#46 I Love Capitalism: An American Story

**David Senra** (0:00)
If there's one lesson I could pass along to kids today, it's this. The opportunities today are the very best they've ever been. You might have to look for them harder than in my day, but they're there. Boy, do I wish I was 21 again and just starting out. Like so many college kids today, I wanted to go to Wall Street and get rich.
That's a good way to make a lot of money, but it's also a way to fail big, not to mention burn out fast.
I learned early how essential it was to love the work I was doing. Sometimes I look back and wonder, how did this all happen? And then the answer comes.
I was at a place where I was having the time of my life.
I still remember what Hudson White Knight said to me 60 years ago.
If you really love your work as much as I think you're going to, you're going to be a big success.
So I'm saying to a kid, I learned that ex post facto. You should learn it up front.
Yes, I've been lucky and you can't learn good luck. My old man used to say to me, you could fall in a bucket of shit and come up with a gold watch and chain. But we all fall in that bucket from time to time.
What distinguishes the winners from the losers is the ability to turn adversity around through resilience and creativity. I still love my work today. All of it. At 82 years old, I'm still excited to get out of the bed in the morning, still charged up about what the next deal might bring.
And though the money my enthusiasms have brought me has enabled me to live well and help others, I can honestly say that if it came down to it, I would pay to go to work every day.
How many people can say that? And that is from the end of the book that I want to talk to you about today, which is called I Love Capitalism by Ken Langone. So if you listened to last week's podcast, you know that we were introduced to Ken through Bernie Marcus' book, Built From Scratch. And although Bernie Marcus' book is filled with a collection of eccentric characters, somehow Ken was able to stand out even amongst a group of rather unique and kind of crazy people.
So that was the first I had ever heard about Ken through that book. When I read Bernie Marcus' book, I then searched Amazon to see if maybe anybody had written a book about Ken Langone. And turns out he wrote his own book. So this is an autobiography that he's writing towards the end of his life. He's still alive, but he's in his 80s when he's writing the book. And how the book is structured is it's broken down into these little stories that tell you a little bit about his early life and then all his adventures that he had building all these different businesses. And usually he's very explicit about the lessons he learned from either experiences or from other people. So what I did today is I just pulled out a few of those stories that I found interesting, the ones I highlighted and took notes on, and I'm just going to share a couple of them with you. So let's go ahead and get right into the book.
And I want to start out where I normally like to start out, which is learning a little bit about his early life. Because I find a lot of the personality traits that cause these entrepreneurs to go out on their own or to attempt whatever it is they're trying to build. You usually see glimpses of these early in life, or there's a reason behind it. And I think one of the reasons that Ken was so motivated from a young age is because he grew up rather poor. So let's learn a little bit about his family real quick. And this is Ken talking about his early life. He says, My grandfather had left school when he was six years old and never went back. When he died at 72, he couldn't read or write. From the time he was six years old until the day he died, he had a shovel in his hand. His right hand was totally deformed. The thumb had lost the ability to bend from sixty years of holding a shovel. There's actually pictures in the back of the book that shows his grandfather's hand.
So now he's going to tell us a little bit about his parents. And he says, My parents were also very simple people. Neither of them ever got close to graduating from high school. My mother dropped out in the seventh grade and my father didn't want to work in the sand pits, so he went to trade school and learned to be a plumber.