Ep 326 | What We Can Learn from John D Rockefeller

Thank you for joining me today. It's Brian Gubernick, and welcome to the No Days Off podcast, where we believe that every single day brings a new opportunity to get better. We're going to get better today by studying an entrepreneur that we could all probably look up to and learn from. This entrepreneur is John D. Rockefeller. He's one of the most prominent figures in American business history. And he built his amazing career, his business career, through a combination of strategic foresight, through ruthless business practices, through innovation in the oil industry, through perseverance, and through patience. Real quick, before we dig into why I wanna focus on John D. Rockefeller, Let's just talk about his career, right? He had— he was born in, in 1839 somewhere in New York. He came from a pretty modest background. His dad was a traveling salesman and his mom was a devout Baptist, and she instilled a very strong work ethic in John. She also instilled a thriftiness. From a very young age, Rockefeller showed a talent for business and for finance. And he was selling candy and doing all sorts of odd jobs to earn money. At 16, he got a job as an assistant bookkeeper at a, at a small firm in Cleveland, Ohio. In 1859, at the age of 20, he partnered with a guy named Maurice Clark to establish a commission business dealing in hay and grain, meats and other goods. This was the framework or the groundwork for his understanding of commerce and trade. He eventually, though, entered into the oil industry, and in 1863 he invested in a refinery in Cleveland, and, uh, things really started to take off for him. By 19— I'm sorry, 1870, he had founded Standard Oil with his brother, and the company focused on refining oil and his, his world took off from there. Uh, he's one of the wealthiest individuals to ever, uh, live in the United States, ever live in this world for that matter. He was also a major philanthropist. So here's what I want to talk about Rockefeller though, and I don't know if most people know this about him, but he had an art of being really, really cool under pressure. Just an amazing, amazing coolness to him. So he began that career that we just described as a bookkeeper, as an investor in Cleveland. But that, you know, launch of his career occurred in the Panic of 1857, which was a massive national financial crisis. The crisis actually originated in Ohio and hit Cleveland really, really hard. Just as Rockefeller was getting the hang of things, you know, arrived the greatest market depression in history up until that point. But even as a young guy, Rockefeller had this unflappable coolness, this, this ability to just handle pressure. He kept his head while everyone around them— around him really lost theirs. Instead of complaining and, and worrying about this economic upheaval they were going through, he just saved his money quietly, and he watched what others did wrong. He saw weaknesses in the economy that so many people took for granted. He had this crazy self-discipline and this crazy objectivity that allowed him to seize advantage from obstacle after obstacle in his life. During the Civil War, during the financial panics of 1873 and 1907 and 1929. Rockefeller saw opportunity in every disaster. Within 20 years of that crisis in 1857, Rockefeller would control 90% of the oil market. His greedy competitors had all perished. His nervous colleagues had sold out and sold their shares and left business. Everybody missed out, but because he was patient, because he had amazing self-discipline, he persevered. Rockefeller, um, kind of learned from this school of adversity because he made a lot of his fortune during market fluctuations. He was able to see what others could not see. Warren Buffett says the same sort of thing: be fearful when others are greedy, and be greedy when others are fearful. Rockefeller was a master of that. When he was 25 years old, a group of investors offered to invest around half a million dollars, $500,000, which was a massive amount of money at the time. Still is a massive amount of money today, but it was especially huge then. A group of investors offered $500K for him to go and invest at his discretion. As long as he could find the right oil wells in which to deploy the money. He was really grateful for this opportunity. He went out to tour the nearby oil fields, and a few days later, he came back to the investors, returned to Cleveland totally empty-handed. He didn't spend a dime. He hadn't spent a dime or invested a dollar of the funds. He had said to these investors the opportunity just didn't feel right to him. At the time, no matter how excited the rest of the market was. So he gave them all back their money and stayed away from drilling. He had to practice this crazy self-discipline with his investments. Now, what can we take from this? Well, not just patience and things like that, but we've got to practice self-discipline with our own investments, whether it's some, you know, amazing new, you know, stock we're getting into, or a retirement fund, or a real estate deal, or a new business. Sometimes the greatest amount of money made is on the deals you do not do. In his later life, Rockefeller actually said— this is a quote— he said, oh, how blessed young men are who have to struggle for a foundation and beginning in life. I shall never cease to be grateful for the 3 and a half years of apprenticeship and the difficulties to be overcome. All along the way. Rockefeller wasn't born with these skills. He was, you know, his parents did develop some things, but he learned this behavior. These strategies were developed in some really bad markets, that market at 1857 especially. He called that the school of adversity and stress, and the obstacle he faced was the opportunity. Ryan Holiday, famed author, writes a book called The Obstacle Is the Way, and he talks about Rockefeller in that book. As a matter of fact, much of what I just shared there came from, uh, Ryan Holiday's book The Obstacle Is the Way, uh, one, one of Holiday's books that I really, really like. As a matter of fact, I like most all of them. And I remember having the opportunity to interview Ryan Holiday a handful of years ago, and we talked about this exact story. It's what, it's what made me kind of recall it here today. You know, I think there's so much to learn from entrepreneurs that have come before us. And today, I think what I want to emphasize with John D. Rockefeller was his ability to not do a deal or not do deals when everybody else was making money led to his ability to do deals when everybody else was running in fear. Remember, be fearful when everyone around you is greedy, and be greedy when everyone around you is fearful. Go study John D. Rockefeller. That's your, that's your assignment for the day, if I can give you one. Just go look him up, see what you can learn. There's always something we could grab that applies in our respective worlds. That's all I have for you today, the No Days Off podcast. Thank you so much for listening. And remember, every single day brings a new opportunity to get better. So let's get after it.