by Lewis Schiff
Convincing you will not be easy, I realize. Consider for a moment that most NFL football coaches have not adopted Coach Gibbs’s groundbreaking method for testing football brilliance, even though it helped get Gibbs elected to the Hall of Fame. And most people running hospitals today still adhere to what Richard Shannon calls “a theory of inevitability” about infection deaths, even though Shannon and others have shown that infections can be all but eradicated through simple step-by-step processes. These two stories from very disparate fields demonstrate how easy it is for the majority of accomplished professionals to avoid rethinking their preconceived beliefs and habits—even if doing so would help them achieve their goals.
I see one common and inspiring quality that links Gibbs, the Hall of Fame coach, with Shannon, the eminent physician—and sets each of them apart from all their peers. Gibbs and Shannon were willing to question the received wisdom they had long relied upon. Their curiosity, their courage, to cast doubt on what everybody already “knew” to be true, to see the familiar with new eyes, allowed them to create breakthrough results for themselves and their teams.
So which are you? Are you the pragmatic airline pilot, willing to master some mundane methods in order to get where you want to go? Or are you the proud surgeon, too steeped in tradition, training, and privilege to contemplate change, even when the evidence says that new thinking is desperately needed? What is it that you “know” right now about money that just might not be true? What do you know about yourself, and your ability to sample a few new ideas? Are you ready to consider, like Coach Gibbs and Dr. Shannon once needed to do, that much of what you “know,” what you’ve always known, might deserve a second look?
2
Do What You Love, but Follow the Money
MORE THAN 7 IN 10 MIDDLE-CLASS SURVEY RESPONDENTS SAID “DOING WHAT I LOVE AND ALLOWING THE MONEY TO FOLLOW” WAS IMPORTANT TO THEIR FINANCIAL SUCCESS.
JUST 2 IN 10 OF OUR SELF-MADE MILLIONAIRE SURVEY RESPONDENTS AGREED WITH THAT STATEMENT.
The Billionaire Busker
If you had been one of Guy Laliberté’s parents back in 1983, you probably would have been a little worried about your twenty-three-year-old son.
The French Canadian Laliberté had skipped college after high school and took off to Europe for a year. He supported himself hand-to-mouth as an accordion-playing street performer, or busker, to use the British term. When he first arrived in London, he had less than $1,000 in his pocket, and to preserve what he had, he spent the night sleeping on a bench in Hyde Park.
Laliberté’s English wasn’t very good and he soon moved on to Paris. There he fell in with other buskers, who taught him juggling, stilt walking, and “fire breathing,” probably the most dangerous of circus-style street acts. Laliberté would first take off his shirt and tie back his hair for safety. Then he would swig a mouthful of toxic flammable liquid and, with a burning torch in one hand, spray a writhing plume of orange-yellow fire 10 feet into the air. Fire breathing became Laliberté’s crowd-pleasing specialty.
Raised in a large middle-class family headed by a corporate executive father, Laliberté always expected to go on to college. But when he returned home from Europe, he instead joined a nonprofit collective of stilt walkers and acrobats called Le Club des Talons Hauts (the High Heels Club). His next several summers were spent living in a youth hostel while helping run Talons Hauts street festivals in the tiny Quebec resort town of Baie-Saint-Paul. Money and possessions never seemed all that important to Laliberté. Each winter he spent whatever cash he’d saved up by escaping to the beaches of Florida and Hawaii.
In early 1983, the Quebec government announced plans for a celebration of the province’s 450th anniversary to take place the following summer. Money was set aside for festivities that would showcase Quebec’s homegrown talent, and Talons Hauts received $1.6 million for a traveling circus that would visit 14 towns throughout Quebec over 12 weeks. Laliberté led the planning. He even dreamed up its name: Le Grand Tour du Cirque du Soleil.
The traveling circus was a chaotic mess that often flirted with disaster. The new “big-top” performance tent was almost impossible to set up. It collapsed in a rain storm one day during a preshow media event. Working conditions for the performers were so poor that there was a near-revolt by the European circus artists brought in to supplement the amateurish Talons Hauts regulars. The Cirque du Soleil show itself, however, won glowing praise from the press and the public throughout Quebec.
Le Grand Tour had been conceived as a one-year project, but Laliberté was determined to keep Cirque du Soleil going. He convinced the government to underwrite another season of shows in 1985. Outside of Quebec, however, the reaction was mixed. Shows in Toronto and Niagara Falls were poorly attended and the fledgling Cirque organization ended the year $750,000 in debt. A national tour of eight Canadian cities the following year fared much better, though, and ended with a showcase performance at the world’s fair in Vancouver.
Cirque had an informal, collaborative style of organization in which Laliberté took on the de facto role of executive producer. He kept pushing the circus’s creative staff to make the shows larger, more theatrical, and more visually lavish. Although the crowds kept growing through 1986, so did Cirque’s debt. Laliberté seemed determined to spend money that Cirque didn’t have. He went to France and brought back a gigantic new circus tent even though Cirque couldn’t pay for it. For almost three years, the fiscal management of Cirque du Soleil involved bouncing checks, wheedling with creditors, and begging for government handouts.
