I’m the Guy Who Wrote “The Art of the Deal”
October 25, 2017
So what is it I've been seeking all these years?
Good morning fellow scribes, wordsmiths, storytellers, unpaid novelists, laid off journalists, untenured scholars, professional inventors and reinventors.
I come to you this morning as a rueful, remorseful and penitentโa product of my own multi-decade redemption and reinvention. ย
I accepted this invitation because I believed that you, fellow inventors and reinventors, would understand, and empathize with the fateful choice I made 30 years ago.
I want to talk to you about what you came here this morning to hear me talk about. Beyond, and more than that, I want to talk about the relationship between our inner lives and our outer lives, between conscience and paying for private schools, and about how we make choices in our lives.
Above all, I want to talk about what it means to be a whole human being, for better and for worse, till death do us part.
These are the sorts of dilemmas that have preoccupied me for more than five decades. Among all the roles I have played in my life, the primary way I see myself is as a seeker. ย
Iโm the guy who organized a โsensitivity trainingโ workshop for my high school classmates at the age of 16.
Iโm the guy who wrote The Art of the Deal,ย and then followed up with a book called What Really Matters: Searching for Wisdom in America.ย ย ย
Iโm the person who launched a company at the age of 47 seeking to convince big companies to better meet the physical, emotional, mental and spiritual needs of their employees.
So what is it Iโve been seeking all these years?
The facile answer is happiness, wisdom, enlightenment, meaning โฆย the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow โฆ the secret sauce โฆ the holy grail โฆ But none of these fully capture what I Iโve craved most fervently.
What Iโve really sought is to feel valued and valuable.
Valued and valuable. This is what I believe all of us are seeking most fundamentally, throughout our lives, even if we donโt always know it โฆ and even if we spend vast energy avoiding the deep and difficult work that makes it possible.
I grew up believing I could never be good enough. I felt I didnโt really deserve love or respect, from others or from myself. But oh how I longed for it โฆ..
My journey was motivated by discontentโthe pain of not feeling comfortable in my own skin or fully at home in the world.
I grew up with a mother who I came to realize much later was deeply troubled โฆ. and a father who didnโt have the wherewithal to protect me, or my brother and sister from her. My father was a kind, gentle, but passive man who was as terrified by my mother as my siblings and I were.
At the same timeโto complicate it allโmy mother was amazingly effective in the world: a passionate social activist and a pioneering feminist who fought all her life to make the world a better and more equitable place, even as she remained a volatile, raging and searingly critical presence at home.
My mother was more like a traditional fatherโalbeit a tyrannical fatherโand my father who was more like a traditional motherโalbeit a mother who worked all the time and wasnโt around much.
It didnโt add up. I never felt safe or secure, nor did my siblings. The experience of safety and security is what makes everything else in life possible.
All children are helplessly dependent on their caregivers. To survive, we each learn to shape ourselves in whatever ways we must to win the love and protection of those we most depend on, no matter how inadequate their care may be. Our hunger for attachment is even more intense if the primary source of our comfort is also the source of our terror.
I spent a great deal of energy trying to survive my motherโto separate from her and find my own identity without losing her love. As it turned out, I couldnโt have both.
I can easily imagine some of you saying to yourselves โWell Iโm sure glad that wasnโt me.โ
But hereโs the thing: it was you, to some degree or another, because all parents fall short of unconditionally loving for their children, and all children grow up feeling โฆ to one extent or another โฆ vulnerable, unsafe, and insecure.
This is part of what it means to be human, much as we donโt want to see it, or feel it, or take it on.
My own solution was to become an achiever.
My mother very much wanted me to be successful in the world, and to make a positive difference, both of which she had done. Achieving and contributing, I concluded, would allow me to be my own person, but also to please her. Her specific ambition was that I become a justice of the Supreme Courtโand more specifically the Chief Justice. My mother set a fairly high bar.
By the time I began college at the University of Michiganโdisappointed at having been turned down by Harvard and YaleโI had decided I wanted to be a journalist. I wanted to โcomfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortableโโa phrase thatโs often and inaccurately attributed to H.L. Mencken, and was probably coined by one of your fellow speechwriters who never got credit for it.
