The Very, Very Rich and How They Got That Way by Max Gunther Read Free Book Online

to make you rich.
    The product or service you sell need not be new and startling. It can be old, familiar even to the point of boredom. Hundreds of other men may be out selling it and indeed may have been selling it for centuries. None of this counts. What counts is that, somehow, you sell it better than your competitors are selling it. That’s how you make your millions.
    The story that follows is the story of a master salesman who sold something that was neither new nor startling – insurance – and ended with something like $400 million.
    W. Clement Stone: Four Hundred Million Dollars
    He is, among other things, chairman of the board and chief stockholder of the Combined Insurance Company of America, a board member and major stockholder of Alberto-Culver Company and board chairman of Hawthorn Books. It is entirely conceivable that the market value of his stocks will rise enough within a year or two to put him in the half-billion-dollar class.
    W. Clement Stone. He is one of the richest men in America and one of the hardest to put down on paper.
    It isn’t that he is deliberately elusive, in the manner of Howard Hughes and some other rich men. Stone doesn’t dodge the press. He is highly publicity-conscious in fact, and remarkably frank about his wealth and its sources. The difficulty is that he is a peculiar and maddening bundle of contradictions. A major magazine tried to put together a profile of him some years ago but gave up in despair. There were so many contradictory facets to his character that most of them seemed to cancel each other out. No clear picture of a man emerged. What emerged, instead, seemed to be a basket of ill-assorted fragments – not one man but several.
    Stone seems insufferably pious to some; he reminds them of a small-town revivalist minister. Yet he reminds others of a big-city huckster or circus pitchman.
    He is obviously a hardheaded pragmatist, a man who knows a lot about business and money and law. Yet on occasion he drifts into strange ethereal worlds: He supports studies of extrasensory perception, for instance.
    He is among the biggest of big businessmen, financially well worthy of appearing on
Business Week’s
cover. Yet he has never appeared there, and it is extremely hard to imagine him there. He simply doesn’t look like a big businessman. He looks more like a bit player from a cops-and-robbers movie of the 1930s. He is a short man with a round face. He wears his hair slicked straight back over his scalp. He wears an archaic pencil-line moustache in the style of Ronald Colman, colorful bow ties, dazzling cuff links, great flashy rings on his fingers. He incessantly smokes four-dollar Havana cigars, which he hoarded in a warehouse before political events cut off the supply.
    He sometimes talks and writes as though the acquisition of money is life’s only purpose. Yet he gives with unimpeachable generosity to boys’ clubs and treatment centers for drug addicts, and he does other good works. He gives not only money but time. His philanthropies must be counted as genuine, not simply tax gimmicks.
    He says the secret of his success is something called Positive Mental Attitude (PMA), and he publishes books and a magazine to spread the word. Some say his publishing ventures are cynically designed for profits. Others say he sincerely believes in PMA and genuinely wants other men to succeed as he did.
    He is an enigma, this Clement Stone. But let’s see what his life can teach us.
    If his story were fiction, it would be too corny to take seriously. W. Clement Stone, born on May 4, 1902, helped support his impoverished family on Chicago’s south side by selling newspapers.
    Selling newspapers.
Does it actually happen in real life?
    Evidently it does. Clem Stone, true to the classic tradition, was a spunky kid who fought hard to win and keep his selling territories. He was thrown out of one restaurant several times but kept sneaking back with more papers to peddle. The customers were