by Rod D. Martin
November 23, 2016

Top Leadership Lessons of 2016:

1. Even as late as one month ago, lots of you were calling for Donald Trump to drop out of the race, certain he would lose.

If he'd listened, you'd have been right.

2. Not one of Trump's opponents, from Jeb! Bush to Hillary Clinton to the Enemedia, ever believed he could possibly win.

Which is the main reason all of them lost.

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January 15, 2016

For decades, Morton Blackwell -- one of the essential fathers of the modern conservative movement and to this day the Republican National Committeeman for Virginia -- has taught legions of students the art and science of political activism, through his Leadership Institute. At the core of his teaching are the following "laws," accumulated through long battle in the trenches of American politics, starting well before Barry Goldwater's nomination for President.

At The Martin Organization, we quote these like Proverbs. You should too.

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by Rod D. Martin
Inc. Magazine
January 7, 2016

You would be surprised how many people don’t accept a breath mint when it’s offered to them.

Maybe you’ve refused one yourself. You shouldn’t have.

If someone offers you a breath mint, they might just be being polite. If so, you may not want a mint just then, but it’s rarely polite or kind to turn down someone’s offered generosity.

But more likely, if they offered you a mint, you needed it. You just didn’t realize it.

It’s amazing how much, ahem, offense you can give without knowing it.

The first lesson of breath mints is that you should strive to pick up on the subtleties of life. People tell you things you need to know all the time: what it will take to close the sale, that they’re agitated, that they’re not feeling well, that you’re upsetting them in some way, that they’re crazy about you, all sorts of things. Experts tell us that 93% of communication is non-verbal – 55% body language and 38% tone of voice – while just 7% is verbal.

If you mis…

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by Rod D. Martin
Inc. Magazine
October 13, 2015

So you want to be an innovator?

Innovation can mean an edge for your business, a breakthrough cure you might need someday, a significant improvement in quality of life: lots of things people need and want. The most significant innovators are frequently treated as heroes. That's nice too.

But where do you begin? Start with these five essentials.

First: Question everything. Never stop improving. 

This is not a call to "dream big dreams" (though that's obviously essential). This is about questioning all of your presuppositions, especially the ones you don't even realize you presuppose.

Nothing is more built into the DNA of most companies than meetings: meetings, meetings preliminary to meetings, meetings about meetings. But at PayPal, meetings were frowned upon: our COO David Sacks (since then the producer of Thank You For Smoking and the founder of Yammer) would actually walk into anything he thought looked like a meeting, listen for a few minutes…

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by Rod D. Martin
Inc. Magazine
September 21, 2015

One of the most essential keys to success? Study those who've gone before.

History gets a bad rap. Children are conditioned to hate it: they are told it’s boring, they are told it’s all memorization of facts and dates. And sadly, all too often, that’s exactly how their teachers teach it.

But history isn’t facts and dates. History is a story, the narrative of those who’ve gone before. And very few people make it into the history books unless they were pretty successful, or at least if their story wasn’t pretty interesting.

To the degree that success is about solving problems (and that making money is about solving other people’s problems), history teaches us both the nature of those problems and how other people solved other problems before us.

The first of those is essential. You can’t solve a problem you don’t understand. This is the great handicap of many a diplomat hoping to bring peace in the Middle East. They don’t speak the language, th…

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by Rod D. Martin
Inc. Magazine
August 26, 2015

To many people, the Golden Rule is very simple: he who has the gold makes the rules.

They aren’t entirely wrong, of course. But that’s not the idea or the ideal. And if you want to succeed, understanding why makes a difference.

The real Golden Rule is found in Christ’s Sermon on the Mount: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Many take it as merely a platitude, or perhaps a command to be “nice.”

They’re wrong.

Jesus uses it to summarize much of the Law and the Prophets. That may seem hyperbolic, or perhaps hyper-theological, until you realize (as even few Christians do) this: the Golden Rule is the underpinning of all sales, entrepreneurship, free market economics, and indeed, of modern civilization itself.

Think of a salesman or an entrepreneur. He wants to make money. But how will he go about it? First, by solving someone else’s problem.

Perhaps you’ve never thought of it that way before. Maybe you’ve thought of the stereotypical fast-talking used car salesman in the plaid jacket, trying to get you to do something you don’t want to do and, presumably, cheat you.

