My own father, as I have said, was poor—very poor—in
his youth, and although he made a great deal of money
during his lifetime, he did not make it with any intention of
caching it away for his own exclusive benefit. He knew the
value of money and had very definite ideas about its uses.
My father considered his wealth
primarily as capital, to be
invested for the direct benefit of his employees, associates,
stockholders, customers and their families.
His attitude toward his wealth was governed by a maxim
he took from Sir Francis Bacon: “No man’s fortune can be
an end worthy of his being.” He loved the challenge of
business, but the incentive was not to pile up money, but
rather to accomplish something lasting. I doubt seriously if
his total personal and family expenditures ever exceeded
$30,000 a year—yet, he was probably one of the first
businessmen to build swimming pools and provide other
recreational facilities for his employees.
I learned from my father that the astute, progressive
and truly successful businessman does not think of his
work primarily in terms of profits. The money value of my
holdings in the companies I own or control has been
estimated in the hundreds of millions of dollars. But this is
a paper fortune and it is still a means and not an end. Only
an infinitesimal part of my fo
rtune is held by me in cash.
My wealth is represented by machinery, oil wells, pipelines,
tankers, refineries, factory and office buildings—by all the
myriad assets of the companies in which I have invested
my capital. And those companies are continuing to produce
goods and perform services—and to grow and expand.
Thus, my wealth is continuing to perform useful, creative
work. These are the worth-while ends to which wealth is a
means, and which give money its real value.
I do not measure my success in terms of dollars and
cents. I measure it in terms of the jobs and the productivity
my labors and my wealth—invested and reinvested as
capital in my various business enterprises—have made
possible. I doubt very seriously if I could have reached
anywhere near the level of success that I have reached if I’d
employed any other yardsticks to gauge my progress during
my career.
I’ve found that, to establish his identity, to feel that he is
a fully participating member of society, an individual must
have purpose and feel that what
he does has some enduring
value well beyond the limits of his own personal interests.
In order to achieve any contentment in life, he must derive
genuine satisfaction and an equally genuine sense of
accomplishment from his work. These are considerations at
least as important as the size of the income he receives
from his job, profession or business.
By no means am I suggesting that a vow of poverty—or
anything even remotely approaching it—will provide an in-
dividual with a shortcut to ecstatic bliss. There is very little
room for the wandering mendicant and his begging-bowl in
our civilization. Human beings have progressed well
beyond the stage where they can be satisfied with their lot
while living on a diet of black bread and boiled cabbage.
They must have decent living standards—all the
necessities and many of the luxuries of life—if they are to
be even moderately content. For these things, they must
earn money.
This does not, however, change the fact that there are
many ways of gauging values besides placing them on a
monetary scale. A badly written, banal contemporary novel
may sell for five dollars a copy, while a great literary classic
may be purchased in a paperback edition for 50 cents.
Certainly the latter has infinitely greater real
value
than
the former, regardless of the tr
emendous disparity in their
prices. By the same token, th
ere are many kinds of success
other than purely financial success. I hold that an
individual’s standing in society should be judged by criteria
other than merely his income, accumulated monetary
wealth or the number and money value of his material
possessions.
Past and present, there are uncounted examples of
individuals who made priceless contributions to civilization,
but who realized little or no monetary rewards from what
they did. Innumerable great philosophers, scientists, artists
and musicians were poor men all their lives. Mozart,
Beethoven, Modigliani and Gauguin—among others of
comparable stature—died poverty-stricken. No one on earth
could possibly estimate the value of the contributions made
to mankind by such men as the late Dr. Albert Schweitzer
or the late Dr. Thomas Dooley; yet, it’s highly doubtful if
either of them ever enjoyed a
personal income as large as
that earned by the average department-store buyer.
The architect who designs a breathtakingly beautiful
building is often a poor man compared to the tenants who
will occupy it. The engineer who builds a dam may well
earn less from his labors than the landowner whose acres
are irrigated by water from the dam. The architect and
engineer have created and built; their success is no less
great because they did not earn fortunes from their work.
Also largely overlooked in this age of treadmill
scrambling for money and status is the fact that there are
many forms of wealth other than financial wealth. One of
the most genuinely contented men I’ve ever known was my
cousin, Hal Seymour. Hal and I grew up together; we were
always close friends and for long periods we were constant
companions. Hal cared very little for money. Content to
earn enough for his own needs, he good-naturedly turned
down every opportunity I offered him for earning more.
Working here and there—he was a topflight oil driller,
photographer, miner, a master of many trades—he never
had much money. But he managed to satisfy his desires to
go many places and do many things—and he always en-
joyed himself thoroughly with the armies of friends he
made wherever he went. His aim in life was always to do
whatever he attempted well. He realized this aim; he
always gave more than he took.
Hal considered himself to be very wealthy in personal
freedom. He was always able to
do the things he wanted to
do, and always had the time in which to do them. He
seldom missed a chance to remind me that, in these
regards, I was much poorer than he. Before his death a few
years ago, he frequently wrote me letters which opened
with the wryly humorous but
meaningful salutation: “To
the Richest Man in the World from the Wealthiest. . . “
I’ll have to admit that I envied Hal his abundance of
time —which is one of the forms of wealth that people tend
to disregard these days. Rich as I may be from a material
standpoint, I’ve long felt that
I’m very poor, indeed, in time.
For decades, my business affairs have made extremely
heavy inroads on my time, leaving me very little I could use
as I pleased. There are books that I have wanted to read—
and books I have wanted to write. I’ve always yearned to
travel to remote parts of the globe which I’ve never seen;
one of my greatest unfulfilled ambitions has been to go on a
long, leisurely safari in Africa.
