Most of the men you will meet in this book are contemporary instant success. They rose from nowhere to somewhere, in most cases within the past decade. This makes them especially interesting, for they are living evidence that today’s economic environment is not as inhospitable as it seems. They, like us, have had to wrestle with the social and economic ills that beset America and every other modern nation. They, like everybody else, have been up against the “late-century too-highs,” that baffling syndrome compounded of high prices, high taxes, high interest rates, high labor costs and high discontent. Somehow they beat the “too-highs”. They went higher. Their stories are brightly encouraging for that reason alone.
Yet a logical difficulty arises. It is summed up in that pessimistic old platitude, “Easy come, easy go.”
These rapid risers haven’t yet had time to demonstrate their staying power. Most of them took pretty solidly established – but who can tell? It is conceivable that some of them, in some bleak future year, will fall with the same stunning speed with which they rose. This happened in the late 1960s, for example, to large numbers of hares in and around Wall Street. The stock market suffered the second worst crash in its history during hat gloomy period. While all the plodding tortoises sat on their savings passbooks and grinned, a host of hot young fund managers and conglomerate architects and other speedy succeeders turned into spectacularly fast failures. As they were shooting down the drain their fading voices could be heard yelling, “We’ll be back!” Most of them haven’t been heard from since.
With these dismal facts in view, it seems like a good idea to show right in the beginning that easy come doesn’t necessarily mean easy go. This will cheer us up, perhaps. So let’s look at some old-time instant successes who held on.