Ron Manners on his book Heroic Misadventures and advice on how to succeed in life and business

“I tell the young students that this is very important. When they are seeking a career, they produce a cv, a document saying how good they are. All those cv's, all those documents look alike. They come out of the educational system like peas out of a pod. When you are seeking someone for a very key position, you don't really want someone without that spark of individuality. You don't want somebody that's like a pea out of a pod. And it is that little event that happened in their life.”

Part 1 of 3 part interview with Ron Manners, the Chairman of Mannwest Group Australian based mining consultation, international serial entrepreneur and an Australia's mining legend. Ron is also a passionate libertarian activist who made great contributions to the libertarian movement in Australia and beyond. In 1975, Ron helped start and run Australia's first libertarian party. In 1997 he founded and is the acting chairman of the libertarian think tank by the name of Mannkal Economic Education Foundation (http://www.mannkal.org). Finally, he is the author of several books, one of which is "Heroic Misadventures" that highlights his lifetime of business ventures around the world and Australia's economic climate in the past forty years.

Transcript:

Jadranko Brkic, (Sloboda i Prosperitet TV):

Ron, thank you for joining us.

Ron Manners:

It's my pleasure Yad.

Jadranko Brkic:

Starting with your book “Heroic Misadventures,” in it you largely write about your own business escapades, however, this book also provides a fascinating real life account of forty years of history of Australia (1960's through 1990's). How did the book come about?

Ron Manners:

It started off just being a book about my what I call misadventures, which is what I’ve learned from some of my ventures into business. Some went very well, some didn't go very well. But while I was writing it, especially as I was coming to the conclusion of the book, I realized that the book itself was more about Australia for those 40 years. Because, I was having some misadventures, some things worked and some things didn't work, but Australia itself was going through the series of cycles. In the early seventies Australia had emerged from a period of extreme wealth where wealth was abundant. But then we blew it all. We had about 15 difficult years, and I could see that as we were moving into the 2008 era, we've come out once again in an era with abundant wealth, everything was going, it was too-good, and could see that we have not conserved anything. We're not saving anything for downtime and then the TFC - the global financial crisis came along and caught so many people unexpectedly. They were exposed. Too-much debt. And then, now we're back where we were in the early seventies. We should be again continuing through prudent investments – buoyancy, but we've fallen in the heap and now we've got a rebuilding process, personally and nationally.

Jadranko Brkic:

So basically you are back where you started.

Ron Manners:

Sure! Wonderful cycle, two wonderful cycles, back in the early seventies where we were coming out of a nickel boom and oil exploration. It was very soundly based, but these commodities – they come to the end of the run and you think it's going to go forever; it never goes forever. And the same with this cycle. And we were carrying too-much debt.

I guess how did that book come to be, it's really the fourth of the series of books. I started documenting my grandfather's era, he was one of the first mining engineers to ever come to Western Australia. He had left a series of diaries and notes. He died 13 years before I was born, so I never really met him, but I was largely influenced by him. T get to know him better, I decided to do his book. It was called “So I Headed West.” And that got me interested into family history and the activities of that time. That was an era when miners were heroes. They went out and they created cities, they created the inland, they created the substance of Australia on which we are still living today.

Then I followed that up with two other books: one was of an early prospector called Balzano and his early adventures, and the third book was about – I called it “Never a Dull Moment” because that covered my parents' era. That took it right through the 1970. And that I stopped at 1970, because it was very appropriate, because some major mineral discoveries were made in Australia, and the whole world arrived on our doorstep to seek these minerals. And they brought a lot of exploration techniques and a lot of knowledge. That was the time to stop that book, so the “Heroic Misadventures” continued on from that one.

The structure came to me ... I was being interviewed by the Australian national radio “ABC,” and they asked me how I got interested in history of it so I was talking about this, the substance, the subjects of this, and the interviewer said: “Ron, you've had such an interesting career, you should make a book of it.” So I thought, with that degree of encouragement I will make a book of it.

Jadranko Brkic:

Early on in the book we find our that you got into business at a very early age, such as for example selling newspapers at age 10, then making and selling rudimentary radios from germanium tubes, to working in your father's mining supplies shop. How much importance do you attribute to these early real world work experiences in putting you on the right path to the eventual success in life?

