ZIAD ABDELNOUR
Interview with Ziad Abdelnour
Today, we are interviewing Ziad Abdelnour @ziadkabdelnour -Ziad K. Abdelnour is Founder, President & CEO of Blackhawk Partners, Inc. a private “family office” in the business of originating, structuring & acting as equity investor in strategic corporate investments and co-Founder of OMV Capital LLC; a trading platform focusing on the financing of real estate, infrastructure and project finance properties throughout the globe.
Founder & Chairman of the Board of the Financial Policy Council; a 501 (c) (3) non-profit organization designed to give its select group of supporters the opportunity to have a direct face-to-face dialogue with the nation’s quintessential power brokers and policymakers.
Chairman of the Advisory Board of Hawkstorm Global – a business specializing in providing a wide array of elite services ranging from Emergency Response and Asset Protection to Security Consulting and Risk Assessments by former members of Navy seals, CIA, DOJ, Blackwater, FBI, State Department, and DEA Agents.
Author of the best-sellers “Economic Warfare: Secrets of Wealth Creation in the Age of Welfare Politics” and “Startup Saboteurs: How Incompetence, Ego, and Small Thinking Prevent True Wealth Creation”
Ziad Abdelnour has over 30-year experience on Wall Street backing over 125 companies & serial entrepreneurs worth in aggregate over 20 billion dollars in the private equity, high yield bond, and distressed debt markets.
Ziad Abdelnour holds an MBA in Finance Summa Cum Laude from the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania & BS in Economics, Summa Cum Laude, from the American University of Beirut.
Today, Ziad Abdelnour continues to be featured in hundreds of media channels and publications every year and is widely seen as one of the top business leaders by millions around the world.
Ziad Abdelnour was just recently been featured as one of the 500 Most Influential CEOs in the World and among the most famous US financiers in US history.
Question: How is a day well spent to you?
Ziad: It is a day spent away from pathetic idiots, social climbers and moronic bureaucrats wasting my time with their stupidities and small thinking. It is a day with the right people all along. Smart, funny and results oriented. Only way you get things accomplished.
Question: What one question can you ask someone to find out the most about them?
Ziad: What’s something that no one would guess about you?
Question: What habit do you have now that you wish you started much earlier?
Ziad: The art of it all consists of what to avoid and who to avoid in life. I am now on steroids when it comes to vetting people. I wish I had developed this art earlier in my life… It is though never too late.
Question: What is the worst advice you see or hear given in your trade or area of expertise?
Ziad: I was told to be fearless, but “this is unattainable, because humans are innately built with fear, and it’s part of how we survive. I think it’s better to examine your fears and divide those into buckets. There are irrational fears that you should pack in a box and put on a shelf, but then there are warranted fears that you should listen closely as you think through challenges. You will encounter fight-or-flight situations where you need to act fearlessly, but feeling the fear a little isn’t always a bad thing.”
Question: What important truth that very few people agree with you on?
Ziad: The problem is we live in a rat race where the more you achieve the happier you ought to become. And that’s far from the truth.
Question: What makes you different? Who trained you or influenced you?
Ziad: I am basically a rebel, a maverick and a person who thrives on changing the “order of things”. I am not here to please people nor make them feel good but to get things done. People who have most influenced me in my life are total “game changers” on their own. Two of my alma mater from the Wharton School Michael Milken and Donald Trump come on top of the list.
Question: What has become more important to you in the last few years and what has become less important?
Ziad: The most important to me is, has been and will always be my family and my inner circle of friends and partners… basically my tribe. What has become less important is the material things such as houses, cars, planes and yachts. They are only a tool to entertain my inner circle as per the above.
Question: What is your motto for life?
Ziad: Be bolder – cause success is not how high you have climbed, but how you make a positive difference to the world.
Be more controversial – cause rules and conventions are important for schools, businesses, and society in general, but you should never follow them blindly.
Be more disruptive – cause in times such as ours, when there is too much order, too much management, too much programming and control, it becomes the duty of superior men and women to fling their favorite monkey wrenches into the machinery. To relive the repression of the human spirit, they must sow doubt and disruption.
Web: https://blackhawkpartners.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ziad-abdelnour/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/blackhawkinc
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ziad.k.abdelnour
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ziadkabdelnour/
Be bolder. Be more controversial. Be more disruptive.
