What I learned from reading Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller by Ron Chernow.

Rockefeller was marked to an exceptional degree by silence, mystery, and evasion.

Even though he presided over the largest business and philanthropic enterprises of his day, he has remained an elusive figure.

A master of disguises, he spent his life camouflaged behind multiple persona and shrouded beneath layers of mythology.

He lingers in our national psyche as a series of disconnected images, ranging from the aggressive creator of Standard Oil, brilliant but bloodless, to the elderly man dispensing dimes and canned speeches for newsreel cameras.

It's often hard to piece together the varied images into a coherent picture.

Earlier in the century, Rockefeller inspired more prose than any other private citizen in America, with books about him tumbling forth at a rate of nearly 1 per year.

He was the most famous American of his day.

Yet even in his heyday of popular interest, he could seem maddingly opaque, with much of his life unfolding behind the walls of his estates.

Rockefeller often seems to be missing from his own biographies, moving through them like a ghostly, disembodied figure.

When Random House proposed that I write the first full-length biography of Rockefeller since the 1950s, I balked.

How could 1 write about a man who made such a fetish of secrecy?

When I told them that I couldn't write about Rockefeller unless I heard his inner voice, the music of his mind, as I phrased it, they brought me the transcript of an interview privately conducted with Rockefeller between 1917 and 1920.

As I poured over this 1700 page transcript, I was astonished.

Rockefeller, stereotyped as taciturn and empty, turned out to be analytical, articulate, even fiery.

He was also quite funny with a dry Midwestern wit.

This wasn't somebody I had encountered in any biography.

Even with such massive documentation I had the frustrating sense that I was confronting a sphinx.

Rockefeller trained himself to reveal as little as possible, even in private letters, which he wrote as if they might someday fall into the hands of a prosecuting attorney.

The 20, 000 pages of letters that Rockefeller received from his more outspoken business partners proved a windfall of historic proportions.

They provided a vivid portrait of the company's Byzantine dealings with oil producers, refiners, transporters, and marketers, as well as railroad chieftains, bank directors, and political bosses.

Like many moguls, Rockefeller was either glorified by partisan biographers who could see no wrong or vilified by critics who could see no right.

This one-sidedness had been especially harmful in the case of Rockefeller, who was such an implausible blend of sin and sanctity.

Rockefeller transports us back to a time When industrial capitalism was raw and new in America, and the rules of the game were unwritten, more than anyone else, Rockefeller incarnated the capitalist revolution that followed the Civil War and transformed American life.

He embodied all of its virtues of thrift, self-reliance, hard work and unflagging enterprise.

That was an excerpt from the book that I reread and the 1 I'm gonna talk to you about today, which is Titan, the life of John D.

So I originally read this book a few years ago for episode 16.

I didn't really know how to do a podcast back then, so I think it's too important of a book to understand the history of entrepreneurship to not redo again.

There's a lot to get to, so I'm going to jump right in.

90% of what I want to talk to you about today is going to be how he built standard oil.

There's a few things in his early life that I think we have to cover first.

So then it's easier for you and I to understand like why he might have made the decisions he did as he builds 1 of the most valuable companies the world has ever seen.

I want to jump to 1 the sentence in the introduction that I think is extremely important, because this guy is 1 of Rockefeller's most important traits, and it says, once Rockefeller set his mind to something, he brought awesome powers of concentration to bear.

And when I read that, It made me think of 1 of my favorite quotes from 1 of my favorite entrepreneurs Edwin land the founder of Polaroid if you read I've read 5 biographies on Edwin land.

He talks about the importance of concentration over and over again I think this is probably his best quote on the importance of concentration And this is what land said my whole life has been spent trying to teach people that intense concentration for hour after hour can bring out in people resources they didn't know they had.

And as you and I go through the way Rockefeller built Standard Oil, it'll become very obvious that he spent just as much time spent working, he spent thinking and concentrating on what he was actually doing.

So I want to talk a little bit about his parents.

He becomes like this blend between his mother and his father.

He winds up having a deep hatred for his father and a deep unending love for his mother.

Rockefeller's father was a snake oil salesman and a bigamist.

He winds up having multiple families throughout his entire life and he loved money but hated work.

So this is Rockefeller assumes the exact opposite posture as his father.

So it says this is about his father throughout his life.

