If this book can be said to have any villains, a notable one would be a man named Ivy Ledbetter Lee.
“Poison of Ivy” Lee, as some of his less admiring chroniclers called him, was one of he first great corporate public-relations men in America – which is as much as to say, in the world. To some public-relations historians he was a genius. Perhaps. If genius is defined as the peculiar ability to make inaccessible complicated things simple – and therefore accessible – then I suppose he can be called a genius. But a number of his contemporaries found it impossible to give him their wholehearted applause, for the greatest task to which he applied his genius was the promulgation and preservation of a myth.
It seems useful for us to look at this myth at the outset. It will pay us to study the myth’s not altogether honorable origins. For this myth and others like it, and the philosophy they represent, have undoubtedly kept many men from achieving, or even dreaming of, instant millionairehood.
Ivy Lee was hired in 1914 by John D. Rockefeller, Junior, to improve the public image of the Standard Oil Company. Standard Oil at the time was perhaps the most hated industrial organization on the face of the earth. The public and the press were bitterly accusing the company of strikebreaking, price fixing, monopoly in restraint of trade, legislative bribery and other nasty practices. Other companies had in fact behaved with far less virtue during the preceding wild decades, but for various complex reasons Standard Oil had become the scapegoat. The public stoning was aimed particularly at the tall, gaunt figure of the company’s founder John D. Rockefeller, Senior.
Old John D., Senior, then in his eighties, had retired from active management of the company. Yet he was still considered to be Standard Oil’s main public spokesman and its walking trademark, and much of the general anger was directed at him personally. This was one of the major reasons why Ivy Lee was hired. His assignment: to change the old gentleman’s image from that of a fast-buck manipulator to that of a kindly, conservative old grandfather.
Ivy Lee came up with an idea so charmingly simple, so brilliantly direct, that it must be regarded as a stroke of genius. Insiders at Standard Oil called it the “shiny dime game.”
Lee saw to it that old John D. was always supplied with a pocketful of newly minted dimes. The old gentleman’s valet was instructed, in fact, to consider the dimes as important a any item of clothing. The aged financier was no more to be allowed out of the house without his dimes than without his trousers. As for old John D. himself, his instructions were to seek out small boys – the more ragged and hungry looking, the better. Gold caddies and newsboys were particularly useful for the purpose. He was to seek them out with special care whenever news reporters and the photographers happened to be present. Having found such a youngster he was to hand over a dime, pat the kid on the head and deliver a homily about hard work, thrift and patience.
“If you save a dime every day,” he sometimes said on these occasions “you’ll be a rich man.” This was egregious nonsense, of course. Assuming that the kid had 70 years left to live, his total invested capital after a lifetime of following John D.’s advice would have come to $2555. If the kid was lucky, compounding interest at fluctuating rates might have tripled or quadrupled the amount – to $10,000, perhaps.
At other times the youngster himself (hired, coached and carefully decked out in ragged clothes by Ivy Lee) would approach the old gentleman and reverently ask for advice on how to succeed. Old John D. would reply with frothy bromides from the Protestant Ethic. “Work hard, spend wisely, invest safely and let time do the rest,” he would say, plunking a dime into a small, grimy palm. This was perfectly laudable advice, but one cannot help but wonder whether the old man himself believed a word of it. It certainly didn’t describe how he made his own fast, flashy leap to wealth.
Yet newsmen were suckered in to the “shiny dime game” by the dozens, and today feature writers and others still tell of those old dime-giving episodes as though they were spontaneous and true. The senior Rockefeller, who had made money faster than almost any other man alive, thus was enshrined in capitalist folklore as a champion of the slow, weary, plodding dime-saving route to success.
