Real Estate Investor Magazine South Africa April/ May 2020 | Page 10

MASTER INVESTOR
TREVOR NOAH
10 LESSONS FOR SUCCESS
1
People will listen if you speak their language.
Noah is biracial -- his father is white and his mother is
black. This made his early life complicated as he grew
up in post-Apartheid South Africa.
“Language, even more than colour, defines who we are as
people. Maybe I didn’t look like you, but if I spoke like you, I
was you.”
2
Stay true to yourself.
During Noah’s elementary school days, classes were
split into two groups. Feeling more comfortable
with his black peers, Noah chose the “B class” against the
warnings of his teacher.
“I decided I’d rather be held back with the people I liked
than move ahead with the people I didn’t know.”
3
Think beyond your current circumstances.
Noah’s optimistic mother, Patricia, didn’t let
oppression stop her from showing her son the “things
for white people.”
“There was no reason to think it would end. It had seen
generations come and go. Yet she was preparing me to
live a life of freedom long before we knew freedom would
exist,” Noah writes. “’Because,’ she would say, ‘even if he never
leaves the ghetto, he will know that the ghetto is not the
world. If that’s all I’ve accomplished, I’ve done enough.”
4
Focus on new experiences, rather than pain.
“I was blessed with another trait I got from my
mother: her ability to forget the pain in her life. I
remember the thing that caused the trauma, but I don’t
hold onto the trauma. I never let the memory of something
painful prevent me from trying something new. If you
think too much about the ass-kicking your mother gave
you, or the ass-kicking life gave you, you’ll stop pushing the
boundaries or breaking the rules.”
5
Use your natural abilities to create opportunities.
In school, Noah said he was fast and had “no pride,”
so he would run to the food line as soon as lunch
started so he would have the first pick. Noah turned this
into a business, charging classmates a percentage and then
choosing the customers who offered the best price.
“That’s when I learned: Time is money. I realized people
would pay me to buy their food because I was willing to run
for it. I was an overnight success. Fat guys were my number
one customers. They loved food but couldn’t run.”
6
There’s nothing worse than regret for what you
didn’t do.
“I don’t regret anything I’ve ever done in life, any
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APRIL/MAY 2020 SA Real Estate Investor Magazine
choice that I’ve made. But I’m consumed with regret for
the things I didn’t do, the choices I didn’t make, the things
I didn’t say. We spend so much time being afraid of failure,
afraid of rejection, but regret is the thing we should fear
most. Failure is an answer. Rejection is an answer. Regret is
an eternal question you will never have an answer to.”
7
You have to invest in your business to make it grow.
During high school, Noah had the opportunity to take
over a friend’s business selling bootleg CDs. It started
small, but eventually, he was earning more than some South
African domestic workers make today, he says.
“When I started [selling bootleg CDs in highschool] I had
a dial-up connection and 24K modem. It would take a
day to download an album. But technology kept evolving
and I kept reinvesting in the business. I upgraded to a 56K
modem. I got faster CD writers, multiple CD writers. I started
downloading more, copying more, selling more. That’s
when I got two middlemen of my own. I started making
party CDs, and those started selling like hotcakes. Business
was booming.”
8
Money is an avenue
“The first thing I learned about having money is that
it gives you choices. People don’t want to be rich;
they want to be able to choose. The richer you are, the more
choices you have. That is the freedom of money.”
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10
The hustle pushes you forward
“Someone’s always buying, someone’s always
selling. The hustle is trying to be in the middle of
the whole thing.”
Make sure you have a back-up.
Once Noah was DJing at a party and the police
showed up demanding he shut off the music,
but Noah was too slow to respond and the officer shot at his
computer.
“I lost the hard drive. Even though the cop shot the monitor,
the explosion somehow fried the thing. The computer
would still boot up, but it couldn’t read the drive. My music
library was gone. Even if I had the money for a new hard
drive, it had taken me years to amass the music collection.
There was no way to replace it. The DJing business was over.
