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P.T. Barnum

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13
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2020-07-26
most recent
2020-07-26
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1
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  1. “On credit. Remember, he's got no money arguing that he would be a more reliable tenant than the struggling Scutter family. So they're selling the business not because they're prospering. They're selling the business because it's not doing well. So Barnum goes and appeals to this guy's interest. It's like, do you want this massive building that you own to sit to sit empty? No, you do not. So I can run this business, I can get customers, I can make it a profitable endeavor. And if I'm profitable, then you get, you have a tenant. So it says this against all the odds Barnum was able to do. And that's another thing to know about Barnum.”

    2020-07-26 · Founders · #137 P.T. Barnum · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Friend asked what with Barnum replied, like, how are you going to afford it, essentially, Barnum replied, brass for silver and gold, I have none. So what are you saying? Courage. I got to do this with gumption. I can't be clever here. And this is the note I left myself on this section. He's very, very clever. Barnum is always clever. It's always more than what meets the eye with this guy. It's a memorable line and it's mostly true. He decided to seek out a complete stranger. So this is what he does. It's really smart. He finds out who owns the actual building, right? Who is this museum that's for sale? Who is this leasing for? Who are they leasing the property from? And so he goes to this stranger, this guy named Francis. So he goes out, he seeks out a complete stranger who owned the building in which the museum was housed with the quixotic goal of persuading him to buy the collection for him, meaning the museum for him.”

    2020-07-26 · Founders · #137 P.T. Barnum · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “One grand effort to raise myself above want. He heard that Scutter's American Museum was looking for a buyer. This collection of curiosities was located on Broadway in New York City. I just want to pause there just for a second what he's saying there is, listen, you know, I can't mess around anymore. I'm trying my hand on a million things. I'm not succeeding anything. I have a wife and I think two children at this point to take care of. I've got to go for it. It's either now or never. And this is where he stumbles into what I would consider his main life's work. He's going to always do more than one thing, but this is the one constant that he had in his life. So it says the museum was now for sale for $15,000. But even this was far more money than Barnum had it at his disposal since my recent, this is what he's saying about his financial situation at the time. Since my recent enterprises had not indeed been productive and my funds were decidedly low, and one of the most famous passages from his autobiography, Barnum told a friend that he was hoping to buy the American Museum, when the incredulous”

    2020-07-26 · Founders · #137 P.T. Barnum · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “But at this point from the time he was about 25 to 31 years old, this is a list of jobs that Barnum tried. He was a dance troop promoter. He was a traveling showman, which I already told you about. He tried to manufacture cologne. He tried to manufacture something called Bear's Grease. He sold Bibles. He was a clerk for a horse show. He was a copywriter, and he was a freelance fiction writer. So he's doing everything he possibly can. And he's going to give us his own description about this period of his life, which was not very successful, not very happy. After a few months of barely getting by with these activities, months in which the family's health had, he's got married, now he's married with kids. Had turned from excellent to poor, Barnum later wrote, I began to realize seriously that I was at the very bottom of Fortune's ladder and that I had now arrived at an age when it was necessary to make one”

    2020-07-26 · Founders · #137 P.T. Barnum · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “And up, and now he's going to go through years, years of struggle after this. He made a lot of money again, and now back in the doldrum. So it says, he struggled to find further success in the years that followed. Barnum would spend much of the five years after the death of Joyce on the road with various acts, ranging from dancers to a small circus. During this period, he would sometimes be away from home for a year or more, and each time he returned, he would say that his life on the road was over. I was thoroughly disgusted with the life of a traveling showman. He was determined to settle into something more permanent in New York, and none of these activities brought him much money. So I'm going to fast forward to the point where he discovers his primary occupation for most of his life was owning the Barnum Museum, the American Museum in New York City, right? It wasn't until he was 60 years old that he starts getting involved in the circus, which he's most famous for, right?”

    2020-07-26 · Founders · #137 P.T. Barnum · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Remarkable is that he was one of the few people that actually realized, hey, I have a lot of areas in my personality that are defective, things that I'm doing for money that are really gross, I need to change this. This is what they're referencing. Not only does he make, he makes like $10,000, which is a monumental amount of money at the time. You could buy, like, for example, he bought a store, like the land for his store from his uncle for like $50 at the time to give you kind of a context into what $10,000 meant. But not only that, when dies, her name is Joyce dies, he sells tickets to her autopsy. And so we see, you know, a very deficient moral character that he works on and improves later in life. And this is one thing, again, that he looks back on with great shame in his life. And so eventually Joyce dies, and then we see this up and down, down.”

