If you haven’t seen the movie 21 yet, go see it tonight. It came out a few weeks ago and it’s by far one of the best movies I’ve seen in awhile. It’s about a college student who gets into Harvard Medical School but doesn’t have the $300,000 to pay tuition (yup, $300k ), so in order to raise the money he starts playing Blackjack with a few of his classmates, learns how to count cards, and wins hundreds of thousands in Vegas. Card counting is a method in which each card is assigned a value (-1, 0, or +1). The player keeps a running tally of the total count and uses it to determine how likely they are to win a hand, and uses this to decide what to do. Casinos hate people who can do this and if they know you can count cards, they’ll ban you from their casino, although contrary to popular belief it’s actually perfectly legal. However, I’m not going to teach you how to count cards - I’m posting this because there are a lot of business lessons you can learn from this movie that can be applied across the board:

• Plan: The team spent months perfecting their skills and planning every detail. I can’t tell you how many businesses I’ve seen fail because someone gets a great idea and jumps into it without the proper planning and preparation. If you’re launching a new blog, you don’t need to spend half a year planning it, but I’d definitely recommend at least a week or two.
• Marketing strategy: The main character didn’t want to join the team initially, but they really wanted him so they ended up sucking him in eventually. They did this by basically leading him on and telling him what he wanted to hear. One reason he didn’t want to do it was he thought it was illegal, so they told him nothing about it was illegal. When they got to the airport, they gave him $200,000 to stash in his boxers so the airport security wouldn’t know about it. Transferring large sums of cash is illegal but since he was already there, he decided to just do it. When they got to Vegas, they gave him a fake ID and a new identity, which is obviously illegal, but since he had already been sucked in and had traveled to Vegas, he was a lot more likely to just say “fuck it” and go along with it. The Reverse Funnel System employs this technique by making people pay a small sum for the information about their product, and then once they’ve paid, they ask the buyer to pay a larger sum for the rest of the information. Since they’ve already been sucked in and don’t want to have wasted money, people are now more likely to pay the larger sum than if the RFS just asked them to pay it from the start.
• Not getting greedy: The main character was consistently winning games because he was playing strategy, NOT gambling. In one round he was up $200,000 and even though the odds were against him, he decided to gamble and go all in, and he lost. The team leader Mickey, who also happened to be his math teacher, got so mad that he gave him an incomplete (which is essentially the same as failing) and took the rest of the money the main character had saved up from all his previous winnings, leaving him with nothing. That one greedy moment fucked up EVERYTHING. Businesses often fail because the owners get too greedy and start taking risks they know they shouldn’t be taking.
• Staying calm: After Mickey basically destroyed the main character’s life, the main character (I keep saying that because I can’t remember his name) decided to stay in Vegas and try to play without Mickey’s help. He ended up getting caught by casino security and beaten up. The head of security started talking about how Mickey had taken millions of dollars from his casino years ago but he had never been able to catch him. As soon as he dropped Mickey’s name I thought, “offer to deliver Mickey in return for the $300k you need.” In the end we find out that he actually did do this and it shows that staying calm and thinking things through even under intense pressure is an essential business skill. If you’ve been reading this blog for awhile, you know that I used to work in the entertainment industry and I’ve worked with numerous celebrities and models. Sometimes I’d introduce them to my friends or girls I wanted to bang and I always thought it was funny how people would always lose their cool and start acting totally ridiculous around celebrities. Obviously it’s not attractive, not to mention bad for business if you have a business colleague acting like this. You need to be able to stay cool and think rationally, regardless of the situation you’re in.
• Screwing over the wrong people: I’ve screwed over quite a few people in order to make the money I have but I’ve always made sure that those people can’t screw me back. Mickey screwed the main character but ended up totally fucking himself over because the main character was able to screw him back harder. You have to be familiar with your friends and enemies especially in a business setting to avoid mistakes like this. If a small business owner screwed Donald Trump out of a deal, Trump would crush him. If Trump screwed a small business owner out of a deal, it’s just too bad for that small business owner because there’s really nothing he can do about it. This brings me to another point: if you know you can screw someone harder than they can screw you, you basically have control over them.
• Networking: Expanding your network and knowing as many people as possible is VERY important, especially in a business setting but also in your personal life. I’m always expanding my network and I’m now at the point where I can do whatever I want - if you want to be a model, I could easily make you famous; if you want to be a rapper, I could introduce you to Interscope A&R’s; if you want to fuck Jesse Jane, I’ll get her to come to your birthday party. How the fuck is it possible to know so many people? You just have to put yourself in the right places and know how to be able to make people think they need you more than you need them (let me know if you want to learn more about networking and I’ll expand on it in a future post). Knowing the right people is often more important than having money and knowing how to connect with these people is one of the most important skills you can aquire.

I know that’s a lot of information, but trust me, it’s important. And if you haven’t seen 21 yet, get the fuuuuck up and go see it!

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1. Blackhat is Not Scamming
2. Learn From Laziness
3. How to Deal Blow From Home
4. Whitehat Link Building
5. Having People Do Your Work For You