The CD selling business was done. All of a sudden, our crew
lost its main revenue stream. All we had left was the hustle,
and we hustled even harder, taking the bit of cash we had
on hand and trying to double it, buying this to flip it for that.
We started eating into our savings, and in less than a month,
we were running on dust.”
as a correspondent for Comedy Central’s  The Daily Show,
succeeding from Jon Stewart.
Making his name abroad, Noah became one of the very
few African celebrities to rub shoulders with business Guru’s
like REImag’s previous Master Investor, Bill Gates. It is without
a doubt that his dedication to his work not only attracts fame
and fortune, but commands respect and recognition from
well-established and recognised people whom he is looking
up to and working towards being around.
“My father is great with
money, and that is the biggest
gift my father has taught us,
as a family. My father taught
us the importance of money
and how to manage it.”
Property Ownership
Being an international artist comes different forms of successes,
money taking the largest resource in the various success forms.
While monetizing your expertise and talent is your main source
of income, it is important that you keep cognisance of the
future. Market values change in the entertainment industry,
and the fortunes you have now might not be as valuable in the
future and therefore, wealth security is vital.
Property ownership is one of the most recommended ways
of securing your wealth, to capture your fortunes and enjoy
them later when there isn’t much left to feast on, if it gets to
that. In order to secure his financial future, Noah has redeemed
himself with two homes away from home.
Manhattan penthouse
The dynamic daily show host bought his first property in New
York in early 2017 to the value of $10 million in Manhattan.
Located in the Stellar Tower, with Hell’s Kitchen on the west
side of midtown closer to Times Square, is Noah’s luxurious
penthouse. It was not only a time to celebrate property
ownership, but a time to celebrate defeating the odds, seeing
an opportunity and running with it. It was a time to start or
continue to reflect on what his father taught him, money
management.
“My father is great with money, and that is the biggest
gift my father has taught us, as a family. My father taught us
the importance of money and how to manage it.” and that is
exactly what Noah is doing.
His penthouse features an 86 m² wraparound terrace and
is about 334 m², it is situated on both the building’s 17th and
18th floors. Trevor’s living room, dining room, kitchen and
two bedrooms are on the lower floor, with the upper floor
containing his master bedroom and terrace.
The building was designed by renowned architect Ralph
Walker in the ’20s in luminous colours, housing the city’s
artisans and businessmen alike. The JDS Development Group
and Property Markets Group converted the tower to condos
and put them on sale in 2014.The building was redesigned
with the hope of boosting the value and integrity of the Hell’s
Kitchen property market.
Bel-Air mansion
No stranger to enormous achievements, in a space of two years
the international stand-up comedian, purchased another,
more luxurious property. This time a Bel-Air mansion at about
$20.5 million.
The mansion spans about 1.31 acres and it is 10,044-square-
feet. It is a 5 bedroom and 7-bathroom home. Amongst many
other luxurious features, it holds a chandelier-topped dining
area, a double-island kitchen and a wet bar with a 500-gallon
aquarium. Pocketing doors connect two living rooms to the
backyard.
The life of Trevor Noah and his story deserves to be
entrenched in a stone that through all storms and hurricanes
will not vanish. Not only because he has lifted the South
African flag, but because he has been a great example to the
youth of the world.
The work he continues to do in his daily life should be
a lesson to the young for the future. The importance of
using what you have to reap healthy and well grown fruits is
important. The art of not losing focus through all the hardships
you are facing is important in order for one to make it in life.
The COVID-19 pandemic, which has engulfed the world should
be seen as an opportunity to “hustle” to create and own space
in the new world order, rather than a reason to fall into despair.
It is not too late for one to start cleaning and sharpening their
spear to fight for their own success, it is not late for you to raise
your fist upwards as you fight to get all the wealth you deserve.
Trevor did it, you can do it too. Let not your current living
conditions change your aspirations and dreams, it’s all possible.
SA Real Estate Investor Magazine APRIL/MAY 2020
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