But pursuing this noble cause in journalism was never simple, because in addition to afflicting the comfortable, I also wanted to be comfortable myself, and famous, and admired.
I wanted to make a difference โฆ. but not at too much sacrifice to myselfโthe self that felt so vulnerable and insecure.
My heroes were the New Journalistsโpeople like Tom Wolfe and Gay Talese; David Halberstam and Joan Didionโwho were all great reporters, but also wrote stylish novelistic nonfiction and were as much appreciated for their writing as they were for their journalism.
These journalists werenโt ink-stained wretches toiling away in obscurity. They were stars themselves, nearly as well known, well paid and admired as those they wrote about.
I wanted to be like them, which I imagined would make me feel better about myself. It turned out that no matter how much I achieved, I continued to feel I fell short.
I didnโt learn that lessons for many years. Instead, I just kept doubling down, pushing harder, hoping to pile up enough bylines and accolades that no one could doubt my value.
After college, I sought a job in New York City, because I had grown up there and because I believed it was the center of the universe. I got offers in other cities, but somehow nothing counted if it wasnโt in NYC.
I began by writing for a small, hip magazine called New Times, long since defunct. Two years later, I hit my first real crossroads, when an editor from the New York Post, who I had been pursuing since college, agreed to meet. These were the days when the Post was home to much admired writers like Nora Ephron, Pete Hamill, Frank Rich, and Anna Quindlen.
The editor and I ended up having too much to drink, and by the end of the evening he had offered me a job not as a reporter, but as a gossip columnist, replacing Leonard Lyons, a legend in the field who was retiring after 40 years on the beat.
I knew nothing about gossip, and it surely didnโt fit my self-image (nor my motherโs ambition for me). ย On the other hand, taking on the assignment would mean having a column in a major New York City dailyโwith my picture at the top.
It was not the last time I would make an expedient choice and rationalize it away.
For the next four months, I wrote an ingenuous column about how, despite my earnest efforts, I couldnโt seem to track down much good gossip.
At the end of the fourth month, Rupert Murdoch bought the paper, and promptly announced in an interview that one example of what he disliked most about the Post was โฆ my column.
How dare I apologize for being a gossip columnist?
Within a week, just ahead of being fired, I resigned and Murdoch launched the infamous Page 6.
I got hired by Ed Kosner, the editor of Newsweek, who I had met on the cocktail party circuit, while searching for gossip. I felt relieved. It was a more anonymous job, but also more respectable.
I wrote about the media, books and entertainment. I nearly always went into assignments idealizing my subjects, and I often came out disillusioned. My talented and celebrated subjects were often struggling mightily behind their appealing public personas. They didnโt seem have life figured out much better than I did. Three years after I wrote a cover story about John Belushi at the top of his game, he was dead from a drug overdose at the age of 33.
Over and over, I was learning that external achievement is largely unmoored from internal satisfaction.
After three years at Newsweek, impatient for more notice, and more visible success, I got hired by the New York Times. Despite the prestige, I felt like just one among hundreds of reporters. I loved being associated with the Times, but I wasnโt eager to spend my career there.
Four years later, when I got the opportunity to write long-form cover stories for New York Magazine, I jumped at the opportunity. ย
It was several years into working for โNew Yorkโ that I first encountered Donald Trump. At the age of 38, Trump had achieved local renown in New York by building a very successful hotel atop Grand Central Station on 42nd Street, and then a flashy condominium in a prized midtown location, which he modestly named Trump Tower.
In early 1985, I got wind of the fact that Trump had purchased an older apartment building overlooking New Yorkโs Central Park South. It was another prize location, but in this case the tenants in the building were living under the protection of rent control and rent stabilization, and paid very little for their apartments. Trumpโs plan was to get rid of them, and turn the building into a luxury condominium.
