Forbes recently conducted an informal analysis of self-made American billionaires. There were a few interesting common denominators. Many of these folks had a high aptitude for math. Of the 380 self-made American billionaires on the Forbes list in the last three years, more billionaires were born in the fall than any other season and more were born in September than in any other month. Merry Christmas! Of the 292 Horatio Algers on Forbes’ most recent list, 20% either dropped out of college or never went at all. And not surprisingly, very few made their money on their first business venture. But they did learn from their failures and considered those failures a necessary step to their eventual success.

I sense a tinge of vague, undefined dread and fear haunting this business. What’s going to go wrong down the road? Dealing with vague dread is debilitating. If vague doubt is a concern of yours, it’s important that you sort out your feelings and determine exactly what’s bothering you. Once you have identified an exact target, you’ll find it much easier to deal with your fear head on.

After 9/11, the NYSE closed for four days. Here are some of the other historical closings. According to an ABC news story, the New York Stock Exchange has closed dozens of times over the years for varied reasons, including presidential funerals, the armistice that ended World War I and for the lunar exploration on July 21, 1969. The NYSE closed its doors for two days on Aug. 15 and 16, 1945, to commemorate V-J Day, the celebration of the Allied victory over Japan that ended World War II. The exchange was closed for a week in March 1933, when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt called for a nationwide bank holiday. The NYSE closed for a day and a half in the wake of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. The exchange closed at 2:07 p.m. the day Kennedy was shot — Friday, Nov. 22, 1963–and closed the following Monday for the slain president’s funeral. Said ABC, “Weather conditions have also been known to keep the exchange closed, such as Feb. 10, 1969, when heavy snow closed the exchange, leaving it to open late the next morning at 11 a.m. The NYSE also closed during New York City’s blackout on July 14, 1977.”

Take a good look at the people in your life you feel closest to. It’s important that you admire and respect those people, because that’s who you are. You’re one of them.

The Augusta National chairman is Billy Payne. He had this to say about Tiger Woods: “He is a very, very special person, a man who decides the outcome and then undertakes a strategy, where the rest of us, we all adopt strategies hoping to get an outcome. He does it just the other way.”
If you recall, I mentioned on this website a response Thomas Watson gave when he was asked how he nearly singlehandedly built IBM. “I imagined what I wanted and I worked backwards.”