Andrew Carnegie: How One of the Richest Men in History Viewed Wealth and Legacy | #Success - Ep. 73

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Do you have a funnel but it's not converting? The problem 99.9% of the time is that your funnel is good, but you suck at selling. If you want to learn how to sell so your funnels will actually convert, then get a ticket to my next selling online event by going to sellingonline.com/podcast. That's sellingonline.com/podcast. This is the Russell Brunson Show. Hey, this is Russell. Welcome back to the vault. Today we're gonna be talking about one of the men who was at one point in time the richest man in the world. This is Mr. Andrew Carnegie, and we're talking about some of have his books here, some really rare stuff. Before I dive into this, people ask like why I'm obsessed with Carnegie, and partially because, you know, at one point he was the richest man in the world. I love studying people who have figured out how to create wealth. But number 2, he is the origin story of Napoleon Hill. If you know Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill got a commission to go interview Andrew Carnegie about how he built his wealth up. While he's interviewing Andrew Carnegie, they hit it off, they became really good friends. It's supposed to be like a 3-hour interview, and Napoleon ended up spending 3 days with him. At the end of day 3, Carnegie told him, he's like, I'm looking for somebody to write the first ever philosophy on personal achievement, and I'm looking for someone who's going to dedicate the next 20 years of life to create this, and would you want to do it? And sat there and waited. And as the story goes, Napoleon Hill instantly said, yes, I'll do it. And Carnegie pulls the stopwatch out of his pocket and says, 29 seconds. He's like, I've asked this over 200 people and you're the first person to say yes in under a minute, therefore I'm going to give you the commission. And then from there, Napoleon Hill went out and created everything that he did, Laws of Success and everything else. And so I love the story of Carnegie, and that made me interested in like his life and what he did. How did he become the richest man in the world? And so we've got a couple books here I'm going to go deep into. This first one here, this is actually a really rare, unique book. It's called Around the World. Carnegie had this chance. He was traveling the world. He was writing down everything he was learning, going to Tokyo and Japan and, you know, around the world, like all different things he was learning. This specific copy of the book is really unique because this one is signed by him. So here is Carnegie's actual signature. This book cost me $7,500. There's the price that I paid for this book. And the reason why I did is, number one, it's signed by Carnegie, which is amazing. But number two, this was signed by Carnegie one month before he closed what at the time was the largest business transaction in the history of the world and what made him become the richest man in the world. He partnered with U.S. Steel and they just used huge merger, and from that he became the wealthiest man in the world. And one month before that merger happens, when he signed this book, and he signed it to his lawyer who was working on the deal. And so this is the lawyer's book, one month before signing, and the top it says, "Yours to the Brotherhood of Man from Andrew Carnegie." And so it's just kind of a cool, unique thing. It was signed in 1901, the book was written in 1884. This book had a new cover put on it, you know, nice leather cover. This is actually a copy of the first edition without the new covers. That's what it would look like in the bookstores. I bought this as part of a collection, so I don't have the actual pricing on this. My guess is probably worth about $1,000 to $1,500 is kind of what you'd probably be able to buy it for right now for first edition around the world. And this is a special copy he made just for his lawyer one month before they closed the largest deal in US history. But honestly, it was the biggest business deal up to that point and made Carnegie the richest man in the world. The reason why I got so obsessed with Andrew Carnegie is as I started buying my Napoleon Hill things, I want to know like who influenced him, like where did he come from. And so Carnegie obviously was kind of the origin story that set Napoleon Hill on his way. So I was like, and this guy was the richest man in the world, like what did he know, what did he understand? Like, you know, one of the things I learned from Tony Robbins is like if you want to be successful, you got to model people who are successful, right? So Carnegie is one of the most most successful humans have ever walked this planet. Like, what did he do? What did he believe? What did he think? And so I started buying everything. These are some old paintings. These are about $500 apiece. You can buy these on eBay. These are actually from like different matchbooks and things like that. These are originals from back in the day. I got paintings of Carnegie, just all sorts of stuff that I wanted just to understand and get in his mind. And as I started reading his things, the thing that I think was the most prolific to me and had the biggest impact on me was actually— it was an essay he wrote, I believe, in 1889. It was called The Gospel of Wealth, and later that got put into a book. And so this is the actual book called The Gospel of Wealth. This is the first edition copy of Gospel of Wealth, which was published in 1900. I bought for $1,272. So $1,272 I paid for this first edition. And there's a lot of different reports and things that Carnegie wrote, but there's this one section we took, the actual report, it was just a lot smaller, called the Gospel of Wealth, and it's in here. And so when I read the Gospel of Wealth, I actually had a friend who read it first, and he's like, have you read the Gospel of Wealth? I'm like, no, I have a bunch of Carnegie stuff. I haven't really gone deep in, like, the things that I read have been good, but again, like Around the World's amazing, but it didn't have anything to do with, for me, like business or marketing or sales, whereas the Gospel of Wealth gave me something very applicable. And so I read it. The book is big, but just the