The fable of Rockefeller and his dimes is not the only fable of its kind in our folklore, of course. There is an older one about a race between a tortoise and a hare. The prudent tortoise carefully conserves his energy – his capital – and wins. The crazy hare bets his entire capital on a single wild speculative spree, bankrupts himself early nd loses. The Rockefeller fable is simple a modern version, perhaps the most famous modern version, of that ancient tale. Both fables express what seems to be a main current of Wester capitalist thought : the slow-money or plodder’s ethic. The basic tenet of the ethic is that slow money is somehow better than fast money – more sensible, more honest and in the end more satisfying.
To the extent that this can be called a book of philosophy, its main thought is that the slow-money ethic doesn’t deserve our automatic reverence. The plodder’s route to success is comfortable and even profitable for some people, but not for everybody. If a man decides it isn’t for him – if he decides to try for instant millionairehood instead – there is no good reason why he shouldn’t listen to his own inner music. There is no reason why he need listen while people cluck at him disapprovingly or tell him stories of tortoises and shiny dimes.
In support of this philosophy we have gathered here the stories of a group of odd and fascinating people who examined the slow-money ethic coldly and then – nervously in some cases, joyfully in others – discarded it. Each one of them, in an earlier period of his life, was an ordinary plodder, obscure, unrich, in some cases unhappy. Safe, perhaps, but not satisfied. Each arrived at some kind of crossroads in his life: a juncture at which he was forced to stand and make a choice. He could go on plodding, saving his dimes, on and on to nowhere. Or, like the hare, he could take a risk and move faster and maybe get somewhere after all.
In the fable, the hare loses. The stories you are about to read are not fables. They are true. In these stories, the hares win.
Our title needs to be defined and justified, so let’s pause here and do it.
“Instant” means fast. In some of the fabulous tales it means very nearly (if you’ll forgive the cliche’) overnight.
You will meet more than one man in this book who suddenly, one bright day, was struck by a magnificent idea. The idea itself shot him skyward. He performed very little further work on it. He simply sat back for the rest of his and let the world come to him. In this kind of story the word “instant” can be taken literally. The man became a success at the instant that idea exploded in his head. You will also meet other men and women who had to do a certain amount of nurturing and developing before their ideas could bring any returns. In these cases “instant” means “spectacularly quick”. In all cases, the word refers to a kind of attitude or approach or philosophy that is diametrically opposed to the plodder’s way of life.
You will notice, too, that the concept of “instant” used in this book usually has a certain overtone of risk taking or speculation. This overtone arises when the word is used to describe financial success in a free-enterprise society. The plodder’s way is the safe way; a nine-to-five job, a regular paycheck, company-paid health insurance and a guaranteed (though maybe not adequate) retirement income. The people you will meet in this book all turned their backs on that kind of safety. They had to. If you seek instant success, you must be prepared to live with a degree of risk. We will examine this factor in more detail as we mingle later with our speedy succeeders.
The second word in our title is “millionaires,” which implies the epitome of financial success. Throughout the book we’ll be using the word “successful” to describe our happy hares. Is this too narrow an interpretation of the word?
The word “success”, down through the centuries, has found itself tangled in a formidable array of moral, philosophical, religious and humanistic quarrels, some of which make more sense than others. Having been wrung through all those quarrels, the word, today, resembles an old sweater after too many washings: shapeless. It fits everybody sloppily and nobody well.
Dozens of definitions are possible. A frankly materialistic man might say that success means having a lot of money. A more mystical or poetic individual would say that it means achieving contentment – and would say that this could be done without money, by contemplating one’s navel or communicating with nature. No matter what definition you adopt, one thing you can be perfectly sure of is that somebody else will call you a damned fool.
In this book, “success” will generally mean material success. But if there are any mystics or poets among you, heed this and cool your wrath: It also means contentment. Most of the people you are bout to meet are of course millionaires, but a few are not. They are included in this millionaires’ book for the sake of – well, let’s call it philosophical balance. Some consider themselves successful simply because they are now doing what they have wanted to do all their lives. You will meet one supremely happy man, for instance, who quit his suburban commuter’s life in favor of a bigger, brighter life by the sea. He is comfortably wealthy but not a seven-figure man. He has succeeded on his own terms, and since he made it all happen fast he qualifies eminently for the label “instant success” though not “instant millionaire.”
