A billionaire reveals his secrets. Fear, debts and the so-called people send-delete

Despite humble beginnings, Morgan founded one of the largest personal injury law firms in the US, Morgan & Morgan, with offices in all 50 states. He is also the owner of, among others, shopping malls, hotels and advertising companies operating in the billboard industry.

Here are five mindsets that influence how Morgan works, hires people, and sees risks and opportunities where others don't.

1. Accept the imposter syndrome

Morgan's first job out of law school didn't pay well. “In my first job, dealing with compensation, I had an annual base of $10,000 and 10 percent on each closed case. I think I earned about $15,000 in the first year.”

After a few years, he founded his own law firm. However, despite its enormous success over the last 37 years, he has never managed to get rid of the so-called imposter syndrome.

– I don't know how it happened and one day someone will expose me – he says about his wealth and successes. However, he does not consider this way of thinking to be a weakness.

In the spirit of the late entrepreneur Andy Grove, whom Morgan emulates, he says: only the paranoid will survive. It is this paranoia, fueled by imposter syndrome, that feeds his relentless ambition. “It keeps you on your toes,” he says.

That's why he starts every morning by checking his data. — I get attendance numbers at my businesses. I receive data about new cases signed the previous day. “I get all kinds of results reports,” he explains.

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2. See happiness everywhere

Morgan talks about happiness the way some people talk about the weather – unpredictable, constant and impossible to ignore. “Life is a thousand left turns, a thousand right turns, a thousand U-turns,” he says. One other turn, he emphasizes, and everything could have turned out differently.

He associates this faith with a sense of humility. Success, he warns, makes people think they are much smarter than they actually are. And the cure is simple: look for opportunities everywhere, because happiness only comes when you stand in its way, he says.

Pursuing happiness meant saying yes to everything – calling lawyers for cases in the early years, visiting unions, going to events that others considered pointless. The more he risked, the more “lottery tickets” he had in play.

– When you are looking for a chance, the more such tickets you have, the greater the chance that you will win – he argues.

This way of thinking led him through the biggest turn of his career. When advertising for legal services became legal in 1977, many attorneys refused to use it. Morgan borrowed 100,000. hole. and he bet everything on it, even though, as he says, he was ashamed of it. However, the phones started ringing almost immediately.

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3. Whatever you do, be a professional

This lesson comes from Morgan's father, whose constant job losses exacerbated the family's financial difficulties when Morgan was a child.

— The greatest gift my dad gave us was that every time he got fired, he would say, “Whatever you do, be a professional, no one can fire you then.” says Morgan.

– It was burned into my mind – that I would be doing something where no one could fire me. I didn't want to be in his situation, he adds.

His father's message shaped his attitude to risk and made him determined to be self-employed. This philosophy became the foundation of his career, from selling Yellow Pages directory advertising for AT&T to pay for college to founding Morgan & Morgan in 1988, when he was in his thirties, much earlier than his friends expected.

“They all worked for someone,” he says of his friends. — I've seen my father work for someone before. I thought: This won't happen – he adds.

4. Delegating is freedom

In the firm's early years, Morgan was deeply involved in day-to-day decisions – making phone calls to the firm, signing cases, and driving his car from one lawyer to another.

Decades later he says: The most important thing I learned was scaling and delegating. And when you learn to scale and delegate, you gain something you can't buy – time.

He spends part of this time choosing the so-called send-delete people – employees who perform a task immediately after receiving a message and never require reminders. When he notices such a trait, he delegates “a little more and a little more” to them.

The result is the freedom to focus your time and energy on strategy, expansion and the next problem to solve.

5. Fear and avoid debt

Although many financial experts say that taking on “good debt” is crucial to building wealth, Morgan avoids debt as much as possible.

After starting several banks in the 1980s, he realized that Compound interest “is like a tsunami” and how quickly debt can “devour you.”

Even though he borrowed PLN 100,000 hole. for investing in mass advertising in the early years of his law firm, he says that he later consistently avoided taking on debt on many other ventures – from interactive museums to hotels and shopping malls. For example, when he bought a failing shopping center in Myrtle Beach, he paid cash.

“I'm deathly afraid of debt,” he says. — At the moment I have zero debts, zero personal guarantees of anything, he adds.

The above text is a translation from American edition of Business Insider