Then, in 1987, Laliberté booked Cirque to open the Los Angeles Arts Festival. The finances at Cirque were so shaky at the time that some top members of the troupe quit over what they considered a reckless move. But Cirque quickly became the hottest ticket at the festival. All 30 performances sold out and the $19 seats were being sold by scalpers for $200. Elton John and Francis Ford Coppola were among the celebrities who counted themselves as fans. Jane Fonda said she saw the show seven times during its two-week run. Cirque returned to Quebec with $1.5 million, its money problems a thing of the past. Within five years, Cirque shows were touring Europe and Asia. Over the next 20 years, Cirque du Soleil grew into one of the largest, most profitable entertainment brands in the world.
Today, Laliberté heads a staff of 3,000 based at Cirque’s ultramodern Montreal headquarters and training center. His management team develops and coordinates six different shows running year-round in Las Vegas, another permanent show at Disney World, and nine touring companies that perform all over the world. Cirque’s $800 million in annual ticket revenue rivals the combined box office take from all the theaters on Broadway.
Thanks to his majority interest in Cirque’s parent company, Laliberté’s net worth is estimated at $2.5 billion. In 2009, he spent $35 million of that personal fortune on a 12-day ride in the International Space Station. Wearing a red bulbous nose and proclaiming himself “the first clown in space,” Laliberté told an interviewer while in orbit, “I’m doing what every kid dreams about—running away and joining the circus.”
Laliberté’s story is often held up as a classic rags-to-riches triumph. His tremendous success suggests that anyone—even a street performer—who pursues a vision with hard work and determination, can end up falling into an enormous pile of money.
But there’s more to this story than just passion and drive. After all, plenty of passionate, creative people work hard their whole lives and still struggle to make ends meet. Laliberté isn’t a billionaire just because he followed his passion for more than 20 years. He’s a billionaire because he’s followed his passion and because he managed to hold on to a big equity stake in his business, even increasing it along the way at the expense of his other partners. That’s why this chapter is titled “Do What You Love, but Follow the Money.”
I know it’s far more common to see this equation put slightly differently: Do what you love and the money will follow. It sounds like a lot less work when it’s put
that way and it’s a more attractive statement of faith. In the Business Brilliant survey, this compelling idea has achieved a high level of acceptance among the middle-class sample. More than 7 in 10 said that “Doing what I love and allowing the money to follow” was important to their financial success. Our self-made millionaire survey respondents disagreed, however. Just 2 in 10 had any faith that the money will follow when you do what you love.
Do What You Love, the Money Will Follow is not only a popular idea with the middle class, it’s also the title of a classic self-help bestseller by Marsha Sinetar. The book has sold more than a million copies and remains in print today almost 25 years after it was first published.
The “Do What You Love” Deception
Marsha Sinetar said the idea came to her in 1984 while on her way to work. She was a public school administrator in Los Angeles at the time, holding down a secure job that she no longer found challenging. What she really wanted to do was become an independent management consultant, write books, and live in the country. But she was afraid to take all the risks required to get there.
Then one morning while driving down Wilshire Boulevard, Sinetar had an epiphany: “Do what you love, the money will follow.” The thought arrived in her mind fully formed, she said, “as if someone was speaking to me.” By the time she got to work, she had resolved to start changing her life, although it would take her two full years to make a complete transition. Sinetar began taking consulting work on the side as a mediator in corporate contract disputes. She moved to a house in a quiet rural community outside Los Angeles. Once her consulting practice had built up enough clients, Sinetar finally quit the school district. By then she was collecting stories for the book she wanted to write. It would be about people who had made similar dramatic changes in their working lives.
Do What You Love, the Money Will Follow was released in 1987 by a small Catholic publishing house and became a surprise bestseller. Sinetar’s premise was that in order to find happiness and prosperity by doing what you love, you need to overcome fears and self-doubt about where the money will come from. The book found a receptive readership among members of a sixties generation in the throes of their middle-age career crises.
Among the people she profiled was a teacher who quit the classroom to become a fine arts potter, a carpenter with an unused master’s degree in English, a former secretary who took up wallpaper hanging, and another ex-secretary who went into the office-leasing business. One of her favorite subjects was a seventy-five-year-old man named Wayne who’d dropped out of grade school during the Depression and built a prosperous general contracting business.
“I always made a living because of me, not because I can build,” Wayne told her. “During the Depression, with twenty people wanting every job, I was working. I’d just go to a place and convince them I could give them excellent service. They not only fed me, they paid me, too.. . . I earned 100 dollars a day during the Depression, cleaning roofs. It didn’t have anything to do with the fact that I can do construction. It has to do with me.”
Although Sinetar never explicitly pointed it out, the vast majority of people she cited as doing what they love were either small business owners like Wayne or self-employed and working from home. The satisfaction they expressed in doing the work they loved was drawn in large part from having an ownership stake in what they were doing. Sinetar herself was no different. She didn’t seek another public-sector job she would love. She pursued the work she loved on the side, as a corporate consultant and author, where she owned a stake in her success and could flex her Business Brilliance.