To help in the effort, he hired a company that specialized in what was known euphemistically as โtenant relocation.โ In practical terms, that meant failing to replace burned out lights in hallways, and not fixing the elevators when they broke, so that the mostly elderly tenants were forced to walk up and down the stairs. It also meant refusing to do any kind of general repairs, including leaks, and even threatening to fill vacant apartments with homeless people and drug dealers.
All of this was designed to make life so miserable for the tenants that they felt no choice but to move out. Talk about an opportunity to comfort the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable. This was the perfect opportunity.
To make it even more appealing, Trump was failing miserably in his efforts to push tenants out.
They organized themselves to fight him, hired a savvy lawyer, and refused to leave. In the article, I described Trumpโs efforts as a case study in โhow not to vacate a building โฆ. the story of a gang that couldnโt shoot straight โฆ a fugue of failure โฆ. a farce of fumbling and bumbling.โ
The cover image in the magazine featured an illustration of Trump looking like a thugโred-faced, sweating and scowling. This was journalism I could feel proud of.
To my amazement, Trump loved the article, and especially the cover picture, and he wrote to tell me so. For Trump, any publicity was good publicity. In this case, he especially loved being portrayed as a tough guy. Almost immediately, he had the magazine cover framed, and put it up on the wall in his office.
Trump was like no human being I had ever met. Qualities that most people would do anything to keep secret, Trump embraced. He was also a reporterโs dream. Wherever he went, he was likely to say something outrageous.
Several months later, I went back to conduct the then famous Playboy interview with him. A few minutes into our conversation, he mentioned that he had just signed a deal with the publisher Random House to do a book.
โWhatโs it about?โ I asked.
โItโs my autobiography,โ he replied.
โYouโre only 38,โ I said, half-jokingly. โYou really donโt have an autobiography yet.โ
โYea, I know,โ he said, โbut Iโm getting paid a lot of money to do it.โ
ย โPeople are a lot more interested in the deals youโve made than they are in your autobiography,โ I said. โIf I were you Iโd call the book โThe Art of the Deal.โ
The title had just popped into my head. Iโm pretty sure I got it from Joan Didion and that she had used the phrase to describe the real nature of art in Hollywoodโdeal makingโbut Iโve never been able to confirm that.
โI like that title,โ Trump said without missing a beat. โDo you want to write the book?โ
As much as it makes me cringe to say so today, I suspect I was hoping he would say that.
I already knew that Trump was a bad actor, from my previous article. I also knew that writing a book with him would very likely undermine my future credibility as a journalist and subject me to the legitimate charge of having sold out.
The term was virtually invented for what I was about to do.
On the other hand, my wife and I had two young children and a mortgage we were struggling to pay with the relatively modest salaries we earned as journalists. I was very worried about our financial situationโperhaps unduly so.ย
Once again, I rationalized my choice.
Writing Trumpโs book, I told myself, would give my family some financial security, and even potentially free me to do whatever book I wanted to write next. How bad could it be to write a book about a big-mouth real estate developer?
It wasnโt as if he was ever going to run for president. I pushed my concerns about the kind of man he wasโand the kind of man I wanted to beโinto the background.
My mother, for one, was appalled by my choice. She disdained any focus on making money, and she saw Trump as a vulgar loudmouth.
Although I didnโt realize it at the time, I now see that writing โThe Art of the Dealโ was the equivalent of putting my finger in her eye. In hindsight, I realize it was a slightly perverse declaration of independence from my mother.ย
Having crossed that moral Rubicon, I focused on making my own good deal with Trump. Most writers for hire receive a flat fee or a relatively modest percentage of any royalties the book earns.
Trump and I haggled back and forth. Ultimately, he agreed to share 50 per cent of his $500,000 advance. My $250,000 share represented five times as much money as I had ever earned in a full year of work as a journalist.
He also agreed to share 50 per cent of any future royalties the book earned.
Once the contract was signed, I arranged to meet Trump on Saturday mornings at his penthouse apartment in Trump Tower. My plan was to interview him for two or three hours at a time, until I had gathered enough material to write the book.
I imagined it would take several dozen such meetings over the subsequent six monthsโand told him so.ย ย
It didnโt take long to realize I was kidding myself. In our very first interview, Trump got impatient answering my questions in less than 10 minutes.