Money has not been a bar to the realization of these
desires; insofar as money is concerned, I could have easily
afforded to do any of these things for many years. The blunt
and simple truth is that I’ve never been able to do them
because I could never afford the time. It’s paradoxical but
true that the so-called captains of industry frequently have
less time for indulging their personal desires than their
rear-rank privates. This applies to little things as well as
big ones.
It is not my intent to imply that I am in any way
dissatisfied with my lot in life. Indeed, I would be more
than ungrateful for the good fortune and advantages I’ve
enjoyed if I were anything less than happy. Moreover, I am
very gratified that I have managed to accomplish most of
the goals I set for myself when I began my business career.
The point I’m trying to make is that each individual has
to establish his own standards of values, and that these are
largely subjective. They are based on what the individual
considers most important to him and what he is willing to
give for a certain thing or in order to achieve a certain aim.
Old—but true—are the bromides that you can’t have
everything and that you can’t get something for nothing.
An individual always has to give—or give up—something in
order to have or get something else. Whether he’s willing to
make the exchange or not is entirely up to him and his own
sense of values.
Acknowledging all this, I nevertheless believe that there
are certain values which, if not absolute in the strict sense
of the word, are surely basic and can be said to be generally
valid. I never cease to be amazed by the casual and even
callous manner in which sizable segments of our population
ignore these fundamental values.
It is estimated that more than 120,000 Americans take
their own lives each year. This figure includes cases which
are officially recorded as suicides and the cases of those
who do away with themselves, but whose deaths, for one
reason or another, are not recorded officially as such. A
significant portion of these 120,000 annual tragedies are
classed as “economic suicides.”
According to Dr. Thomas P. Malone, head of the Atlanta,
Georgia, Psychiatric Clinic, an acknowledged authority on
the macabre subject: “At least 30 to 40 percent of so-called
economic suicides occur when a man is successful, not when
he is failing. When a man has achieved the peak of success,
often he has nothing left to scramble for.”
I’m no psychiatrist, but it seems to me that anyone who
takes his own life because he has achieved success and has
“nothing left to scramble for” never had any worthwhile
motives to scramble for in the first place. The goals he
sought— and achieved—were meaningless. When he
realized this he also realized that what he had actually
achieved was not success but pathetic failure.
In a report in the
Journal of the American
Medical Association,
Drs. Richard E. and Katherine K.
Gordon revealed the results of an intensive study they
made of families living in a typical contemporary status-
seekers’ suburban community. They determined that the
diseases which stem primarily from emotional stresses—
notably ulcers, coronary thrombosis, hypertension and
hypertensive cardiovascular disease—were markedly more
prevalent there than in communities in which status
seeking was not such a dominant social factor. Anyone who
has encountered specimens of the ulcer-ridden,
tranquilizer-devouring and status-seeking Organization
Man and their nervously shrill-voiced, apprehensive wives
will hardly be surprised by this revelation.
I am unable to see that the achievement of any degree of
social status is worth the price of a man’s life or the
destruction of his or his family
‘s health. Assuredly, there is
something very wrong basically when human beings are
willing to sell their lives and their health so cheaply. Nor
am I able to see that money or the dubious benefits
conferred by the attainment of what passes for status are
worth the price of one’s individuality and personal
integrity. I am apparently in the minority. It is becoming
increasingly apparent that it’s no longer fashionable to pay
much heed to these considerations. Their value has been
swept aside in the pell-mell rush to conform to what is
regarded as the majority view—which regards the ac-
cumulation of money and material things and the gaining
of status as the approved goa
ls and places no ceiling on the
price which can be paid for achieving them.
I consider it one of the major tragedies of our civilization
that people have come to regard it virtually mandatory to
imitate in order to win the social acceptance of their
fellows. The end result of this can only be to reduce even
the most brilliant individuals to a sterile cipher.
Toady and lickspittle are nasty words. The average man
would probably be inclined to use his fists on anyone who
called him either. Yet, countless men will lower themselves
to such absurd devices as wearing bow ties because their
employers wear them, cutting their hair the way their
superiors do, or buying their homes where the other
executives buy theirs. They ap
e and echo the ideas, views
and actions of those they seek to impress, proving nothing
but that they are servile toadies. Imitation may be the most
sincere form of flattery— but it
is
imitation, and flattery is
nothing more than a pat on the head from someone who
knows he deserves a kick in the behind.
I once obtained control of a company and was
immediately —and far from favorably—impressed by the
fawning attitude of the majority of the firm’s executives.
Most were obsequious yes-men feverishly trying to please
the new boss so that they could further their own narrow
ambitions. Wanting to see just how far they were willing to
go, I called a special management meeting. At the meeting,
I proposed a wholly impractical and ruinous scheme which,
if implemented, would have quickly bankrupted the firm.
Of the nine executives present, six instantly expressed
their approval of my “plans.” Three of these men went to
the extreme of modestly hinting that they’d been “thinking
along similar lines”—something I could well believe from
having studied the firm’s profit-and-loss statements. Two
very junior executives remain
ed glumly and disapprovingly
silent. Only one man in the group had the temerity to stand
up and point out the flaws in my proposal.
Needless to say, the company soon had some new faces
in its executive offices. The
three dissidents remained; all
are still associated with my companies and, I might add,
are now in the upper income brackets.
It has always been my contention that an individual
who can be relied upon to be himself and to be honest unto
himself can be relied upon in every other way. He places
value—not a price—on himself and his principles. And that,
in the final analysis, is the me
asure of anyone’s sense of
values—and of the true worth of any man.