To succeed, don’t follow the crowd

Rule No. 4: Trust your brain, not your gut.

When I bought my Gulfstream IV jet with $30 million in cash, I made sure it came with a pilot who was “instrument rated.” That meant he could fly in almost any weather.

He had developed two skills: First, he knew his instruments cold.

Second, he was trained to follow those instruments even when his gut feeling was deadly wrong about which way he should steer the plane.

You must become instrument-rated in your own business.

Make no mistake, I trust my gut all the time for certain business decisions like which of two candidates to hire or how far to push a negotiation.

But I had bigger decisions like how much to bid on billion-dollar loan portfolios.

In those situations, I was so familiar with bid prices that my numbers told me when the market was bidding crazy for loans.

I knew the facts and economics cold, so I had no problem letting someone else outbid me.

Take the time to build a great instrument panel you can trust.

On the really big course changes, study those instruments and trust them.

They’ll protect you and allow you to fly above your hand-wringing competitors.

Bartmann is the foremost expert on helping entrepreneurs profit from buying bad loans and a leading authority on entrepreneurship in America. His book Bailout Riches recently became #1 on Amazon’s Best Seller List.