He was more than willing to provide sound bites to virtually any reporter who called his office, but it was nearly impossible to keep him focused on any single topic for more than a few minutes. He had a stunningly short attention span.
โThis is so boring,โ he would tell me, with irritation, a few minutes into any interview we did. โI donโt want to talk about what already happened. Itโs the past. Itโs over.โ
If I managed to keep Trump answering questions for 20 minutes, I considered it a major victory. He was like a kindergartener who canโt sit still in a classroom.
In all the time I spent with him, I never saw a book on Trumpโs desk. It later dawned on me that he had likely never read a book in his adult life.
Twenty years later, during his presidential campaign, he confirmed as much. Asked at one point to describe a favorite book, he named โAll Quiet on the Western Front.โ ย How old were you when you read that one?ย
After a half dozen frustrating interview sessions, it became clear I wasnโt going to get a bookโs worth of materialย by asking Trump questions. Eventually, I decided to simply show up at his office in the mornings and listen in on his phone calls.
I donโt ever remember asking permission. It was clear to me that if Trump could have had his way, the whole world would have been listening in on his calls.
When I arrived each day around 9 am, he was nearly always on the phone. I picked up an extension eight feet away from him, and listened in on his conversations for the next several hours, and often all day long.
Beside reporters, Trump spoke mostly with lawyers, bankers and brokers for the deals he was doing. Many of these people became primary source material for the book. Over time, I went and interviewed each of them, in order to fill in the details Trump was incapable of providing.
It was during these conversations that I realized I couldnโt take anything he told me at face value.
What others told me about Trumpโs deals oftenย directly contradicted what Trump had told me. That made me uneasy, but I reminded myself that I was writing this book for hire. It wasnโt meant to be my version of events, nor an objective account. This was Trumpโs story, and he was sticking to it.
More than any human being I have ever met, Donald Trump has the ability to convince himself that whatever he is saying at any given moment is true, or sort of true, or at least ought to be true. As we all now know, lying is second nature to him, just one more way to gain advantage.
Facts to Trump are whatever he deems them to be on any given day. When he is challenged, as he has demonstrated over and over, he doubles downโeven if what he has just said is demonstrably false.
Iโm convinced that Trump believes even his most preposterous lies, and that the more he repeats them, the more true they become to him.
When it came to The Art of the Deal, I wrestled with how to tell stories that I knew included inaccuracies.
Eventually, I came up with this sentence, aimed at covering all potential untruths:ย โPeople want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular. Itโs called truthful hyperbole. Itโs an innocent form of exaggeration and a very effective form of promotion.โย
Trump loved that explanation, preposterous as it is. After all, there is no such thing as truthful hyperbole. Itโs a sleight of hand, a purposeful misdirection. In the end, truthful hyperbole is just a trumped-up word for lying.
What I did so effectively in The Art of the Deal, Iโm ashamed to say, was use language to reshape Donald Trumpโs bullying, cynicism and one-dimensionality into a voice that seemed boyish, ingenuous and brashly charming. ย
In the end, I created a character far more winning than Trump actually is. Even as I was writing the book, Iโd begun to think of him as a black hole. With nothing to sustain him inside, he looked entirely to the external world for nourishment.
No amount of money, success, praise or attention was ever enough. No matter how much he got, the solace it gave him very quickly leaked out.
What I didnโt fully recognize at the time was how much of Trumpโs neediness and hunger for affirmation I share. By seeing these distasteful qualities in such an exaggerated version in him, I could feel more righteous about disowning them in myself.
ย At the same time, I understood in some deep empathic way Trumpโs hope that more money and fame and external success would eventually make him feel betterโand serve as substitute for the safety, security and love that he never got in childhood.
And which I didnโt either.
โThe ultimate motive for seeking extraordinary success, power, or fame,โ writes the psychologist Sue Blogland, โis to make sure that our feared rejection, born in childhood, never happens.โ
โWe want to believe that if we ourselves could just secure enough recognition and approval from the outside world, if we could feel sufficiently admired, we would be healed and our self-esteem secured.