If so, you’re certainly not alone. Confucius taught that “the virtuous man knows what is noble; the low man knows what is profitable.” Medieval Japanese social hierarchy placed merchants at the very lowest rung, while the Indian caste system placed them just above the untouchables. The Islamic scholar Ibn Khaldun, widely considered one of the early fathers of modern sociology and economics, went so far as to write that looting is morally superior to trade, because it requires courage to defeat a rival in combat.

No wonder most of human history has been characterized by barbarism!

This sort of thinking is rooted in a false belief: that there is a finite amount of wealth, and that the only way someone may gain any is for someone else to lose it: a zero sum game. Most of human history and action, from Mongol conquests to modern collectivism, is characterized by this belief: to have something, you have to take it from someone else.

But wealth is not in the ground, or hidden in a castle, or stashed in Uncle Scrooge’s money bin. Wealth is in the mind. And it can be created in unlimited qualities, limited only by man’s creativity and the constraints under which he works.

How can this be? Let’s examine the salesman, the entrepreneur, again. He could loot: many still do. But he doesn’t. And short of that, he has no claim to your money.

So how then can he get it? He must persuade you to give it to him.

That persuasiveness is frequently seen as seduction, something corrupt, something dangerous. But when was the last time you were actually “seduced” into buying a car? Most people need a car; and if salesmen had such magical powers, wouldn’t you just keep buying cars until your entire front lawn was filled, much as a cocaine addict ruins himself financially to pay his dealer?

Perhaps the salesman is better at selling than you are at buying, but that’s certainly not the salesman’s fault. He could indeed cheat you, and again, some do. But we have courts for that, and police; and in times past, cheating frequently ended in the cheater’s death. Plus, reputation is a big deal: get a bad one, and no one will do business with you anymore. That is not a formula for sustainable success.

The salesman is just trying to feed his family. And guess what: so are you. He needs money more than the car he’s selling; you need a car more than the money you’re holding: how else are you going to get to work, or take the kids to school?

So when you make the exchange, you both become richer than you were before. Both of you.

Now multiply that simple transaction across an entire civilization. How much richer are Americans today than before the automobile? And how many other businesses, and jobs, exist because of that one invention, and because of the people who sold it?

The compounding effect is staggering. The world’s per capita GDP – roughly, the amount of wealth per person – stayed pretty much flat for all of time until the middle of the 18th Century, when people began to embrace this idea. Allowing entrepreneurs a legal framework in which to pursue their vision created the entire modern world, from candlelight and doctors using leeches to iPhones and robotic surgeries in just 250 years.

How does the Golden Rule apply? Go back to the beginning, to the salesman before the sale. How does he get money? Yes, he must sell something. Yes he must persuade. But first, he has to solve someone else’s problem.

And that’s the key to everything.

Success lies in standing in the other man’s shoes, taking stock of his situation: his preferences, his problems, what he needs, maybe what he doesn’t even know yet that he needs. The iPhone was like that. The car was like that. The airplane was like that.

Virtually everything was, at some point, like that.

Someone saw a problem, frequently a problem lots of other people had but few really saw, or at least saw as solvable: it was just a “fact of life,” like polio. The someone who did see it thought hard, worked hard, invested great sums of money, came up with a solution. And then, after all that exertion, he still had to go persuade someone to buy it. And if no one did – because freedom means no one has to – there came no money, no fame, no trophy for trying.

You can be upset about the price of a computer, or a cancer drug, if you want. But what you have to recognize is that all the money in the world could not have bought it just a few short years ago. George Washington could defeat the British Empire and help craft the U.S. Constitution, but all his wealth and power couldn't buy an air conditioner or an aspirin. Real wealth is ability more than it is money: money can only buy what someone creates and produces. Without that, money is just toilet paper.

The entrepreneur, the teacher, the salesman of every kind, solves the problems of countless people and makes a little money from each of them. Some are angered that a John D. Rockefeller or a Steve Jobs is rich. Those critics fail to grasp that those men's fortunes are but the tiniest fraction -- a commission, if you will -- of the wealth created, spread out across all their customers and entire societies, by those men’s ideas and efforts.

All the conquerors in all of time could not do what one Thomas Edison, or one Robert Fulton, did to change the world, and for the better.

So the secret to success is indeed the Golden Rule. The better you are at solving other people’s problems, the more money you can make, the more good you can achieve, and the more you can change your community or even your world.

So get to work.

