Phil Town attended the Women’s Millionaire Conference, Portland, March 19th, 2005. A thousand rich and willing-to-be-rich women all in one place. I’m waiting in the wings as a wonderful MC and comedienne from Dallas, Texas is cracking the place up. Back stage it sounds like this crowd is fired up, which means its going to be a fun place for me to speak.
And it is. You may not know this, but a good speaker can feel the audience and read those feelings like a book. They are excited, they are empowered, they are ready. And I can feel it. This group of women wants to learn. They have to drag me off the stage when an audience feels like that. I never want to leave. I want to give them every bit of investing advice that I have. I want to help them change their lives. It’s so much fun and so effortless.
That’s the way it works, isn’t it? You really want to help somebody when they really want the help, when they are ready to change, ready to learn, ready to take action. But when your prospective student is cynical, it’s a whole different feeling about teaching.
Sometimes I speak to tough investing audiences. They come to learn, but they show up with a deeply cynical attitude. The kind of attitude that stops them cold from ever trying the new ideas of Rule #1 investing. There must be so much financial pressure in their lives for them to show up in spite of their cynicism that it’s kind of heart wrenching for me. They’re there. I know they are looking for answers. But I feel some huge wall is up between us.
After one talk I had a cynic tell me that if I say that the stock market might not go up for 20 years it must be some sort of a scam. That’s in spite of the fact that in the last 100 years the market has gone nowhere 37 years, then 18 years and now 5 years. But you know that if I said the stock market was going to go up in the next 20 years they would come to the same predetermined conclusion. Somehow it’s predetermined by their lives that what I’m showing them is just not possible. They ignore the fact that Graham did it, that Buffett did it, that all sorts of other people just like us did it, that I made millions doing it, that’s its worked for 80 years in every kind of market. They just can’t shake the cynicism.
But in Portland, the vast majority of the women in that audience were there with a desire to believe that if somebody else can be a successful investor, they can do it, too, whatever it is. That kind of attitude will make it possible for their dreams to come true. They will become rich women. Or, if they already are rich women, with a little knowledge at the right time and a good attitude, they’ll stay that way.
