American lawyer John Morgan
An American lawyer from humble beginnings, currently worth 1.5 billion dollars, shares 5 mindsets that helped him become (and stay) rich.
The multimillionaire John Morgan Sometimes he wakes up with a start, relieved to find himself in his own bed instead of the place his mind drags him to during the night. Num recurring dreamis trapped in an old car, almost no moneynot knowing how he’s going to get away with it.
With assets currently valued at 1.5 billion dollarsMorgan tells how he grew up as the oldest of five siblings in a family “financially insecure”.
Despite having coming from almost nothingMorgan would end up founding one of the biggest law firms personal injury insurance company in the United States, Morgan & Morgan, which has offices in all 50 US states. He also owns a number of shopping centers, hotels and billboard advertising companies.
It is enough, however, listen to it for a few minutes to realize that it is not the stereotype of the pompous billionaire. He admits to suffering from impostor syndrome, dream that you lose everything and attributes much of his success to simple luck.
Recently, Morgan shared with Insider the five mindsets that shape the way he works, hires people and sees risk and opportunity in places that others tend to ignore.
1. Embrace imposter syndrome
Morgan’s first job after law school didn’t pay much. “My first personal injury job gave me a base salary of $10,000 and 10% of everything I closed,” says Morgan, who in his first year earned “about 15 thousand dollars” (a little less than 13 thousand euros).
After a few years, decided to open his own office. However, despite the enormous success he has built over the last 37 years, he has never managed to shake off the feeling of .
“I don’t know how this happened”, he says about wealth and success, “and one day They’ll find out that I don’t belong here.” Still, he doesn’t see this way of thinking as a weakness.
Morgan follows the philosophy of the late businessman Andy Grovewhich he seeks to emulate: “only the paranoid survive“. It is this paranoia, fueled by impostor syndrome, that sustains his unshakable will to continue, sums up the multimillionaire: “stay hungry”.
That’s why, start every morning looking at numbers. “I receive the entry numbers for my tourist attractions. I receive the numbers of new processes signed the day before. I receive all types of reports”, he explains.
2. Seeing luck everywhere
Morgan talks about lucky how some people talk about meteorology — unpredictable, constant and impossible to ignore. “Life is a thousand left turns, a thousand right turns, a thousand U-turns,” he says. A different detour, he adds, could have changed everything.
It says that this conviction born from a feeling of humility. Success, he warns, convinces people that they are much more intelligent than they really are. And he believes that the antidote is simple: look for opportunities everywherebecause luck only appears when we put ourselves in its path.
Chasing luck, for youit meant saying yes to everything — cold calling lawyers to get cases in the early years of their careers, visiting union offices or going to events that others considered a waste of time. The more opportunities it created, more “lottery balls” were at stake.
“When you’re looking for opportunities,” he says, “the more lottery balls you have, the more likely you are to play bingo”.
This way of seeing the world guided him through the biggest turning point of his career. When advertising for legal services became legal in 1977, many lawyers refused to try it.
Morgan borrowed $100,000 and bet everything on this pathdespite admitting: “I was ashamed.” But the phone calls started coming in almost immediately.
3. Whatever you do, be professional
This maxim came from Morgan’s father, whose succession of lost jobs it only worsened the family’s financial fragility when he was a child.
“The great gift my father gave us was that, whenever he was fired… said these words: ‘Whatever you do, be professionalno one can fire you'”, Morgan recalls. “And it was engraved in my mind that I was going to do something where no one could fire me. I wouldn’t be in his position”.
Father’s message shaped the way he views riskoe made him determined to work for himself.
This mentality has become the backbone of your careerfrom the days when he sold Yellow Pages ads for AT&T to help pay for law school, to founding Morgan & Morgan in 1988, in his early 30s — much sooner than his friends expected.
“They all worked for someone,” he says of his friends. “I had already seen my father work for someone. I thought: this won’t happen to me”.
4. Delegating is freedom
In the firm’s early days, Morgan says he was deeply involved in the day-to-day running: making cold calls to other offices, soliciting clients and drove his Nissan Maxima from lawyer to lawyer.
Decades later, he emphasizes: “The most important thing I learned it was escalating and delegating. AND when you learn to scale and delegateyou get what you can’t buy: tempo.”
Part of that time is spent choosing what you call “people send-delete” — employees who deal with something as soon as he sends it and who never need a second reminder. When he identifies this characteristic in someone, he starts to delegate “a little more and a little more”.
The result is freedom to focus time and energy on strategyexpansion and the next problem to solve.
5. Be afraid of — and avoid — debt
While many financial experts argue that taking on “good debt” is essential to building wealth, Morgan avoids debt whenever he can.
After having participated in the creation of several banks during the 80s, he learned how compound interest “is like a tsunami” — and how debt can “swallow” us quickly.
Even so, borrowed 100 thousand dollars to invest in advertising in the early days of the firm, as soon as the law allowed lawyers to advertise their services — something that is still prohibited in Portugal.
But Morgan says resisted taking on debt when he launched many of the other companies, including his interactive museumshotels and shopping centers. When he bought a struggling shopping center in Myrtle Beach, for example, he paid for it in cash.
“I’m terrified of debt“, he admits. “Right now, I have no debt, zero personal guarantees about anything.”
