by Jordan Belfort is the latest work by the director best known for the film The Wolf of Wall Street by Martin Scorsese, a criminal who has become known worldwide. Already in the Hollywood film, the transformation of the main character portrayed by Leonardo DiCaprio from an impostor to a motivational coach becomes visible. Towards the end, he already teases there his Straight-Line Seminar, which is supposed to enable others to become successful.
One can think of it at this point what one wants. Personally, I find it highly reprehensible and would have punished this book accordingly clearly if the author had not reflected himself several times in the work and also repeatedly appealed to all readers to do decent things with the knowledge.
He has his past and it is a blessing and a curse at the same time. Blessing, because it was the only thing that brought him this attention, and curse, because everyone who knows him knows that he did not earn his money in an honest way and therefore rightly ended up in prison.
This book now summarizes the most important findings of his Straight Line Seminar and once again makes these contents tangible to a broad mass of people. It is about the art of persuasion, influence and success, as the subtitle already correctly promises.
The straight-line concept is based on the approach of always returning to the straight line between the initial situation and the personal target state in negotiations. The aim is to eliminate disruptive factors, excuses, pretexts and unnecessary discussions on the fringes of what is actually relevant and, ideally, to anticipate them. The main goal is to always be on the line and thus to achieve success as quickly as possible and without frictional losses.
This is the first time that Jordan Belfort has revealed content from his system outside of his EUR 2,000 seminars. Whether the price was originally justified for this, remains to be seen and probably resulted more from supply and demand.
At this point a few words about the author:
Jordan Belfort was born in 1962 in the Queens borough of New York. He studied at American University and earned millions as a broker on Wall Street at the age of 26. At 36, he was arrested for his criminal activities and spent the rest of his life in prison. Today he lives as a successful motivational speaker in Los Angeles.
The laudatory texts on the back cover about the content had put me off extremely at first and in my opinion, a little less thickly applied platitudes would certainly have fulfilled their purpose here. One waits a very long time before finally talking about the malicious manipulation that Jordan Belfort has used his system for. In my opinion, the critical classification should have been made much earlier(!), but at least it came at the end,
"I have to admit that my life is mostly known for my crazy past. However, that's only a small part of it and not the one I'm particularly proud of or want to be remembered for."
Jordan Belfort
He also wants to dedicate the book to other people who have fallen on their face in one way or another in their lives and have had to learn to get back up again or are still in the process of doing so. He wants to serve as an example to them of someone who had also hit rock bottom. Only at the point one may certainly not compare his situation with the average, because about the very most people probably no Hollywood film with Leonardo DiCaprio in the leading role will be shot, which carries innumerable visitors into the own seminars afterwards.
"Everything they say about me is true, I am one of those born salesmen who can sell ice to an Eskimo, oil to an Arab, pork to a rabbi, or anything to anyone. [...] Be that as it may, this is my gift: I am able to sell anything to anyone, and in large quantities; and whether this gift comes from God or is natural, I really cannot say, but what I can say with absolute certainty is that I am not the only person born with this gift."
Jordan Belfort
It is questionable whether this is necessarily a predicate that one would want to carry. What is described here in many places as a "gift" could also easily be described as unscrupulousness, a lack of values or as pronounced egoism. I find it unbelievable that this unfortunately remains completely uncommented and unclassified for such a long time in the book, until at the end there follows a kind of promise to himself that all readers should make to themselves and to him:
"I will never use the strategy I'm about to learn to manipulate my potential clients into acting against their own interests. If I do it anyway, I deserve the same ten years of pain and suffering that Jordan endured."
In the end, I can still give the book a good rating due to this turn of events. Otherwise, I have little to criticize about the content. As a reader, you learn a lot about the first four seconds of a conversation, the right tone of voice and the appropriate body language, the art of customer acquisition and the targeted sales presentation.
In the end, the art of looping is primarily the central tactic for getting prospects back on the straight line again and again, and rightly occupies a very large portion of the book.
It is an exciting and certainly interesting sales book, with an approach that is worth taking a look at. Especially people who work in a sales department where telephone guides are used can certainly adopt one or the other directly or at least have their own scripts adapted accordingly or pass on impulses to the sales and/or management.
Once again, I was able to learn a lot, but I also saw many parallels to previous books on the subject of negotiation and sales, which I have already had the pleasure of reading.
Unfortunately, in my opinion, it doesn't quite come close to really recommendable works like Deal by Jack Nasher or Sell by Martin Limbeck. Still, it is a book that at least exudes the glamour of Hollywood and thus a certain degree of perceived exclusivity. The straight-line concept itself, however, is certainly not rocket science and thus easy to implement and not particularly new to many experienced salespeople.
But what interested me most about it was the vehemence with which Jordan Belfort dealt with his customers, following the system. You can literally feel the scenes, which you also know from the film, in which it basically doesn't matter what the customer presents in response to your own sales presentation for inputs and pretexts, because the straight line is defined and Belfort is more than motivated not to lose sight of it.