    2020-07-26 · Founders · #137 P.T. Barnum · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “They say she's 161 years old, and then she helped raise the first president, right? And really with this really gross and distasteful for is that He essentially leased a slave and set up shows all across the country with this lie, right? And so it says the business finally came. I fell into the occupation and far beyond any of my predecessors on this continent, I have succeeded. So you're talking about this is the beginning of my career as a showman. It's something I did better than anybody else in the world later on, okay? But he says, Barnum's admission that the event that would set his life on its course was the least deserving of all my efforts in the showline. By this, he meant in part that the elements for its success were already in place and required little creative showmanship on his part, but it also became the episode of his life for which he was the least proud, one that spurred him to begin to be the better sort of showman that he would eventually become. He had to learn how to be a good person. At the very beginning, the author talks about, you know, what's”

    2020-07-26 · Founders · #137 P.T. Barnum · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Followed by years of no success. Eventually, even it out a little bit as he gets older, but in his early ages. He couldn't hold on to a good opportunity for very long. So he has these periods of time where he's got an abundance of money and then several years pass where he has none of that. And so that's where we're in right now where he's looking for an opportunity. And I'll list all the different jobs later that he did. It's remarkable how many different things he was trying to make money at.”

    2020-07-26 · Founders · #137 P.T. Barnum · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Him. This day had all the earmarks of a Barnum production. So he gets out. He's still running his newspaper. He's still making a ton of money running his lottery business and then all of a sudden they outlaw. The state outlaws, they ban lotteries. So it says the state legislature banned lotteries. And without any source of income, Barnum had to change course. He could not keep publishing his paper. He now had no resources. He blamed himself for his situation, writing that the old proverb easy come, easy go was very true in my case. Still, this is a really important aspect of his personality. He was an unyielding optimist. So I said, still he had confident in his ability to earn money. And so this up and down, down and up nature is prevalent throughout Barnum's life, who'll have massive success.”

    2020-07-26 · Founders · #137 P.T. Barnum · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Sed for libel, and then he goes to jail. But that's so that's also interesting. But the most interesting part of that is we see this innate ability of showmanship because the day, first of all, he's running his newspapers Why he's in jail, but he organizes a parade for the day upon his release. So I'm just going to read the section to you. A lot of Parnum's life is just unbelievable. So he says he was convicted by a jury and sent us that he could either pay court costs or serve 60 days in jail. I choose to go to prison. So he's doing it almost as like protest saying, you know, we should have freedom of speech. I'm going to go to jail even though I don't have to. So while he's in jail, he's running his newspapers. And he makes this like, hey, I'm a defender of free speech kind of thing, right? So he says his ability to marshal not just his own paper, but also the goodwill of others was a harbinger of things to come. It was the first clear example of...”

    2020-07-26 · Founders · #137 P.T. Barnum · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “He realizes, hey, there's no opportunity for me in this small town. Let me go to New York where it's becoming a large city. There'll be opportunities for me to run my business because he realizes even from an early age that he's not fit to work for other people. So he winds up moving to Brooklyn and he starts his own business. And what's remarkable about this section is, one, he had an insight into who he was at such a young age, but two, he's 17 years old when he starts his first business in New York. So it says, Barnum soon decided to start a business of his own. My disposition is and ever was, he wrote, of a speculative character. Yeah, that's an understatement. And he knew even then that he would only be happy working for himself. He managed to pull together some money to buy a porter house for sale. And it says, despite, so he winds up borrowing some money, starts this small little restaurant, essentially, but he doesn't, we also see right here in this next sentence, an insight into who he was probably for his whole life.”

    2020-07-26 · Founders · #137 P.T. Barnum · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “And this is what in his autobiography, this is what he says about this time in his life and about the earning of his own money, the impact it made on his mind. And he says, it made me feel that it was quite a man of substance. And having this passion for commerce, for trying to make money winds up being beneficial because, like a lot of people that we said in the podcast, his early life is filled with tragedy. So at 16 years old, his father dies, and this leaves him as the oldest child, the person that has to work to support his family. So since Barden was father died of a lingering illness, leaving his family with debts. Now the eldest of five children with the youngest, only seven, Barnum remembered the family returning from the cemetery, to quote, to our desolate home, feeling that we were forsaken by the world and that but little hope existed for us on this side of the grave. So Barnum was born and raised in a small town in Connecticut.”

    2020-07-26 · Founders · #137 P.T. Barnum · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “For wherever I went the constant inquiry was Do you know Barnum? Barnum, who was born ten years into the century, and died nine years before its end, embodied the period's great narrative of breaking social boundaries. Americans often sell him as an exemplar of what it meant to be one of them. Europeans saw him as a representative of the American character. He was born into a family that had to hustle in its small Connecticut village to stay solvent. Through hard work, a lot of brass, and a genius for exploiting the new technologies related to communication and transportation, he became world famous and wealthy beyond his dreams. And he did it all by appealing to popular tastes and interests. He understood what ordinary Americans wanted. Barnum embodied”

    2020-07-26 · Founders · #137 P.T. Barnum · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source