#248 John D. Rockefeller (Titan)

**David Senra** (0:00)
I want to tell you about a one time only limited event that I don't think you're going to want to miss. I am doing a live show with Patrick O'Shaughnessy from the Invest Like the Best podcast in New York City on October 19th. Patrick has interviewed over 300 of the world's best investors and founders for his podcast. I've read over 300 biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs for my podcast. We'll be talking about what we learned from seven years of podcasting, sharing our favorite ideas and stories and doing a live Q&A. There will also be special event-only swag. If you live in New York City, I think it's a no-brainer. But if not, I think it's a great excuse to fly in. I've already heard from a bunch of people that bought tickets. They're flying in from other cities. Some people are flying in from other countries. That's setting the bar really high, so I will have at least four shots of espresso or four energy drinks before or during the show so we can make it a night that you'll never forget. If you're interested in attending this unique live event, I will leave a link down below. I highly recommend you get your tickets today, and I hope I get to see you in New York on October 19th. The life of John D. Rockefeller was marked to an exceptional degree by silence, mystery, and evasion.
Even though he presided over the largest business and philanthropic enterprises of his day, he has remained an elusive figure. A master of disguises, he spent his life camouflage behind multiple persona and shrouded beneath layers of mythology.
He lingers in our national psyche as a series of disconnected images, ranging from the aggressive creator of Standard Oil, brilliant but bloodless, to the elderly man dispensing dimes and canned speeches for newsreel cameras.
It's often hard to piece together the varied images into a coherent picture. This has not been for a lack of trying. Earlier in the century, Rockefeller inspired more pros than any other private citizen in America, with books about him tumbling forth at a rate of nearly one per year.
He was the most famous American of his day. Yet even in his heyday of popular interest, he could seem maddingly opaque, with much of his life unfolding behind the walls of his estates.
Rockefeller often seems to be missing from his own biographies, moving through them like a ghostly, disembodied figure. When Random House proposed that I write the first full-length biography of Rockefeller since the 1950s, I balked. How could one write about a man who made such a fetish of secrecy?
When I told them that I couldn't write about Rockefeller unless I heard his inner voice, the music of his mind as I phrased it, they brought me the transcript of an interview privately conducted with Rockefeller between 1917 and 1920
As I poured over this 1,700 page transcript, I was astonished. Rockefeller, stereotyped as taciturn and empty, turned out to be analytical, articulate, even fiery.
He was also quite funny with a dry Midwestern wit. This wasn't somebody I had encountered in any biography.
I was now eager to do the book.
Even with such massive documentation, I had the frustrating sense that I was confronting a sphinx.
Rockefeller trained himself to reveal as little as possible, even in private letters, which he wrote as if they might someday fall into the hands of a prosecuting attorney.
The 20,000 pages of letters that Rockefeller received from his more outspoken business partners proved a windfall of historic proportions.
They provided a vivid portrait of the company's Byzantine dealings with oil producers, refiners, transporters and marketers, as well as railroad chieftains, bank directors and political bosses.
Like many moguls, Rockefeller was either glorified by partisan biographers who could see no wrong or vilified by critics who could see no right. This one-sidedness had been especially harmful in the case of Rockefeller, who was such an implausible blend of sin and sanctity.
The story of John D. Rockefeller transports us back to a time when industrial capitalism was raw and new in America and the rules of the game were unwritten. More than anyone else, Rockefeller incarnated the capitalist revolution that followed the Civil War and transformed American life. He embodied all of its virtues of thrift, self-reliance, hard work, and unflagging enterprise.
That was an excerpt from the book that I reread and the one I'm gonna talk to you about today, which is Titan, The Life of John D. Rockefeller by Ron Chernow. So I originally read this book a few years ago for episode 16 I didn't really know how to do a podcast back then, so I think it's too important of a book to understand the history of entrepreneurship to not redo again. The book is almost 700 pages. There's a lot to get to, so I'm gonna jump right in. 90% of what I wanna talk to you about today is going to be how he built Standard Oil. There's a few things in his early life that I think we have to cover first. So then it's easier for you and I to understand why he might have made the decisions he did as he builds one of the most valuable companies the world has ever seen. I wanna jump to one, the sentence in the introduction that I think is extremely important because it describes one of Rockefeller's most important traits. And it says, once Rockefeller set his mind to something, he brought awesome powers of concentration to bear. And when I read that, it made me think of one of my favorite quotes from one of my favorite entrepreneurs, Edwin Land, the founder of Polaroid. If you read, I've read five biographies on Edwin Land. He talks about the importance of concentration over and over again. I think this is probably his best quote on the importance of concentration. And this is what Land said. My whole life has been spent trying to teach people that intense concentration for hour after hour can bring out in people resources they didn't know they had. And as you and I go through the way Rockefeller built Standard Oil, it would become very obvious that he spent, as just as much time as spent working, he spent thinking and concentrating on what he was actually doing. So I wanna talk a little bit about his parents. He becomes like this blend between his mother and his father. He winds up having a deep hatred for his father and a deep unending love for his mother. Rockefeller's father was a snake oil salesman and a bigotist. He winds up having multiple families throughout his entire life.