Ron Manners:

I think what we do as young people, to express our desire to be independent, I wanted to be independent of my parents financially. I wanted to to be paying my mother housekeeping from the time I was about ten. That drove me to be a poker boy, and then with the money I saved from those early adventures I bought a jukebox, and had a first jukebox in the city where I was living at the time. I think it was a desire to be independent, that forms who you are. How long you wish to be just living off your parents, or at what stage you want to be independent and supporting yourself. So it's been a strong desire since age ten.

Jadranko Brkic:

In that perspective, what advice would you give to today's young people that are just starting out with their own careers and are investing in their own future? Should they just go and get a college degree?

Ron Manners:

No. It's a question that is often asked of me. We've sent about 640 young scholars to conferences and internships around the world, and they are often asking this question: what makes the difference? It's a question I often ask. I've met a lot of very successful people, and that's the question I always ask of them: “what happened in your life that made all the difference?” You know, this is a surprising thing: their answer is never the education, it's never which university they went to, it's not what clubs they are part of, it was always, always, a little surprising event that happened in their life. Something that just came along out of the blue, and they saw that opportunity for what it was, it was an opportunity, they seized it, and they made the most of it. And that made them just a little bit different to everyone else. I tell the young students that this is very important. When they are seeking a career, they produce a cv, a document saying how good they are. All those cv's, all those documents look alike. They come out of the educational system like peas out of a pod. When you are seeking someone for a very key position, you don't really want someone without that spark of individuality. You don't want somebody that's like a pea out of a pod. And it is that little event that happened in their life. Two events that I won't mention happened to me when I was much younger. They took me out of a country town, they've made realize there is a world out there. That's been worrying me ever since. I'm grappling, I'm engaging myself with the world, not with very small environment in which we're normally born and raised. So that's it: be different, be courageous, and concentrate on what makes you different to all the others.

On the matter of how you prepare yourself for the career that you've chosen for yourself, it reminds me of the wise … I had a mentor called Leonard E Read, and he founded the Foundation for Economic Education in the US way back I think in about 1947. But he used to say to me: “Ron, for your career, don't push yourself. Only go where you are invited. But, be prepared.” So always be preparing yourself for that career that you have in mind for yourself out there in front. So when the occasion arises, you are ready. And you can put your hand up and say well, I know a little bit about that, and you will be so different from everyone else who will be apologizing for not knowing enough about it. You will be prepared, and you will be selected. You will be invited, and you will be ready for when you're invited.

Jadranko Brkic:

Many of the so called “wannabe entrepreneurs” who hesitate on making their own entrepreneurial moves will appreciate reading your book and can learn a lot from all the experiences that you have had. However, so many of them, even after reading so many how to books on economics and business, they are still stuck in their own little world that they hesitate to make that move and finally become entrepreneurs. I guess they are really afraid of failure. What would you advise those people to do?

Ron Manners:

I guess I got a background in engineering and engineers are very good at measuring things. If I have made a career move, or if we started or got involved in a business and it didn't go so well, I later evaluate it. I ask what went wrong? You measure these things. And we do that the same, and I'll mention later how we use the same sort of technique within our foundation, but I measure these things or find out what went wrong, what did I do wrong, and that makes me very determined to start again. In the next venture, to correct all those mistakes, to steady and maintain the focus on the things that did work very well, and avoid the things that didn't work as well as we had hoped.

Jadranko Brkic:

Isn't entrepreneurship something that perhaps people are, say, born with? Entrepreneurial spirit, is it something that we can learn over time, trial and error?

Ron Manners:

Well, it takes courage. It takes courage, we have all this knowledge, most of us have the ability to be entrepreneurial, but the type of employment that's offered these days really offer so much security that many people are afraid to leave that security blanket and try it for themselves. They'll never be entrepreneurs if they are more influenced by security of tenure, superannuation, benefits, and the fact that their job comes with a car and a housing allowance, and all this other fruit that goes with these security things. But that's not entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship is saying I don't want any of that because I have enough confidence in my own ability to succeed.

End of part 1 of 3 part interview.