Perhaps a more accurate title to Sinetar’s book would have been Do What You Love, but Follow the Money. Almost all the people she profiled for her book were following the money and doing it gladly. It wasn’t about chasing the almighty buck for them. It was about growing their livelihoods and creating services and things of value to other people. That was part and parcel of what they loved. There was a creative challenge in finding new things to love doing and new sources of income to make it happen.
And that was the case with Guy Laliberté. At almost every critical junction in the history of Cirque du Soleil, the entire enterprise might have collapsed or gone in a completely different direction were it not for Laliberté’s personal devotion to following the money. It’s not that he was driven by greed or profit. In fact, in a few situations, he resisted the allure of easy money because it threatened his creative control. For all his erratic management habits, the one constant in Laliberté’s career was the nurturing and protection of his personal stake in the future prosperity of Cirque du Soleil.
When Laliberté took the lead in guiding Cirque through its early years, the troupe’s nonprofit status was essential to its survival. This was how Laliberté got private donors and the government to foot the bill for all Cirque’s early mistakes. The government was indulgent and creditors were patient because no one expected a lovable band of circus clowns to be good with money. At one point, Cirque’s bank simply forgave $200,000 worth of bounced checks.
Laliberté would later say this was all part of a passing phase. “I told the government funding agencies that we’d be free of needing their support within five years,” he was quoted in Cirque du Soleil: 20 Years Under the Sun, the official history of Cirque du Soleil. At one point he said he returned a subsidy check to the government because the circus had a profitable season.
Those years of spending beyond Cirque’s means were dedicated to a very specific vision shared by Laliberté and the rest of Cirque’s creative team. They wanted to present the circus arts as part of a theatrical experience, one that was more emotionally involving than the typical Ringling Brothers circus event. To do this, each new Cirque show required a unique set of costume designs, stage props, lighting effects, and an original musical score. Then the performers would also need to be paid more for extra weeks of rehearsals so all the acts can be shaped into a theatrical, storytelling whole.
It was an expensive vision, but Laliberté saw a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Theatergoers, he knew, are accustomed to paying much higher ticket prices than traditional circusgoers. Circus-as-theater cost a lot to produce, but it was also potentially very profitable.
Soon after the successful 1986 national Canadian tour, Laliberté and two other top Cirque administrators hatched their plan to turn Cirque into a private, for-profit company, with each one of them as one-third owners. Some members quit the troupe in disgust at the move, including Laliberté’s longtime friend and mentor, Guy Caron, the artistic director of Cirque. But Laliberté assumed correctly that most members would stay because they were just happy to keep working.
The circus-as-theater vision for Cirque belonged as much to Caron as it did to Laliberté. But the two men had vastly different ideas about how to achieve it. Caron was a founder of Quebec’s circus school, and held a deep belief in consensus decision making and nonprofit collective ownership. Laliberté, on the other hand, said that “I always had business goals, as much as I had goals to travel and have fun.. . . I always said that if Cirque makes it big, it will be because it succeeds at marrying art and business.”
Under Caron, Cirque du Soleil might have developed into Quebec’s national circus as an arm of the circus school. It might well have grown into a well-regarded regional performance group with a seasonal touring schedule, like the Los Angeles Philharmonic or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. But Caron never would have led Cirque into becoming a global cultural phenomenon. Caron’s Cirque would have never sold 10 million tickets a year, or employed more than 1,000 performers, teachers, and trainers.
Laliberté and Caron split on bitter terms, and by some accounts, Caron complained to others in Cirque that Laliberté would be better off selling used cars. If anything, the comment showed this poor understanding of Laliberté’s true motives. At the time of this breakup, Laliberté passed up a potentially lucrative offer from Hollywood that any used-car salesman would have salivated over. It was a de
al that would have solved all of Cirque’s money problems with the stroke of a pen.
While Cirque was in Los Angeles for the arts festival, a team from Columbia Pictures came to him with a proposal for a Cirque du Soleil movie. The studio put a lot of money on the table and, after years of Laliberté’s living so close to the edge of insolvency, it would have been understandable if he had grabbed at it. But as the negotiations proceeded, he believed that Columbia wanted him to sign over control over the Cirque du Soleil name. In exchange for one big payday, he and his management team might be reduced to working for Columbia, not as partners but as serfs. He rejected the offer.
There is a reason why I chose to open this chapter with a story from the performing arts. The seven principles of Business Brilliance are so basic and fundamental to creating wealth that I wanted to demonstrate they can apply to any job description on earth, even in fields where making money is far from the chief concern—like the arts. Even in the arts, where talent and artistry is supposedly valued above all else, the people who make the most money tend to be those who are most mindful of following the money. I discovered, for instance, that Laliberté’s rise as the world’s richest circus clown bears some striking parallels to the story of Damien Hirst, the world’s richest artist.