actual essay on Gospel of Wealth is very small. That was the thing that had the biggest impact on me from Carnegie's life that I could actually translate into my business today. And so we can dive into that if you want. Do you guys want to? Should we dive into that? So this is the quote from the Gospel of Wealth essay from Carnegie. He basically concludes the report, he says, "If a wealthy person dies with vast wealth intact, having failed to distribute it for good, then they die in shame. The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced." And so Carnegie's whole belief was like, you can go and you can make a whole bunch of money, but he's like, your job is to take the money, live the way you need to be able to survive, But the rest of it, he's like, you shouldn't be passing on to your kids. He's like, that's not the way it works and they're going to be spoiled. He's like, you create this wealth and your job is then to give it away to society to help things. And so you see what happened with Carnegie. He did his biggest transaction in the history of all time, right? And he becomes the richest man in the world. First thing he does is he goes out there and he builds, I think it's like 3,000 or 4,000 libraries, like Carnegie Hall, things that you guys have heard of, right? He built all these things. He was giving the wealth back to society because he felt like if he kept it, then it would be a disgrace. Like, that's not how it's supposed to be. I love Ayn Rand and her thoughts. And this seemed very, The opposite with Ayn Rand. If you read Atlas Shrugged and things like that, where she's very much like, as a producer, you should collect money and like you shouldn't give it to the government or give it to, you know, the government wants the money so they can give it to the poor and things like that. And at first I was like, ah, there's this disconnect where Rand's like, Ayn Rand's like, no, you got to keep the money and like don't give it away. And Cardone's like, all the money you make, you should give it away. I'm like, how does it work? And then I read something that Ayn Rand wrote that was interesting. She said what she disagrees with is like the government coming with a gun and they give me your charity to go give to people and try to take the money from you through taxes and stuff to go to give to the poor, right? She's like the most evil most evil character written of all time was Robin Hood, who stole from the rich and gave to the poor. He said what you should do is, is you should in business be selfish. Like acquire as much, make as much money as you possibly can. And then from that, then you should give, but that's giving it because you want to, not because the government's coming to you with a gun and trying to take your money away. And that was the big thing. I think Carnegie nailed as well. It's like collect this stuff and then go out and your philanthropic efforts are the end result of what you should be doing with your wealth. And so how does this relate to people nowadays? It's been interesting in my business. I've seen a lot of people who, they'll start their business a lot of times, they're like, you know, we have half our money to charity. And they struggle because it's hard for them to make profit when half their money goes to charity, right? And they're trying to make their business very philanthropic, but the problem is like it eats the profits and you can't actually grow and the business dies, right? You notice Carnegie didn't give half his money to charity when he was growing up. Instead, he focused on the business, he collected all the money, and then when he was able to, then he gave it all away. So I think the people I see that are most successful are those who inside their business, they make as much money as possible, and then separately they're taking the profits so they can give them away. And not necessarily weaving into your business, because a lot of times that can stranglehold your business. It doesn't actually grow. Now, a couple things we've done inside the ClickFunnels community, and this kind of goes the opposite way I just said, but we launched ClickFunnels a decade ago. We're like, how do we attach what we're doing to a bigger mission, right? And so for us, the mission we decided to partner with was Village Impact. Some of our friends, they build schools in Kenya. And so we set up initially where every time somebody builds a funnel inside of ClickFunnels and goes live, we would donate a dollar towards Village Impact. And so each year at the end of the year, we look back and like, hey, how many funnels were built? The first year was like 18,000 funnels have been built. We're like, oh, That's a big check. She wrote a check for $18,000 and gave it. And the next year was like $25,000, then $30,000. And then got a point where all the Funnel Hackers in our community were building literally hundreds of thousands of funnels every single year. And so every year we've done that. And what's been cool about it is we've had a chance to see all these schools being built as a community, everyone getting together, like being excited about the fact like we're building funnels, but because that we're building schools and helping these people with different opportunities. And I think when you look at your business that way where it's like, how do you make as much money as possible? But then from the profits, from the revenues, not because you have to, because the government's trying to take your money with a gun, but because the goodness of your heart. It's like, now that I have these things, I wanna do what Carnegie said. I wanna give the wealth back to help people who are less fortunate than me. And so anyway, I thought the Gospel of Wealth was just a cool, it was my favorite thing that Carnegie wrote that was very applicable to me, especially seeing somebody who literally had it all, someone who was the richest man in the world and who decided to give it all away. It was a pretty cool story. We've had a lot of people who've come into our world who wanna use ClickFunnels to raise money for their charity. And it's fascinating when you look at the mindset of someone who's trying to raise money for charity traditionally, right? Is they come and like, hey, donate some money to our cause and you're gonna help these children, you're gonna