How I made $500,000,000. Memoirs of a billionaire. John Davison Rockefeller

I am an optimist by nature, but when I have to talk about the future peaceful conquests of my people, I cannot express the due enthusiasm for this.
“From a young age, my mother and priest inspired me to work hard and save money.”
“The first and foremost prerequisite for success in business is patience.”
"If your only goal is to become rich, you will never achieve it."
“I have always tried to turn any disaster into an opportunity.”
“I would rather earn income from 1% of the efforts of a hundred people than from 100% of my own efforts.”
“You always have to communicate with winners and optimists. That's right, with a capital letter - winners and optimists!

“Voices are heard more and more often,” says Buckle, “about the evil of wealth and the sinful love of money. And yet, with the exception of the desire for knowledge, no passion has brought so much good to mankind as the passion for accumulating money. To her we owe all trade and all crafts. They gave us the opportunity to get acquainted with the works of the most diverse countries; they have further awakened in us the thirst for knowledge and broadened our horizons, acquainting us with the culture, languages ​​and ideas of different nations, inciting people to bold enterprise, teaching us prudence and foresight, enriching our experience, and giving us an infinite amount of extremely valuable means for saving lives and alleviating suffering. We owe all this to the desire to acquire money. If zealous theologians succeeded in destroying all money-seeking humans as a species, this world as we know it would cease to exist, and we would naturally revert to the state of primitive savages. Without wealth there is no motive for work; without these motives there is neither knowledge nor art.
Is there anyone who does not understand the essence of these words of an eminent English historian, for whom they will not become the embodiment of truth, among the readers of the memoirs of Rockefeller, the richest of all the rich, who, more than anyone else, in our days, has attached the honorary title of "King of Merchants"? И кто не поймет вместе с тем всю горечь, всю горькую мудрость слов Горация: «кто собирает денег кучи, тот следует за скорбями"?
“In my opinion, he is mistaken,” says Rockefeller, “who takes it into his head to assert that great wealth necessarily ultimately promises happiness to its owner. Rich people are the same people as others, and if wealth is able to give them a sense of satisfaction, then this is explained only by the happy circumstance that they are capable of committing acts that can give a sense of satisfaction to others.
These words could be put as an epigraph to Rockefeller's memoirs, and if you read these memoirs, written in simple language and without embellishment from the life of this most hated man in all of America, you have to admit that he was guided by this very epigraph all his life.
Throughout the existence of the human race, as soon as an exceptional person appeared, society immediately began to blame him. So it was with Rockefeller: his countrymen, or at least most of them, could not forgive Rockefeller for his exclusivity, for being a genius, the Napoleon of commerce, and for the fact that he once declared that he shunned the company of the stupid, never invited fools to work together, and avoided devoting them to his plans. For such a statement, revenge can be quite thorough: most will never forgive, never forget. Poisonous arrows of slander are flying around the corner, addressed to the "blessed with the gifts of happiness", and even the king of trade is powerless before the wounds inflicted by them.
Recently, Rockefeller was required to take action against one of his detractors. To this he proudly replied: “And what do you want me to do? For slanderers, the law knows only two punishments: either the slanderer is imprisoned, and then, against my will, I will make him a martyr in the eyes of his friends, a martyr of the idea of ​​protest against the rich "powerful man." Or he is sentenced to a fine, and how absurd this punishment would be if a slanderer by vocation pays me, say, ten thousand dollars for insulting my honor.
But the mind cannot influence the crowd. If you want to act on it, you need to follow your feelings, and the more often and louder false assurances are heard, flavored with the necessary pathos and “sincere tone of heartfelt conviction”, the more fair they will be in the eyes of the crowd and the deeper it will feel them. Rockefeller had to experience this more than once in his life. All his slanderers adhere exclusively to this recipe. For example: as soon as Rockefeller, who grew up in a very pious family, goes to church, slanderers shout: “Look at the bastard! This is how he wants to buy the favor of the church! After all, the fact that he donates millions to charity, he just wants to kill his conscience. If Rockefeller enters the train car "with mere mortals," a cry rises from the slanderers: "That's a miser, as if he had nothing to arrange a special salon car for himself!" And if he followed their advice, the cry would rise even stronger. After all, there is no way out of this dilemma, where great wealth leads. One can only be surprised at the philosophical patience with which Rockefeller endures the whole abyss of endless and rather poisonous reproaches that strike both himself and his family. Here is another example. About two years ago, one of Rockefeller's daughters fell mortally ill during her visit to France. The father hurried to the call. On behalf of a large newspaper, he was accompanied by two reporters, day after day, hour after hour, reporting on this journey in their newspaper. Here, of course, there could be no question of sympathy for the old father, suppressed by excruciating fear, for his daughter, struggling with death far from her home: this is just curiosity, just the desire for a sensation. Rockefeller later admitted to his friends that it was extremely painful and hard for him to endure the daily torture of interrogations, but he immediately added that it was extremely difficult for both reporters to fulfill their duties. So anyone can see from this that Rockefeller's faith in a good beginning in man is unshakable.
It will be appropriate here to say a few words about the charitable institutions founded by Rockefeller, and not because their establishment cost Rockefeller more than twenty or thirty million dollars, but if only in view of the reason that he, in understandable feelings of delicacy, gives in his memoirs only a cursory mention of them in just a few words. The only institution that bears his name is the Rockefeller Institute, an institution for medical research. The fact is that only one-third of the doctors work at this institute, in New York, another one works in American laboratories in a wide variety of cities, and the remaining third makes scientific trips abroad. Even though it was founded quite recently, only 8 years ago, this institute has already given a significant practical result: it was within its walls that a healing serum against epidemic paralysis was discovered.
Another idea of ​​Rockefeller, put into practice, is the idea of ​​alleviating and destroying social need through the dissemination of useful knowledge to the masses and the popularization of higher education. To this end, he founded the General Educational Council, to which he invited other philanthropists (for example, Andrew Carnegie). This House of Education, a grandiosely conceived "philanthropist's trust"—Rockefeller's favorite idea—was detailed in his memoirs. The essence of such an educational program was to teach, for example, farmers the art of farming, and then send them to small farms all over America, so that already there, on the ground, they would be able to come to the aid with all their newly acquired knowledge to individual farmers, often lacking the time and resources to follow the progress of newly introduced agricultural practices. Further, Rockefeller earned himself a long-term memory of his support for the University of Chicago. Which of the European millionaires could donate, at least approximately, the same large sums to his native university! His last idea was also invaluable: to educate young girls, prepare them for the career of educators of children, and then send them to an orphanage for poor women in childbirth! This cultural cause is of undeniable importance for society, and the American government is currently following in the footsteps of Rockefeller, recognizing the expediency of his idea.
Here they can say: all this is wonderful, all this is of tremendous importance, which we are not going to deny Rockefeller. But at the same time, it is quite common knowledge that the Standard Oil Company, which laid the foundation for Rockefeller's enormous fortune, used rather dirty combinations. As to this doubt, the best answer to it is Rockefeller's own account in his memoirs of the foundation and nature of the trust. Who will be able to resist the amazing logic of such reasoning, who will be able to oppose them?
“It would be absurd to expect,” says Rockefeller, “practical success from destruction of a competitor. Generally speaking, a good business man does not give in to external influences - it is true that he may have an occasional hitch in business, but he will always and very soon cope with it. In any case, I have never had to