The Very, Very Rich and How They Got That Way Read Online Free PDF Page A

longer buy an acre of Manhattan for a couple hundred bucks.
    And yet there are still men making fortunes. How? Let’s visit some of them and find out.

3. How to Get Rich Without Really Trying
    It is not easy to become one of the very, very rich. We’ve noted and will note again that the process takes guts. It takes work. It takes self-assurance. It takes these and other attributes in almost superhuman measure. The ordinary unrich – you and I – may display such characteristics from time to time when we’re feeling good, but that doesn’t seem to be enough. What is required is that you step up the voltage and keep it stepped up all day, every day.
    In our tour through this gallery we’re going to meet men of such outrageously high voltage that we will wonder why their fuses don’t blow. The average man’s energy output, compared with theirs, is a mere dribble. They perform prodigious amounts of work. Their brains generate ideas in a seemingly endless stream. They leap into situations of enormous risk, unworried, supremely confident. They do things that other men wouldn’t dare do or simply would never think of doing. They seem a little more than human sometimes, and this may trouble us if we harbor any hope of emulating them. We’ll be tempted to think,
These are men of a special and superior breed. What they did can’t be done by anybody else. Adventures like these aren’t for just folks.
    William Benton: One Hundred Fifty Million Dollars
    In the light of this, it seems like a good idea to comfort ourselves right in the beginning by looking at a man who is (and we hope he will pardon the expression) just folks. He is William Benton, cofounder of the advertising agency Benton and Bowles, briefly a U.S. senator, today sole owner (with his family) of
Encyclopaedia Britannica
.
    The
Saturday Review
once characterized Benton as a “smoothly whirring dynamo of a man.” A dynamo, to be sure – a man of constant, high energy output. But he whirs smoothly, and that is what makes Benton a comfort to the unrich. Unlike other men we’ll meet here, he doesn’t quiver and crackle with frighteningly high voltage. His life has been generally calm, orderly, a smooth and patient progression from one step to the next. He took risks, certainly. He recognized early in his life that nobody ever gets rich on a salary, and he voluntarily left a secure job to step out into the scary world of the self-employed. Yet he kept his risk to a minimum. He was content to begin modestly and build slowly. Unlike other hundred-millionaires, he didn’t make it by betting everything on some mad scheme that could either shoot him skyward or flatten him in an instant. He did nothing that could be called startling or unusual. He generally stayed within established patterns of business behavior, trod the trodden paths. Like a good mountain climber, he tested each new handhold before letting go of the one below.
    Probably the main reason for the tranquillity of Benton’s climb was that he never really wanted to be one of the great rich. He was not driven by the compulsions that screeched and seethed inside most of the other men you’ll meet here. He determined early in life that he would quit the business world when he reached a moderately comfortable level of wealth – and that is actually what he did, at age 35. Circumstances conspired against him, however, and he got rich after all, by accident.
    He sometimes seems irritated by the fact. When
Fortune
included him without comment or qualification in its 1968 list of the nation’s richest people, he howled in dismay. He argued that he
wasn’t
rich. He pointed out that he lived modestly. Almost his entire worth was bound up in
Britannica
, he said, and since he had no intention of ever selling the company and converting his equity to spendable cash, he felt that to class him with the great rich was not only erroneous but impudent.
    Fortune’s
editors found his argument puzzling. As one of them