help whatever. And that's like, the way they look at it. If you think about like in a perfect world, people would all be like, yeah, I want to help these charities, right? But that's usually the thing, like traditional offer that most charities put out there is not a good offer, right? It's like, hey, if you donate money for us, we're going to help kids, you know, we're going to help whatever. Like that, that's the offer. It's not a good offer. And even though in the ClickFunnels world, like when we try to do charity things, right? Hey, we're gonna raise money for charity. In their heart, like I want to raise money for charity. They don't want to give money for that, right? We had one of our ClickFunnels members who had a charity and he came in and he read the DotCom Secrets book. He's like, I'm going to actually build a funnel that's going to raise money for my charity. So he built a funnel, all the revenue from the funnel went to go fuel the charity, but What he realized is like, I gotta create offers. Like people trade money for offers. They don't trade it just 'cause they want to feel good about themselves, right? And so you have to create a really good offer. And he ended up winning a Two Comma Club Award for his charity by having a funnel that had upsells and downsells where people were getting value for things they wanted and that money went to charity, right? We found the same thing at Funnel Hacking Live when like we wanted to raise money for Village Impact and also Operation Underground Railroad. First couple times we're like, hey, yeah, if you wanna donate money, you can. And it was like crickets. Like couple people like felt guilty and they'd walk away. And in people's hearts, they want to do good, but they just, it's hard. So after that, we started creating offers. Okay, if they donate to charity, what's the valuable thing we can give back to them? Like, what's the offer we can create? And so we start creating offers for the charities. Like, hey, when you donate X amount to the charity, then Stu and I were going to come to Boise and we're going to do a 3-day event on how to launch a membership site, right? We did that. Also, people went crazy because they want to give, but for most people, it's like they're going to be parting with money. They need an offer. I think that's one of the big things is like, you see most charities, they just don't understand good marketing. So when they put it out there, people aren't willing to trade with their money. Even though you think in their head, like everyone says like, oh yeah, I donate money to charity. Fortunately, very few do. But if you can create an offer where it's like, what are they getting out of it? That's what gets people to actually move. I remember when my kids were young and Dallin, who's my oldest of my twins, I remember one day he said to me, he's like, Dad, this is so great that I'm rich. And I was like, no, you're not rich. Like, I'm rich. You're not rich. I'm like, I'm not going to give you anything. I will teach you and train you and help you, but I'm not going to give you anything. I've been in this business long enough to see a lot of like father-son entrepreneur groups where the father built something from ground up and the son comes in and kind of rides the waves. That person doesn't develop. They don't have the— it's like they never had the pressure and the stress that you have to go through as an entrepreneur to create something big. And they're kind of given things. And I never liked that. And so for my kids, I'm like, I've told them, I was like, if you want to work for me, cool. But like, you're not getting special treatment. Like, you can come in and you can work if you want to, or you do something else on your own. The people during Carnegie's time where the families are still around today, right? And there's books been written on this. Like, those families, they didn't just give the money to their kids. In fact, they— I can't remember the two the two groups, the Rockefellers and the Vanderbilts or something. They may know. There are two families. So the Vanderbilt family, they basically took their money and gave it to the kids, and within a couple generations it was gone. And the Rockefellers, instead, they went and they set up like family bank. Their posterity come to the bank, and if they want to start a business, they would get a loan from the family, and they'd go after, start the business. They had to pay the loan back with interest. And these guys, now you look at them generationally, 100 years later, everyone in the family is— I mean, not everyone in the family, but the family as a whole is very, very wealthy. And that's the two differences when you start looking at how the game is played. A lot of times when you give things to people that are unearned, they don't cherish them and they lose them. That's why you look at the lottery winners, win $100 million, win $50 million, and you think like these people should be the richest people on the planet. Like 9 times out of 10, their wealth is completely gone within like a couple years because they never had to go through the pain and the energy to actually earn it. I think what Carnegie did was smart. He wasn't just handing out money to people. He was building things he thought would create generational wealth. He was building libraries. He was building these different things with his wealth that he thought would help people, give them the structure. But it wasn't just like freebie handouts. I think that's one of the keys when you're doing this is like, how do you create opportunities for people but not give them handouts? That is a little bit about Andrew Carnegie, who was the wealthiest man ever to live on this planet for a while, and what he did and what he thought. I went through The Gospel of Wealth, which again is not a very long read, so you could probably go find a copy online. But I did have a section of my notes. I pull out my favorite things, my favorite parts of it. And if you click the link down in the description, Go over there. We will send you a copy of my notes from The Gospel of Wealth. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If so, check out some of these other videos. I'll show you guys some more cool books here in the very near future.

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