the book Zeckendorf: The Autobiography of the Man who Played a Real-Life Game of Monopoly and Won the Largest Real Estate Empire in History. - Sam Zell

I told David, “Go look at every store and its entire inventory, who we would sell it to and what we would get for it, in case the deal goes south.” It was a basic fire-sale analysis — what we’d get in the worst-case scenario if we had to liquidate the company. David came back and said, “We’d get 80 percent of our purchase price back.” So I knew that what we had to lose was 20 percent.

I was the pitchman. I went to each of the houses, sat on a lot of couches, and flipped through dozens of family photo albums as I explained to the homeowners that we were going to build student housing and they could either stay and put up with loud music at night and beer cans on the lawn, or they could move to the other side of Ann Arbor. It worked. I kept buying houses and eventually acquired one full block of land. They were all cash deals, $1,000 each to tie up the properties with deferred closings requiring around $20,000.

Once I have formed my opinion, I have to trust my perspective enough to act on it. That means putting my own money behind it. My level of commitment is usually high.