Doug Jones's (dougj) Blog

I am writing this from the Big Island in Hawaii. I am on the Kona Coast where it has been clear and in the high 80's every day this week. On the other side Kilauea is erupting and has fountains reach 1000 feet. It seems every time I go on a vacation  my business picks up by itself.  A few years a...

A bit of magic. When I started doing magic shows I did them for free as Community Service. Then companies and associations started to contact me and pay me for shows. Because I could mix sales, motivation and comedy magic they paid me a lot to present. I had to limit the magic because I was runni...

Mortgage Magic has the name magic because for almost 40 years I have dabbled in magic. The name came about by accident. I had always worked in banking and decided to become a mortgage broker and realized I would need a business account. So I went to a bank and asked to open a checking account. Th...

Most everybody knows the quote from the song 'Beautiful Boy' by John Lennon, "Life is what happens when we are making other plans".   ​ Actually Allen Saunders  stated "Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans" in a 1957 issue of Reader's Digest. This quote is mistakenly attrib...

The income that a borrower earns vs. the income for loan qualification can be quite different sometimes.In the Bay Area a lot of Tech borrowers have income called Restricted Stock Units and different banks will determine the income differently.  In a nutshell RSUs vest over a period, typically ba...

Sometimes a negative event or what seems like a negative event can be the start of success. This is a true story about a friend who seemed like he walked out of the book of Job: He got a divorce, filed for bankruptcy, and was out of a job. We invited him to come and live with us and he did. He go...

Yesterday I grabbed this book off a bookshelf in my garage with the thought that I needed to re-visit this classic by Dr. Maxwell Maltz. My intention this time is to read the book slowly and recapture the truths taught in the book.I have been surprised at the depth of the book. I remember it bein...

​This could be under real estate, loans, or any sales  situations under making the best of a bad situation. Simple Rope Trick but David Copperfield did this trick on Nation Wide TV !More than 30 years ago I was hired by a Texas Computer firm to do a 40 minute magic show at a convention in San Jos...

Magicians know the phrase "pack small, play big". That is what we  did with the Mortgage Magic TV show. We hosted the weekly show which was aired in Silicon Valley for 5 years. During that time we produced more than 300 shows and interviewed people associated with the Mortgage Lending and Real Es...

Wanting to improve my sales skills is what led me to magic. I was a sales manager and was also assisting a sales training class weekly.  Our sales course studied segments about 'showmanship' for our sales presentations and that led me to walking into a magic shop asking what I could do to incorpo...