Think of it as Yoga for the brain, we are going to stretch a bit.
There Be Dragons – Hunting, Making Deals, and Surviving
Most men spend their lives tending a farm. A few wander over the hill looking for dragons. The trouble is, once you’ve killed one, the ordinary hunt never looks quite as interesting again. --YNOT!
There are a lot of ways to make a living.
Some people work the farm.
I don’t mean literally—although some do. I mean they get up every morning, go to work, do their job, collect their paycheck, pay their bills, and do it again tomorrow.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with that.
Some of those jobs pay very well. A person might make $50,000 a year, $100,000, $200,000 or more. But unless some of that money gets converted into assets—something that keeps growing after the paycheck is spent—the person can work for ten years and discover that financially he isn’t much different from where he started.
He made money. He lived. He paid the bills.
Then there is another kind of person. The wheeler and dealer. The entrepreneur.
The guy who is always looking over the next hill wondering what might be there.
Some people hunt rabbits.
They make a hundred dollars here, five hundred there, maybe a few thousand on a deal. Enough rabbits, and you can make a pretty good living.
Others hunt bigger game.
And every once in a while, somebody decides to go looking for a dragon.
That’s what I call killing the dragon. A dragon isn’t an ordinary deal.
You don’t find one every Tuesday afternoon.
A dragon might be a business opportunity that changes your financial life. It might be buying something nobody else understands, building a company, developing a piece of property, inventing something, acquiring a distressed asset, recognizing an opportunity before everybody else does—or simply being in the right place when something enormous appears.
I’ve hunted dragons most of my life. And here’s the part people don’t put in the motivational books: I’m still not sure it’s worth it.
Because dragons are big for a reason. They are difficult.
They consume enormous amounts of time. They wake you up at three in the morning. They require money before they make money. They create problems you never imagined when you first saw the opportunity.
A rabbit doesn’t usually hire lawyers. Dragons do.
A rabbit doesn’t call you Sunday morning because the bank froze a transaction. Dragons do.
A rabbit doesn’t require months—or years—of negotiations, repairs, financing, lawsuits, permits, employees, contractors, accountants, customers and sleepless nights. A dragon can.
And the strangest thing about dragons is this: You don’t always go hunting for them. Sometimes the dragon finds you.
The phone rings. Someone walks into your office.
A company goes bankrupt. A piece of property becomes available.
Someone desperately needs to sell something.
A customer asks whether you can solve a problem you’ve never solved before.
You look at it and realize: There might be something here.
That little sentence has probably created more fortunes—and more ulcers—than almost anything else in business.
Because once you’ve seen the dragon, it’s difficult to unsee it.
You begin calculating. If I buy this for X… If I fix this… If I combine these two things…
If I can find financing… If I can get this customer… If I can survive six months…
Suddenly you’re not working your normal day anymore.
You’re hunting a dragon.
And the dangerous thing about dragon hunting is that occasionally you actually kill one.
Then something happens to your brain. You remember it.
You remember the deal everyone said couldn’t be done.
You remember the day the papers were signed.
You remember seeing a number in your bank account that would have taken years to earn working normally.
And you think: Maybe I can do that again.
So you go looking for another dragon.
That’s how it starts.
The world loves talking about the successful dragon hunters. We tell stories about the enormous acquisition, the company that suddenly became worth millions, the property deal that changed somebody’s life.
We don’t talk nearly as much about the dragons that ate the knight.
And there are plenty of those. Deals collapse. Partners betray each other.
Customers don’t pay. Something that looked like an opportunity turns into a five-year nightmare.
Sometimes you walk away with treasure.
Sometimes you walk away carrying scars.
Sometimes you get both.
That is the part I want to talk about.
Not the Instagram version of entrepreneurship.
Not the fellow standing beside a rented Lamborghini telling you that you too can become a billionaire if you’ll just buy his $499 course.
I want to talk about what really happens when you pursue unusually large opportunities.
How you recognize them. How you evaluate them. How you finance them.
How you know when to keep fighting. And perhaps most importantly:
How you know when to walk away.
Because courage isn’t charging every dragon you see.
Sometimes courage is recognizing that the dragon is going to eat you and getting the hell out of the cave.
I’ve spent a lifetime making deals, building things, buying things, selling things and occasionally getting involved in situations that, looking backward, any sensible person probably would have avoided.
Some worked. Some didn’t. A few changed my life. And some dragons I never went looking for at all.
They came looking for me. Those may be the most interesting stories.
Killing the Dragon. The big opportunities. The big risks. The victories. The mistakes. The money. The aggravation. The glorious triumphs and the glorious failures.
And what I’ve learned after spending a lifetime occasionally deciding that instead of working the farm…
I’d rather pick up a sword and see what was hiding over the next hill.
