Focus on building a system that can identify talent, deploy capital, foster good partnerships, and maintain control with minimal direct operational involvement, allowing for broad influence and continuous learning without attracting undue attention.
Understand that economic downturns are inevitable and create opportunities to acquire valuable assets at reduced prices, allowing the prepared few to expand their empires while others struggle for survival.
Practice patience in investments, understanding that significant wealth is generated by holding assets and waiting for them to grow over time, rather than chasing quick transactions.
Foster a win-win environment by ensuring that partners and operators also get rich, as this pragmatically leads to real success and reciprocation.
Cultivate a relentless, lifelong drive to learn continuously, acquiring a little bit of extra knowledge every day, as this compounds significantly over a long life.
Use a profession (like law) not as an end in itself, but as an observation post to systematically understand economic flows, spot investment opportunities (e.g., in real estate, foreclosures, property development), and collect assets rather than just fees.
Stay out of the headlines, move in silence, don’t brag, don’t try to be seen, and don’t chase attention to build a fortune and avoid negative consequences.
Build a ‘fortress of wealth’ through decades of systematic financial planning, ensuring sufficient capital and insulation from market panics, allowing you to avoid forced selling and instead capitalize on dislocations.
Identify and retain exceptional operators by compensating them well and granting them autonomy, allowing them to work effectively within the system with patience.
Reinvest profits and dividends from successful ventures back into the system to fuel new opportunities, creating a perpetual capital deployment machine and an expanding network of businesses.
Cultivate a network of relationships, as they lead to intelligence, which in turn creates opportunities, forming a self-reinforcing cycle of success and growth.
Apply systematic precision and business principles to large-scale financial challenges (like national debt), using elegant solutions such as refinancing at lower rates and staggering repayment terms to save significant costs and manage obligations effectively.
When creating a lasting legacy or institution, prioritize the long-term growth and purpose of the entity over personal ego, explicitly refusing to put your name on it if it allows for greater future contributions and expansion from others.
Focus on creating a true legacy by building conditions and institutions that are designed to outlast you and enable something greater than yourself to grow and flourish long into the future.
When establishing an institution, carefully design its governance structure (e.g., a board with a controlling majority of trusted private citizens) and precisely select trustees who will protect its independence and uphold high standards.
View interactions, even challenging ones like press conferences, as learning opportunities; admit what you don’t know, then actively seek out experts to fill knowledge gaps, ensuring you are more informed for future engagements.
Focus on achieving tangible results and efficient operations, treating public opinion or optics as irrelevant noise, especially when confident in the systematic soundness of your approach.
Employ silence as a strategic tool in conversations, listening intently and only breaking it to ask laser-precise, critical questions that get to the core of a proposition.
When facing strong competition or attempts to control your business, innovate and build alternative infrastructure or solutions rather than engaging in direct, costly battles, to maintain independence and competitive advantage.
Treat business failures or missed opportunities as valuable learning experiences, integrating insights from them to refine strategies and make future decisions smarter.
When exploring new ventures or solutions (like industrial research), start small with a trial period to test viability, and only commit fully with significant resources once early projects demonstrate promise.
When facing complex problems or identifying new opportunities, practice patience by observing and waiting for the right solution or partnership to emerge, rather than rushing into action.
Employ patience and systematic thinking to position oneself strategically ahead of future events, allowing for significant advantage when those events (e.g., war, market shifts) occur.
Build an intricate system of vertically integrated businesses where each component (e.g., land, lumber, financing, fuel) reinforces the others, providing unprecedented influence and advantage over competition.
Seek out or create flexible financial structures (like trust companies in their era) that allow for a broad range of investment activities, including venture capital, to expand beyond traditional banking limitations.
Study biographies of successful individuals (like Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography) as a manual for success, not just inspiration, to gain instruction and principles that guide one’s path.
Focus educational curriculum ruthlessly on practical subjects (reading, writing, arithmetic) that are necessary and useful for future business endeavors, eliminating perceived distractions like poetry and fiction.
Engage children in reading business material (reports, financial news, economic theory) and discussing it critically with them, fostering an apprenticeship in analytical thinking and critical engagement with ideas.
Instill in children the philosophy that life is a competition where only the fittest survive, preparing them for an industrial battlefield by focusing on practical, necessary skills for business.
Approach significant life partnerships, like marriage, with a systematic and analytical lens, impartially assessing complementary strengths and qualities to structure a beneficial partnership.
Recognize the limits of applying purely rational, systematic business principles to personal relationships and emotional domains like marriage, as these areas require different approaches than balance sheets or income statements.
Practice reciprocation by going positive and going first in partnerships and dealings, trusting that making others successful will lead to the world doing most of the work for you.
Engage in political influence (e.g., quietly funding politicians) to ensure policies (like tariffs) protect business interests and foster prosperity, viewing it as an efficient business practice.
Employ counterintuitive thinking in policy or business by sometimes lowering ‘prices’ (e.g., tax rates) to incentivize behavior (e.g., productive investment, honest reporting) that ultimately increases total revenue or achieves desired outcomes.
View recessions as rare opportunities for the financially strong to consolidate power by acquiring weaker entities, and be prepared to seize these moments decisively.
Be acutely aware of the long time it takes to build a reputation and how quickly it can be ruined, using this awareness to guide decisions and actions differently, especially in public-facing roles.
Approach economic downturns as a natural, necessary process for purging excesses, allowing the system to reset, and be prepared to endure the suffering until the system corrects itself.
Embrace a self-reliant philosophy: always be prepared, avoid overextending to prevent circumstances from forcing poor decisions, be prudent, and understand that personal responsibility is paramount as no external entity will save you.