He extended considerable energy on tricks and schemes to avoid plain hard work.

And then sure now describes why understanding this part of Rockefeller's life is so important to understanding how he built his company.

This marriage fused the lives of 2 highly dissimilar personalities setting the stage for all the future heartache, marital discord and chronic instability that would so powerfully mold the contradictory personality of Rockefeller.

And his dad Bill is this crazy character throughout the entire book.

Well this is before Rockefeller was born.

Her name is Eliza and decides to say hey we're going to move in this my lover.

We're going to call her a housekeeper and I'm going to have babies by both of you simultaneously.

So it says Bill roughly disabused Eliza of any high-flown romantic notions that she might have had about matrimony.

Far from renouncing his girlfriend, Nancy Brown, he brought her into the camped house as a housekeeper and began having children alternately by wife and mistress.

This affair wasn't the only indignity visited upon Eliza.

She was often abandoned by Bill." This is so important because you realize Rockefeller was like an old man from a young age and part of this is that he felt when he goes and starts looking for his first job, which I'll spend a lot of time talking about.

He felt like I have to take life seriously.

It's almost like he was a father of a family of 5 at 16 because his dad would constantly like run away.

So it says it's not the only indignity visited upon Eliza.

Bill remained a restless and defiant individualist who preferred life beyond the pale of society.

And since it was unpredictable when Bill would be back or if he had ever returned, Eliza had to learn how to do a lot with a little.

And so the 1 tool that she used for this was frugality.

And this is something that this is a trait that she would instill in Rockefeller from a young boy that even in when he's in his 90s, he was so he's 97 years old.

So it says Eliza became extremely frugal and drilled her children in thrifty maxims such as willful waste makes willful want.

And I have some crazy stories later on about just how frugal Rockefeller was even when he was 1 of the wealthiest people on the planet.

There's 3 traits that are taking place on this on this page that he keeps with him through his entire life.

He always praised the benefits of adversity.

He was always thinking and he was always persistent.

So it says, in contrast to his father's disdain for manual labor, John gloried in the rigors of country life, which he came to believe toughened him for later industrial struggle.

His frugal boyhood hardened an already stoic nature and made him strong against later adversity.

This is how his neighbors remembered him at this time.

To other people, he often seemed abstracted.

They remembered him with a deadpan face, walking along country roads, lost in thought, as if unravelling deep problems.

He was a slow learner, but patient and persistent.

Rockefeller would later describe himself accurately as reliable but not brilliant.

A few pages later, there's more examples I wrote on this page, traits from his early life that he also used in building his business.

We can see that there was something extraordinary about the way that this boy pinpointed goals and doggedly pursued them without any trace of childish impulsiveness.

When playing checkers or chess he showed exceptional caution.

Remember, this is just a metaphor for how he built and managed Standard Oil.

When playing checkers or chess, he showed exceptional caution, studying each move at length, working out every possible counter move in his head.

I'll move just as soon as I get it figured out, he told opponents who tried to rush him.

You don't think I'm playing to get beaten do you?

To ensure that he won he submitted to games only where he could dictate the rules.

Despite his slow ponderous style once he had thoroughly mulled over his plan of action he had the power of quick decision.

And really now that I've read this book 2 times, I don't want to oversimplify it, but really studying the way that he built his company, I was like, oh this is what happens when amateurs try to compete with a professional.

He was so smart, efficient, and ruthless you just cannot believe it.

And 1 thing that enhanced all those traits was the fact that John was a true believer.

In his heart, 100% for the rest of his life, thought that God gave him a gift and his gift was making a lot of money so then he could give it all away.

And the reason that's important is because true believers are not going to have like the normal self-doubts that others or maybe even his competitors will.

And this is something he picked up when he was really young.

So it says, early in life he learned that God wanted his flock to earn money and then donate money in a never-ending process.

I was trained from the beginning to work and to save Rockefeller explained.

I have always regarded it as a religious duty to get all I could honorably and to give away all I could.

I was taught that way by the ministers when I was a boy." So we're still in the childhood but think about this.

He's got traits that are beneficial for when you're building a business combined with a core belief that this is what God wants him to do, combined with a mother who put a lot of pressure on his shoulders from a very early age because her husband was running around the country half the year and then she never finds out but fathering and having other entire families.

I lost count how many children he sired I don't know maybe 10, 15 he's got a gang of kids So let's go to that.