โBut no matter how great the success, the original narcissistic wound remains unhealed.โ
Bloland also happens to be the daughter of the revered psychoanalyst Erik Erikson. Her insights grew out of observing the vast gulf between her fatherโs enormous external success and his inner torment.
In Trumpโs case, he has more access to the attention he requires than ever before โฆ. but thatโs the equivalent of saying a heroin addict has kicked his problem once he has free and continuous access to the drug.
Trumpโs dilemma is that his insatiable need for external validation puts him forever at risk of feeling worthless.
Trump grew up with a very powerful and brutal father, and an overpowered, passive mother who was in no position to defend him. I understood that dynamic, even if the roles were reversed in my parents. ย
To survive, Trump determined that he had to go to war with the world. It was a simple choice for him.
He either dominated or he submitted. He either created fear or he succumbed to fearโas his older alcoholic brother had.
Trump treated every encounter as a contest he had to win, because the only other option was to lose, which was the equivalent to him of obliteration.
From early in his life, he deduced that the best way to stay safe was to take no prisoners. So Trump stood up to his father. He dominated his siblings. He became a bully in his neighborhood. When his father dispatched him to military school, Trump managed to get elected head of the Corps of Cadets.
Each of us moves through early childhood with a narrow, self-centered worldview. Thatโs the nature of development. The difference for Trump is that his worldview never got much wider, or deeper, or longer. By his own declaration, he is essentially the same person today, at 70, that he was at 7.
Along the way, he failed to develop qualities of character that most human beings do in the course of growing up, to one extent or anotherโempathy, generosity, reflectiveness, the capacity to delay gratification, an appreciation of subtlety and nuance, and above all, a conscienceโan inner sense of right and wrong.
Even at 70, his when own sense of self feels at risk, he will lash out at Carmen Cruz, the struggling mayor of San Juan, to lift himself up โฆ. or disparage the service of a war hero like John McCain, or humiliate members of his own administration. And without a momentโs guilt.
Because Trump has never spent time expanding his emotional, intellectual and moral universe, his worldview has congealed. Through his narrow lens, what he sees is a jungle full of predators out to get him.ย ย
Win or lose, dominate or submitโthis perspective lies at the heart of Trumpโs internal narrativeโthe story he tells himself about who he is. It informs every choice he makes, much as our own narratives do in our own lives, even when weโre not consciously aware of them.
Trumpโs drug of choice, is attentionโas it is for so many public figuresโbut we each have our own ways to anesthetize ourselves against the experience of emptiness, despair, loneliness and inadequacy.
None of us is free of these feelingsโtheyโre an unalterable part of being human. All of us look for ways to keep our pain at bay, precisely because itโs so painful.
We rely on defenses like denial, rationalization, blame and projection โฆ or we turn to drugs, or alcohol, or video games or the Internet โฆ or we turn into workaholics, or relentless achievers, or we become caretakers while failing to take good care of ourselves.
But any addiction has a predictable pattern. The addict keeps chasing the high by upping the ante in an increasingly futile attempt to get the same effect.
When the Art of the Dealย was finally published in 1987, it became an instant #1 bestseller. Over the next year, I earned more money than I had in the sum of my previous career as a journalist. ย
I liked having more money. Who wouldnโt? But it didnโt make me feel much better. And feeling bad proved to be an unexpected gift.
The ultimate irony is that writing The Art of the Dealย led me down the path that I believe saved my life.
Iโm reasonably certain Iโm only person alive who was led to the dharma by Donald Trump.
In many ways, the last 30 years of my work have been a direct reaction to the values and world view Trump represented.
In my next book, What Really Matters,ย I set out to write about people who had led more reflective lives and had more inspiring and idealistic goals beyond their own immediate self-interest.
The experience was inspiring in many ways, but life has a habit of confounding our expectations.
In the course of five years of interviewing and getting to know scores of psychologists, philosophers, scientists and mystics who had spent their own lives searching for meaning โฆ what I discovered was complexity and contradiction.
