Founders
Episode 353 #353 How To Be Rich by J. Paul Getty
Founders

Episode 353: #353 How To Be Rich by J. Paul Getty

Founders

Episode 353

#353 How To Be Rich by J. Paul Getty

David Senra is the host of Founders, where he studies history's greatest entrepreneurs. This is what he learned from reading How To Be Rich by J. Paul Getty.

What I learned from reading How To Be Rich by J. Paul Getty. 

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(2:00) My father was a self-made man who had known extreme poverty in his youth and had a practically limitless capacity for hard work.

(6:00) I acted as my own geologist, legal advisor, drilling superintendent, explosives expert, roughneck and roustabout.

(8:00) Michael Jordan: The Life by Roland Lazenby. (Founders #212) 

(12:00) Control as much of your business as possible. You don’t want to have to worry about what is going on in the other guy’s shop.

(20:00) Optimism is a moral duty. Pessimism aborts opportunity.

(21:00) I studied the lives of great men and women. And I found that the men and women who got to the top were those who did the jobs they had in hand, with everything they had of energy and enthusiasm and hard work.

(22:00) 98 percent of our attention was devoted to the task at hand. We are believers in Carlyle's Prescription, that the job a man is to do is the job at hand and not see what lies dimly in the distance. — Charlie Munger

(27:00) Entrepreneurs want to create their own security.

(34:00) Example is the best means to instruct or inspire others.

(37:00) Long orders, which require much time to prepare, to read and to understand are the enemies of speed. Napoleon could issue orders of few sentences which clearly expressed his intentions and required little time to issue and to understand.

(38:00) A Few Lessons for Investors and Managers From Warren Buffett by Warren Buffett and Peter Bevelin. (Founders #202) 

(41:00) Two principles he repeats:

Be where the work is happening.

Get rid of bureaucracy.

(43:00) Years ago, businessmen automatically kept administrative overhead to an absolute minimum. The present day trend is in exactly the opposite direction. The modern business mania is to build greater and ever greater paper shuffling empires.

(44:00) Les Schwab Pride In Performance: Keep It Going!by Les Schwab (Founders #330) 

(46:00) The primary function of management is to obtain results through people.

(50:00) the truly great leader views reverses, calmly and coolly. He is fully aware that they are bound to occur occasionally and he refuses to be unnerved by them.

(51:00) There is always something wrong everywhere.

(51:00) Don't interrupt the compounding. It’s all about the long term. You should keep a fortress of cash, reinvest in your business, and use debt sparingly. Doing so will help you survive to reap the long-term benefits of your business.

(54:00) You’ll go much farther if you stop trying to look and act and think like everyone else.

(55:00) The line that divides majority opinion from mass hysteria is often so fine as to be virtually invisible.

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#353 How To Be Rich by J. Paul Getty

Introduction

The book that I want to talk to you about today is How to be Rich and is written by J. Paul Getty. It did not start out as a book as a matter of fact. The book that I'm holding in my hand was first published over 60 years ago, but it started out because the founder of Playboy magazine, Hugh Hefner approached J. Paul Getty in the 1960s and he asked him to write a series of columns.

So he winds up writing -- J. Paul Getty winds up writing over five years 19 different essays with the goal of transferring and educating, basically transferring his experience and a knowledge that J. Paul Getty had about building businesses to the next generation to what he considered – what he called the younger businessmen of his day.

Now keep in mind, when he's writing these essays, he’s 73 years old. So almost everybody else is younger than him. And as such, this book is very different from the autobiography of J. Paul Getty, which I covered last week. Really, the way I would think about reading this book and what this podcast is going to be is we just have one of, if not the richest person on the planet at the time he's writing this, and he is just telling us the lessons that he derived from 60 years, nearly 60 years of building businesses.

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