He had his mother's ability to bear a large burden for long periods in an unruffled way.

Many neighbors testified that the unflappable Eliza never lost her temper, never raised her voice, never scolded anyone, a style of understated authority that John inherited.

I brought that point out because that's how he ran his business.

From his mother, he learned economy, order, thrift, and other virtues that figured so largely in his success at Standard Oil.

Eliza trained her children to reflect coolly before making decisions.

Her frequent maxim was, we will let it simmer.

This was a saying that John employed throughout his business career.

She really did see her oldest son as gifted.

She saw qualities in him still invisible to the world at large.

Because she confided in him and gave him adult responsibilities, he matured rapidly and acquired unusual confidence.

As he put it, I know that in my own case, I have been greatly helped by the confidence imposed in me since early boyhood.

He learned to see himself as a reluctant savior.

He thought it was like the world's savior of the entire industry.

The entire oil industry must be brought under my control for the good of the world.

So he says he learned to see himself as a reluctant savior, taking charge of troubled situations that needed to be remedied.

So let's skip ahead to 1 of the times where his father comes, you know, his father would pop up randomly.

Maybe he stays for a month, maybe he stays for a few days.

But the ruthlessness that is very evident in Rockefeller's career, I believe was learned from his father.

The bane of John's boyhood wasn't poverty so much as chronic worry about money.

And it's easy to see how cash came to see like God's bounty, the blessed stuff that relieved all of life's cares.

After the family spent anxious weeks or months running up credit bills and waiting for father's return, Bill would abruptly materialize, like a jolly Santa Claus, swimming in money.

He would compensate for his long absence by extravagant shows of generosity with his children.

For John, money became associated with these brief but pleasurable interludes when father was at home and the Rockefellers functioned as a true family." So remember this is his opinion of his father when he's still a child.

He is not yet of the age where he's old enough to take the measure of the man that his father actually is.

the lessons that his father's trying to drill into him as a very young age.

To his son he conveyed the message that commerce was a tough competitive struggle and that you were entitled to outwit the other fellow by any means.

He tutored John in a sharp, relentless bargaining style.

And so 1 of the things that Rockefeller had to learn to overcome is the fact that everybody knew that his dad was, you know, a scam artist, that he lied all the time, that he abandoned his family.

And so everybody in the town, in the neighborhood would obviously gossip about his father.

And so John had to learn defense mechanisms to deal with that.

And so he learns this as a kid, but later on, he was almost impervious to criticism.

It's almost like he built his own world within the world and a lot of that was just because he didn't really care about society's opinions so said a boy was such a father needed to screen out malicious gossip and cultivate a brazen indifference to community opinion.

This bred in him a reflexive habit of secrecy, a fear of the crowd, a deep contempt for idle chatter and loose tongues that lasted his entire life.

When John was a child, Bill would urge him to leap from his high chair into his waiting arms.

1 day, he dropped his arms, letting his astonished son crash to the floor.

Remember, Bill lectured him, never trust anyone completely, not even me.

The boy who faced down the vicious talk of neighbors would be extremely well prepared to walk unscathed and even defiant through the turbulent controversies that later surrounded his life.

This reminded me when I read the biography of William Randolph Hearst all the way back on Founders number 145.

He was raised in an environment like this.

I remember I told you that I went to visit his house.

And 1 thing that was apparent when you read that biography is that Hearst did not like society.

In fact, there's a quote from that book that says he didn't care about what people thought of him and he despised society.

That's not an exact fit of the way I think about Rockefeller, but it's close.

And then there's this long section that just describes all the different work and that John was doing as a young boy.

But I just want to pull out 1 sentence because I feel this sentence is really Rockefeller's MO that he uses for his entire career.

Rockefeller analyzed work, broke it down into component parts, and figured out how to perform it most economically.

2 more sentences spread out that give you an idea of how he was as a boy and how he was his whole life in my opinion.

1 was not supposed to dwell on insults, but keep one's sights fixed on the practical goal ahead.

And then the second thing is, I have no recollection of John excelling at anything.

I do remember he worked hard at everything, not talking much, and studying with great industry.

And so he's a teenager, he's about to go on the job hunt, he wants to work full-time, he wants to support his entire family.

In an extremely peculiar arrangement, John, aged 15, was already lending small amounts of money to his father and charging interest.

