He always had a talent for selling and admits he abused it while running his own security firm, Stratton Oakmont, in the 1980s and 1990s. He sold so-called penny stocks to investors, causing millions in losses for his clients.
Eventually, he got caught, went to jail for securities fraud and money laundering, wrote his memoir, and started over as a sales and motivational coach. He says selling can be mutually beneficial if the intent is right, and he wants to benefit his current clients by teaching his sales system. They, in turn, are advised to benefit their clients by selling them useful products.
The Epoch Times spoke to Belfort about his turnaround.
In the beginning, I was even a bit reluctant to teach sales, because the system I created is very powerful and it can be misused. But it’s [about] the intent and looking to use it to help people. The system is legitimate. The key distinction is that you only want to use my Straight Line System or any system of persuasion to help people get things they need, things that are going to help them.
You are not looking to get people things they don’t need and just sell things to make yourself money. You are putting the customer first. If you are doing only that alone, you are 99 percent there with ethical sales.
One thing the movie doesn’t portray well is the internal struggle that I had. Every single day, I was feeling bad about it and questioning it, but I was caught up in the greed and the power.
I think my drift to the dark side of human nature was an aberration from who I always was and the way I am now. So it was very easy for me to take a good look inside and become the person my parents had originally sent out into the world.
It changed when I got sober in 1998—I was addicted to drugs—five years before I went to jail. When I got sober, I went, “What did I do?” I would not say the drugs caused it. but they allowed it to continue without the guilt and remorse—they quiet that down. I got caught years after I went back on the straight and narrow.
Jail gave me time to think about things, and that’s when I taught myself how to write. Writing my book was a fundamental thing for me. I got to look at myself, my strengths, my weaknesses, my faults, my failings, my successes. This was a very powerful form of self-therapy, to examine myself and see what led me to certain behaviors and how to avoid those in the future.
In the beginning, when I got out of jail and out there to teach, it was all about myself: “I’m going to be ethical. I’m going to hold myself to the highest ethical standards. I’m never going to cross the line again.” But then I’m teaching other people how to make money and sales, so I thought I would also make sure to instill that message in other people as well.
When I took the system and brought it to a higher level many years later, I took some things out that would lead to misuse. But at the end of the day, it’s about the intent of the people who are using it.
Now, when I go out to teach people, it is all about ethics and integrity—and making money. I know for a fact that these are not mutually exclusive. You can maintain your ethics, and you can make a ton of money.
By teaching that to people, it doesn’t matter what type of work they do, whether they use it for business reasons or personal reasons. It makes a massive impact on their lives.
Go to my Facebook wall and read the comments. I get 50 emails a day from people who say how it changed their lives.
