#354 Sam Walton: The Inside Story of America's Richest Man

**David Senra** (0:00)
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So the book that I want to talk to you about today is Sam Walton, The Inside Story of America's Richest Man, and is written by Vance Trimble. This book is way less known than Sam's incredible autobiography. In fact, this book came out a few years before Sam's autobiography was published. At the end of the book, Sam Walton is still alive. And what is fascinating is how the book begins. And it talks about the fact that before the early 80s, there was no such thing as the Forbes 400 list. And so when the very first Forbes 400 list comes out, Sam is on it, and then within a few years, he obtains the number one spot and just holds it year after year after year. But before that happened, for the first 60 years of Sam Walton's life, he was not nationally known. He says he was in the shadows. He was off the beaten track, just building his incredible business empire. And so by the time the Forbes 400 list has come around, Sam has already built this $6.3 billion fortune. And so the book opens with all of these reporters in the early 1980s descending on Bentonville, Arkansas, to try to figure out who Sam Walton is and how he accumulated such a massive fortune. And then in their research, they give a great overview of his life. And so it says he grew up in Missouri in the Depression. He worked his way through college, lived a clean Christian life, served stateside in World War II, married an Oklahoma banker's daughter, opened up his first five and dime store in Backwater, North Central Arkansas, and raised four healthy kids. And then this is my favorite part of this entire section. Pretty darn ordinary, but only on the surface, Sam Walton underneath was no ordinary man. He was a genius in business with an iron mind and unwilling to compromise any of his carefully thought out principles.
And one of the most remarkable things about Sam is just how simple his idea really was. And he says it's a very simple idea. I'm going to buy cheap, I'm going to sell low, I'm going to do that every day, and I'm going to do it with a smile and focus on service. And one of the benefits that Sam Walton had early in his career was that there's a tendency for people to confuse a simple idea with an ordinary person. And Charlie Munger, who extensively studied Sam Walton, hit upon why a simple idea taken very seriously is so powerful in business. Charlie said, In business, we often find that the winning system goes almost ridiculously far in maximizing and are minimizing one or a few variables.