All of our speedy succeeders, millionaires or not, have succeeded on their own terms. Herein may lie the only useful definition of the word. If you think you have won success, you have won success.
You may ask what good it will do you to mingle with these quick and contented folk, these happy hares. If you need a reason beyond the plain fun and sheer exhilaration that comes from reading a good story, here is an excellent and perhaps more practical reason. It is entirely conceivable that one or more of these people, when you meet them, will persuade you to launch a quick-money gambit of your own.
A foolish notion, you say? Unlikely because you won’t be meeting these people in the flesh?
No, not foolish and not unlikely. You don’t have to meet a man face to face before you can be influenced by him. This truth is illustrated by one of the fastest hares in all history. His name is Ross Perot.
He is interesting for a number of reasons, this Ross Perot, not the least of which is the fact that he built a personal fortune of $300 million in six years from a standing start. His story has been told so often that we needn’t go into its details here. I single him out only because his story shows how profoundly one man can influence another from afar.
Consider Perot. Until the age of 32 he was an ordinary jobholder. He worked for a computer company. His wealth, like any middle-income man’s wealth, was being eroded by inflation, hacked at by taxes, nibbled at by monthly bills and – well, you know how it goes. Perot was a man like you and me, a member of the herd, a standard mass-produced Joe. His vision were unexciting. If he dreamed, his dreams vanished like puffs of smoke every morning.
One day, idly flipping through a magazine, he came across a notorious statement made more than a century before, and far away, by a man who had never heard of computers – or, indeed, of electronics. The author of the statement was Henry David Thoreau, and he wrote it in the 1850s on the banks of Walden Pond in Massachusetts.
“The mass of men,” wrote Thoreau, “lead lives of quite desperation.”
That statement evidently jolted Ross Perot hard. It was the catalyst that made him change the entire course of his life. He quit his job. On this thirty-second birthday, almost exactly 100 years after Thoreau’s death, Perot founded Electronic Data Systems, the company that was to make him an instant success and a multi, multi, millionaire.
There is no reason for us to be unnecessarily depressed by Thoreau’s statement or even to take it very seriously. It is surely one of the most blackly pessimistic statements that ever seethed on paper. Things aren’t that bad, and as a matter of fact Thoreau himself cheered up considerably in his subsequent ruminations at Walden. He must have been feeling unusually gloomy that day. Perhaps he had a severe case of poison ivy.
At any rate, the statement itself is not of great importance here. You can take it or leave it, depending on your personal outlook. What is important is the effect of the statement on a particular man, Ross Perot. What is of monumental significance is the phenomenon: the fact that one man can profoundly influence another, even though the two have never met and never can meet.
This process of mutual influence is one of the more interesting attributes of our interesting species. Two dogs or cats or rabbits of the same sex can meet, can spend months or even years in each other’s company, and can then part without any perceptible changes having been wrought in either one. Perhaps a few fleas will have swapped places, but nothing else noteworthy will have happened. Men and women, however don’t often slide past each other like that. Instead, they bounce off each other. The course of a man’s life can be radically changed, can even be reversed outright, by his meeting with another man or woman.
So malleable are we, so highly susceptible to influence, that we can change one another without even meeting in person. I could conceivably be deflected in a new direction by reading something you have written, as Perot was deflected by Thoreau. In a variation of the same process you could be turned around or bounced sideways by reading a report, written by me, on what a third man has said or done.
This book cannot properly be categorized as “inspirational” in the sense that it will urge you to change your life. You will find no urgings in it. It will not buttonhole you and pound “positive thoughts” into your head. You will search in vain through its pages for a “magic sure-fire success formula” or even a “mundane fifty-fifty success formula.” What the book does contain is a group of richly dissimilar people, who, in their individual ways, achieved some kind of dream in a hurry. If you want inspiration, you will get it in abundance from them.
They are the hares. Let’s meet them – if we can catch up with them.