This article appeared in Inc. Magazine, and originally appeared as an answer on Quora.

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by Rod D. Martin
Inc. Magazine
August 13, 2015

First mover advantage is a myth.

Some disagree. They’re wrong. Or if they aren’t wrong, perhaps we could rephrase my point this way: it is exceedingly difficult for a first mover to keep their advantage.

Either way, this is a key secret to success: never be overawed by the status quo.

Many attribute our success at PayPal to our having been the first mover. But we weren’t the first. We were just the first to do it right.

Leif Erikson is said to have beaten Columbus to America by 500 years. John Cabot made it to North America during the rule of Henry VII, before the Spanish and 110 years before Jamestown.

So what?

Far more interesting is China’s Admiral Zheng He. In the early years of the Ming Dynasty, from 1405 to 1433, “The Great Navigator” led daring voyages of exploration throughout the East Indies, along the coast of India, all the way to the Arabian Peninsula and as far as Mombasa and possibly Zanzibar. He commanded 317 ships and 28,000 crewme…

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by Rod D. Martin
Fortune Magazine
July 29, 2015

Must you be ruthless and selfish to be a successful entrepreneur? No. It’s exactly the opposite.

An entrepreneur must be ruthless with himself — he needs to be a disciplined machine — but the rest of what he does is an exercise in following the Golden Rule.

The entrepreneur brings a new product or service to market. When he begins, no one wants it. So if he wants to be successful, his first and foremost goal must be to solve a problem many people have, in a way those people would want it to be solved.

How to do this will not always be obvious, either to the entrepreneur or to his prospects. No one had ever used an iPhone before Apple created it, so it was not clear that anyone would want to use one, much less pay $850 for one (much less pay $850 ever year or two for a new one).

This is the chief risk in an entrepreneurial venture: will they want it? This is not about ruthlessness or selfishness. It’s about thinking of the other guy first. What …

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by Rod D. Martin
Inc. Magazine
July 29, 2015

Relentless. If there is any word that describes successful people, that’s it. Successful people just don’t quit.

Does this seem obvious? Perhaps; but it obviously isn’t. The quality of unceasing determined force-of-nature-like unstopability is not merely rare: it shocks people when they see it.

You don’t have to be a cinematic action hero to reap the benefits of relentless effort. Let’s just take one example: language learning.

If you’re like most Americans, you took two years of some foreign language – probably French or Spanish – in high school. You probably did it again in college. And if you’re like most people, you’re lucky if you can remember “taco,” “burrito” and “baño.”

You probably think you’re bad at learning languages. You probably think some people are gifted at leaning languages, and you’re “just not one of them.” And that may even be true.

But it’s also completely irrelevant.

Learning a language is about relentlessness. Your teachers p…

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by Rod D. Martin
Inc. Magazine
July 1, 2015

What is this "work-life balance" thing people keep talking about?

I am an entrepreneur. It's what I've chosen to do with my life. I am very happy with my life, which is largely composed of work: work I've chosen because, yes, it makes me money, because it makes the world better (assuming we're successful), and because it gives expression to my particular gifts, such as they are. Some people paint, some write poetry. This is what I do.

When I hear people whine (and yes, fair or unfair, that's what I hear them doing) about "work-life balance," it seems to me that more often than not they're expressing an entitlement mentality. "I really shouldn't have to work,” they seem to be saying, “but since I do, I demand as much time away from that work as I can possibly get away with." And if their work is indeed meaningless and stupid, then good for them (although if we counted up all the hours these same people are probably spending on Facebook and porn si…

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by Rod D. Martin
December 19, 2011

An old friend wrote today on Facebook, saying: "In ten days, my son will officially become a teenager. Call me crazy, but I am optimistic that he will be a pleasant teenager and grow into a fine young man."

You can imagine some of the responses, of the "Good luck with that!" variety. But mine was as follows:

You are by no means crazy. All three of our teenagers honored their parents, loved the Lord, and behaved themselves with dignity and honor. They were certainly kids, but they were not the rebellious monsters society mythologizes, if not idolizes, not by any means.

Best advice I can give you?

1. Pray without ceasing, and remain constantly in God's Word.

2. Remember that children -- teenage or otherwise -- are persons, not objects or pets. They want to be heard, and if you genuinely listen to them in love and respect, explaining yourself clearly and kindly when you disagree (or need to teach), occasionally reminding them that you're doing certain things n…

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