I met people who were often stirring in their words, and skilled in their practices, but who could also devolve, like the rest of us, into more primitive behaviors under stress. Many of them remained nearly as blind to the contradiction between their walk and their talk.
Over time, Iโve come to believe that each of us has an infinite capacity for self-deception.
For all the work I have done to see through my own blind spots, I know they are still there, rising up when Iโm feeling most threatened. ย
Over most of the past two decades, I have run a company called The Energy Project. We focus on helping organizations to invest more in meeting the needs of their employees. Along the way, weโve helped thousands of people to more skillfully manage their own energyโphysical, emotional, mental and spiritualโso they can lead happier and more productive lives.
All or this has helped me to lead a happier and more productive life myselfโin large part because I have found a purpose higher than my own self-interest.
At the same time, Iโve evolved a more nuanced, complex and forgiving perspective on the possible.
Rather than trying to explain it, Iโm going to try to show it to you. Iโd like you to take out a pen, and a piece of paper, or use you phone, if thatโs the way you roll.ย ย ย
Hereโs the exercise. Iโd like you to take a few moments to think of a few adjectives that describe who you are at your best.
How did that feel? You wouldnโt mind hanging out with that person would you?ย
Ok, now Iโd like you to spend a few moments thinking of adjectives that describe who you are at your worst. Take another few seconds to write those qualities down.
So unless youโve experienced writerโs block, each of you should have the beginnings of two lists.
So hereโs the $64,000 question: Which of these lists describe the real you?
Isnโt it pretty obvious that you are both? And that you move regularly along the spectrum between these two poles? ย
Isnโt it also plain that these two lists, together, represent a more complete and truthful way of describing yourself?
And finally, isnโt it the case that when you are at your worst, thatโs not all of who you are? Or who you are all of the time?
This insight was life changing for me. It freed me from a binary perspective that had burdened me all of my life.
For the first time, the fact that I wasnโt always my best didnโt mean I was bad.
The fact that I wasnโt always right didnโt make me always wrong.
It was more complicated that, and so is life.
We cannot change what we do not notice. This is what true development and growth are really all about: seeing more and excluding less. The more you see, the more you have the potential to influence, and the bigger the human being you can become.ย
At times, I can still behave like a frightened, defensive child. I am also still the person who made a fateful decision at 33-years-old to write a book with a man named Donald Trump. The instincts which prompted that choice have not disappeared.
But I am also far more aware of my vulnerable and needy instincts, and I have much more capacity to manage them โฆ to make conscious choices about how I behave in the world, and to make amends and repair when I fall short.
The pull to my worst qualities is less intense, less frequent and it lasts for shorter periods of time. Because I spend less time defending my value, I have far more energy available to create value, and more capacity to love and feel loved.
This is the life Donald Trump has never lived, and never will.
But you can. The choice about who you want to be is one of the very few that no one can ever take away from you. It begins with being conscious in every moment that you have a choice.
โLoving oneself is no easy matter,โ the psychologist James Hillman has written, โbecause it means loving all of oneself, including the shadow where one is so inferior and so socially unacceptable.
โThus the cure is a paradox requiring two incommensurables: the moral recognition that parts of me are burdensome and intolerable and must change, and the loving, laughing acceptance of them, which takes them exactly as they are, joyfully, forever. One both tries hard and lets go, judges harshly and joins gladly.โ
Our current narrative about who we areโthe assumptions we holdโneed not hold us.
Our fate is not unalterably fixed. The stories we tell ourselves are not immutable facts.
We can rewrite our stories, we can behave better in any given moment, and things can always get better.
At the end of Tony Kushnerโs Pulitzer-Prize winning โAngels in Americaโ the character Prior reflects on the horrific wave of death caused by AIDS and the gay communityโs challenge. What he says feels poignantly relevant to the challenges we face today, in the era of Trump.
โThe world only spins forward,โ Prior explains. โWe will be citizens. The time has come.
โBye bye now. You are fabulous creatures, each and every one. And I bless you. More life! The great work begins.โ
You, too, are fabulous creatures, each and every one. So bless you. More life. The great work begins.
Hashtag: Resolve to evolve.