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

so amused by his gall that they finally prevailed on the owner to stop heaving the youngster out on the sidewalk. With a bruised bottom but a full pocket, Stone went away to ponder the meaning of this episode.
    He was that kind of kid – and, later, that kind of man. He was fond of mulling over his experiences to see what could be milked out of them for future profit. “What did I do right?” he would ask himself. “What did I do wrong? How will I approach that kind of situation next time?” He badgered himself with such questions throughout this life. He tried, in fact, to reduce all of life to a formula. He wanted to write a kind of code by which to guide himself. A set of short, pithy instructions that would lead him safely and profitably through any thicket of personal or business problems.
    He believes he has succeeded in that aim. He has arrived at just such a set of instructions. As we’ll note later (chapter 5), the instructions aren’t totally clear to everybody else. But they are obviously quite clear to Stone – and in his case, at least, they have worked magnificently.
    Stone, an only child, was raised by his mother. His father died when the boy was very young. The books and articles Clem Stone wrote in later life indicated that his mother had a profound influence on his character. She managed somehow to combine a deeply felt piety with a tigerishly aggressive business instinct – a combination that shows up today in Stone himself. She and he alike seemed to see God as a kind of business partner or moral stockholder. They prayed for courage, guidance and luck in their business ventures. Rewarded, they felt obligated to pay their divine stockholder dividends in the form of personal virtue, good works and more prayer. In the success formulas that Stone wrote as an older man, he classified the Bible as a kind of self-help book.
    Stone was also influenced, he says, by the works of Horatio Alger. He read some 50 Alger books as a boy and was impressed by Alger’s suggestion that God rewards the virtuous with cash.
    Stone’s mother worked for several years as a seamstress. She managed to save a little money. When young Clem was in his teens, she invested her savings in a small insurance agency in Detroit.
    It was a risky move. The investment actually bought nothing more than a business connection and a spoonful of goodwill. The agency was in business to sell health-and-accident policies of a single company, U.S. Casualty Company of Detroit. For each policy sold, the agency kept a commission – and that was its only income. The agency bore all expenses except those of printing the policies and paying the claims. Its only assets were a small, dusty rented office, a few items of office equipment and the abilities of its sales force.
    The sales force – in fact, the entire staff – consisted of one woman, Stone’s mother. She sold nothing on her first day of business. That night, according to Stone’s own account, she prayed. She prayed some more the next morning. And then she went to Detroit’s biggest bank, sold a policy to one of its officers, got permission to roam about the building and ended the day with 44 sales. Horatio Alger would have loved her.
    The agency prospered. And in the summer before his junior year of high school, young Clem went out to try his hand as a salesman.
    His mother instructed him to go to a certain office building and cold-canvass it from top to bottom. He was frightened. But his days as a newsboy came back to him, and as he stood trembling on the sidewalk outside the office building he reviewed some of the pithy self-goads with which he had prodded himself back then. One went something like “When there’s nothing to lose and much to gain by trying, try.” Another went, “Do it now!”
    So he did it. He marched into the building. Had he been thrown out he was prepared to go back in just as he had gone back into the restaurant years before to peddle papers. He wasn’t