Way of the Wolf

Auteur

Jordan Belfort

Texte du rabat

Originally published in hardcover in 2017 by North Star Way.

Résumé
Jordan Belfort—immortalized by Leonardo DiCaprio in the hit movie The Wolf of Wall Street—reveals the step-by-step sales and persuasion system proven to turn anyone into a sales-closing, money-earning rock star.

For the first time ever, Jordan Belfort opens his playbook and gives you access to his exclusive step-by-step system—the same system he used to create massive wealth for himself, his clients, and his sales teams. Until now this revolutionary program was only available through Jordan’s $1,997 online training. Now, in Way of the Wolf, Belfort is ready to unleash the power of persuasion to a whole new generation, revealing how anyone can bounce back from devastating setbacks, master the art of persuasion, and build wealth. Every technique, every strategy, and every tip has been tested and proven to work in real-life situations.

Written in his own inimitable voice, Way of the Wolf cracks the code on how to persuade anyone to do anything, and coaches readers—regardless of age, education, or skill level—to be a master sales person, negotiator, closer, entrepreneur, or speaker.

Échantillon de lecture
Way of the Wolf

PROLOGUE

THE BIRTH OF A SALES SYSTEM

WHAT THEY SAY ABOUT ME is true.

I’m one of those natural born salesmen who can sell ice to an Eskimo, oil to an Arab, pork to a rabbi, or anything else you can think of.

But who really cares about that, right?

I mean, unless you want to hire me to sell one of your products, my ability to close is basically irrelevant to you.

Whatever the case, that’s my gift: the ability to sell anything to anyone, in massive quantities; and whether this gift comes from God or from nature, I really can’t say, although what I am able to say—with absolute certainty, in fact—is that I am not the only person who was born with it.

There are a handful of others who are sort of like me.

The reason they are only sort of like me has to do with another precious gift I possess, a gift that’s infinitely more rare and infinitely more valuable, and that offers a massive benefit to everyone. Including you.

What is this amazing gift?

Quite simply, it’s the ability to take people from all walks of life regardless of age, race, creed, color, socioeconomic background, educational status, and level of natural sales ability, and turn that person into a world-class closer almost instantly.

It’s a bold statement, I know, but let me put it to you this way: if I were a superhero, then training salespeople would be my superpower, and there’s not a soul on the planet who does it better than me.

Now, that sounded totally awful, right?

I can only imagine what you’re thinking right now.

“What a cocky bastard this guy is! So conceited! So damn full of himself! Let’s throw the bastard to the wolves!

“Oh, wait! He already is a wolf, isn’t he?”

Actually, I’m an erstwhile wolf. But, either way, I think it’s time to formally introduce myself.

I’m the Wolf of Wall Street. Remember me? The one who Leonardo DiCaprio played on the silver screen, the one who took thousands of young kids, who could barely walk and chew gum at the same time, and turned them into world-class closers using a seemingly magical sales training system called the Straight Line? The one who tortured all those panic-stricken New Zealanders at the end of the movie because they couldn’t sell me a pen the right way? You remember.

On the heels of Black Monday, I took control of an irrelevant little brokerage firm named Stratton Oakmont and moved it out to Long Island to seek my fortune, and it was there, in the spring of 1988, that I cracked the code for human influence and developed that seemingly magical system for training salespeople.

Its name was the Straight Line System—or the Straight Line, for short—a system that proved to be so powerful and effective, and so easy to learn, that within days of inventing it, it brought massive wealth and success to anyone I taught it to. In consequence, thousands of young men and women began pouring into Stratton’s boardroom, looking to hop on the Straight Line gravy train and stake their claim in the American Dream.

For the most part, they were a decidedly average lot at best—basically the sad, forgotten spawn of America’s working-class families. They were kids who had never been told by their parents that they were capable of greatness; any greatness that they naturally had in them had been literally conditioned out of them since the day they were born. By the time they made it into my boardroom, they were trying merely to survive, not to thrive.

But in a post–Straight Line world, none of that mattered anymore. Things like education and intellect and natural sales ability were mere trivialities that could be easily overcome. All you had to do was show up at my door, promise to work your ass off, and I would teach you the Straight Line System and make you rich.

But, alas, there was also a dark side to all this precocious success. You see, the system turned out to be almost too effective. It created freshly minted millionaires at such a ferocious clip that they ended up skipping over the typical life struggles that most young men and women go through that serve to build their characters. The result was success without respect, wealth without restraint, and power without responsibility—and, just like that, things began to spiral out of control.

And so it was that, in the same way that a seemingly innocuous tropical storm uses the warm waters of the Atlantic to grow and build and strengthen and mutate until it reaches a point of such critical mass that it destroys everything in its path, the Straight Line System followed an eerily similar trajectory—destroying everything in its path as well, including me.

Indeed, by the time it was over I had lost everything: my money, my pride, my dignity, my self-respect, my children—for a time—and my freedom.

But the worst part of all was that I knew I had no one to blame but myself. I had taken a God-given gift and misused it, and I had taken an amazing discovery and bastardized it.

The Straight Line System had the ability to change people’s lives in a dramatic way—leveling the playing field for anyone who’d been held back from achieving greatness due to an inability to effectively communicate their thoughts and ideas in a way that connected with other people and moved them to take action.

And what did I do with it?

Well, besides breaking a fair number of records for the consumption of dangerous recreational drugs, I used my discovery of the world’s most powerful sales training system to live out every adolescent fantasy I’d ever had, while empowering thousands of others to do the same.

So, yes, I deserved exactly what I got: completely wiped out.

But, of course, the story doesn’t end there; and how could it, after all? I mean, how could a system that created such massive wealth and success for anyone who learned it simply fade away into obscurity?

It couldn’t. And, of course, it didn’t.

It started with the thousands of ex-Strattonites who, after leaving the firm, began spreading the system around—bringing a watered-down version of it to a dozen different industries. Yet, no matter where they went or how watered down the version was, learning even a fraction of the Straight Line System was enough to take a struggling salesperson and turn them into a solid producer.

Then I got involved.

On the heels of two bestse…