9 Lessons Vince McMahon Should Have Learned From Ted Turner
4. Channel Your Thirst For Validation
Vince McMahon has always had a thirst for respectability. Its whats driven so many of his decisions in life and at work over the last thirty years. Remember, this is a guy who was raised in a trailer park with dubious male role models like his absentee father and his violent stepfather to contend with. He didnt meet Vince Snr. until he was twelve years old, and it took him years to persuade him to let him help run the company. Vince McMahon thrives on work, but his obsession with the minutiae of the WWE has left him with little else in his life. Ted Turner, on the other hand? He started the worlds first 24-hour news network. He was Time Magazines Man Of The Year in 1991, and has a star on Hollywoods Walk Of Fame. He saved the bison from extinction, and owns the worlds largest herd of the animals. Since stepping back from television in 2001, he built a hugely successful forty-four restaurant chain that specialises in bison meat, and is run on an completely environmentally-friendly basis. Until recently, he was Americas largest individual landowner, with acreage comparable to the size of Rhode Island and Delaware combined. The baseball team he owned won the World Series, and he goes fishing with former presidents. Hes won ridiculously dangerous, reckless sailing races. Hes a philanthropist and humanitarian, pledging huge amounts of his personal fortune to charity and environmental work. Hes working on ridding the world of nuclear weapons. Compared to that, the creation of WrestleMania seems like small potatoes. Despite his efforts to rebrand himself and his company over the decades and go mainstream, hes failed in every other diversifying business venture hes tried, up to and including financing two doomed attempts at the Senate for his wife (to the tune of well over $100 million dollars wasted). Right now, it might be time to admit that WrestleMania, the Network and the WWE brand are the greatest accomplishments of his career, and that worlds most successful wrestling promoter of all-time ever is a pretty damn good validation of all the work hes put into being Vince McMahon.
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