a joke. People laugh at them when they first hear them. But the real business opportunities that have been created are done in areas that aren't particularly sexy, aren't particularly innovative, and aren't necessarily this new high tech wismo gismo. But what they are is someone who had a passion for something. The key or the secret: Find something that you're interested in that gets your juices flowing. That you feel passionate about....The difference between people and people who don't is the people who make it know how to recover from setbacks and recover quickly." Jim McCann, CEO of 1-800-FLOWERS.com and author of Stop and Smell the Roses.

The appeal and value of the interviews will depend, of course, on the level of rapport which a reader has with each of Litman's nine guests. Also, to what extent each of them addresses issues and opportunities relevant to a reader's specific financial goals. For example, many readers will have no interest in creating multiple streams of income (which Robert Allen discusses) or in marketing (which Jay Conrad Levinson discusses) or in maximizing the value of a company inorder to sell it (which Michael Gerber discusses). Therefore, I strongly recommend a careful review of the Contents section in which Litman provides key points for each chapter. My guess (only a guess) is that at least one of the chapters will be worth far more than the cost of this book to almost every reader.

One final point. With all due respect to Litman, his book's subtitle is somewhat misleading. Why? His guests unanimously agree that getting rich is only a destination. Their greatest pleasure is derived from completing the journey necessary to reach that destination. During their conversations with Litman, they generously share the lessons they have learned in the vineyards of free enterprise and most of these lessons were the result of their own encounters with barriers, setbacks, etc. The journey to wealth is already difficult enough. Why make it even more difficult by ignoring what can be learned from pilgrims such as these?

The first third of the book was absolutely terrific with various successful people offering some wonderful motivational thoughts. The rest of the book bogged down, but the first third or so is worth the purchase price. I was distracted often by the enormous amount of misspelled words. For a book that espouses "going the extra mile", their proof reader never entered the race, and I found this problem to be completely the opposite of the ideas espoused within. Nonetheless, the book is worth reading. It's a treatment of wealth from perspectives such as spiritual as well as a discussion of methods, processes, and motivation.

This book consists of transcripts of 9 interviews from the Mike Litman radio show. I kept a highlighter handy as I read through the interviews and found excellent pearls of wisdom in each one. Although I am not complaining, I think readers should be forewarned that reading this book will make you want to explore other books and programs that are referenced in the interviews. I've already spent about $100 just following up on recommended reading from the interviewees. Mike Litman also has his own web site that has other great interviews available. If you want to get ahead in life, books like this are your ticket.

The book certainly has some good points to it, but one thing that puts me off is that the book sometimes seems like one big sales promotion for their web sites and mailing lists. It's a little irritating that at the end of every page they ask you to visit their web site and they keep pushing their "special offers" whenever they can. My take is that Mike Litman (who I think is around 28 years old) is applying a lot of the marketing and sales techniques mentioned in the book to funnel traffic between his various projects and to make money for himself. I don't think there is anything particularly wrong with that but it's just a little bit of a hard sell. People buy a book for it's content if we enjoy your work we will seek you out ourselves!! What goes around comes around...

This book shows me that there are two things common to very successful people--no matter what field: first, they all give, as in tithing, even before they had the money to do so easily ; and second, they work to improve themselves, to grow and change for the better. People who work harder on themselves than they do on their jobs seem to enjoy great success. So when people tell me I am weird becasue I study new ways to think and act, ways to understand where I am stuck and how to move ahead--I know they reflect their own being stuck and I choose to leave their paradigms.
This book makes perfect readiing just before falling off to sleep as it shifts my thinking and energy to new heights and allows my mind to work at a new level while I sleep.