He was never sentimental when it came to business.

He simply charged his father what the going rate was.

And then second, an early example of this maxim that John would repeat throughout his life that success comes from keeping the ears open and the mouth closed.

This is a neighbor describing how he was different from other teenage boys in the neighborhood.

He sat quietly in his chair listening to what was being said.

So for education, John took correspondence courses.

You can kind of think like if you took like a college-level class to the mail is the way I would think about that.

So he would take correspondence courses to supplement his education.

He wanted to learn about business and bookkeeping.

And then I want to get into 1 of the best days of his life and he's just, he says he's not brilliant.

I would, I think he's just being humble because the way he goes about everything is just really, really smart.

So he's taken this course and says it taught double entry bookkeeping and the essentials of banking, exchange, and commercial law.

By the time his studies had ended, he had turned 16, And he was ready to flee the traumas of his family life by focusing his energies on a promising business situation.

So he's in Cleveland and his full-time job is looking for a job.

And so he says, I went to the railroads, to the banks, and to the wholesale merchants.

At each business, he asked to speak to the top man.

I understand bookkeeping and I'd like to get to work.

Despite incessant disappointment, he doggedly pursued a position.

This went on each day, 6 days a week for 6 consecutive weeks.

He approached his job hunt devoid of any doubt or self pity.

I was working every day at my business, he said.

That's just a really smart way to think about this.

He was a conformed exponent of positive thinking.

And then these 2 sentences gives you a perfect idea of the kind of person that we're dealing with.

When he exhausted his list he simply started over from the top and visited the businesses 2 or 3 times.

Another boy might have been crestfallen, but Rockefeller, this is 1 of the most important sentences in the entire book in my opinion, but Rockefeller was the sort of stubborn person who only grew more determined with rejection.

6 weeks later he finally finds a job and this is what he said about that.

All my future seemed to hinge on that day and I often tremble when I ask myself the question, what if I had not gotten that job?

And he takes it seriously for the rest of his entire life.

I don't care about my birthday, I care about job day.

He turns it into a holiday to be celebrated for the rest of his life.

For the rest of his life, he would honor September 26th as job day and celebrate it more than his birthday.

So he's working for these merchants and their primary business is like produce and grain.

I just want to pull out a couple highlights here because we see these personality traits that he keeps for his entire life.

He is extremely precise, extremely disciplined, extremely frugal and extremely success obsessed rather work educated him work liberated him and work supplied him with a new identity.

I learned to have great respect for figures and facts, no matter how small they were, he said.

Many kept their books in such a way that they did not actually know when they were making money on a certain operation and when they were losing.

He closely reviewed every bill, confirming the validity of each item and carefully adding up the totals down to a penny.

He pounced on errors, even if it was just a few cents, and reacted with scornful amazement when the boss next door handed his clerk a lengthy, unexamined plumbing bill and said, please pay this.

Rockefeller was appalled by such cavalier indifference.

He displayed a bulldog tenacity that took people by surprise.

This is a great, this is the way I think about him.

The language that Chernow is about to tell you and I right here, it really, like the visual matches in my mind perfectly as I'm reading the book.

He was pale and patient as an undertaker.

He would wait until the debtor capitulated.

He collected payment from people as if his life depended upon it.

And 1 idea that you and I talk about over and over again because it pops up in these books and I think it's completely opposite of how People that are not founders entrepreneurs think is that belief comes before ability?

You don't accomplish great things and then think that and then believe you can do it now You believed it way before that accomplishment ever came Right and so what he's about to say here keep in mind He is saying this this statement that he would repeat over and over again to everybody at this point He talked a lot more later in life.

He would they call him the Sphinx But what the statement he's about to make he is making a dollar a day at this point in his life and he'd go around yelling, I am bound to be rich.

Rockefeller derived pleasure from work and never found it cheerless drudgery.

The business world entranced him as a fountain of inexhaustible wonders.

He thought it was like almost like sinful so he tries he tries to set up a system so he doesn't so he works less and he fails at it.

So says 1 day he decided to throttle this obsession.

I made a deal with myself not to be seen in the office after 10 o'clock p.m.

Within the next 30 days it is telling that the young man made such a pledge to himself and equally revealing that he found it impossible to obey So then they go into great detail about his Baptist upbringing, the way he thinks about religion.

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#248 Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller