Today, I want to start a series that will explore the lives and secrets of notable christian business moguls in modern history.
I am unashamedly a Christian Business man and a covenant practitioner. What I will be sharing with you are some of my sources of inspiration. There are some secrets that you can’t find in a Harvard or Yale textbook except in the Holy Bible.
In life you can either succeed by experimenting until you find the secret success formula or you can simply study the lives of successful people and replicate what they do within your unique context. The later is faster and its my chosen route.
John D. Rockefeller is one of my biggest inspiration. He is an undoubtedly regarded as the greatest businessman to ever live and will forever be remembered as one of the greatest capitalist and philanthropist in the world. He was a Bible believing Christian.
He was a man with ruthless business tactics, exceptional talent, strategic brilliance, and a passion for philanthropy. He was one of the richest oil magnates in the history and as of today (2019), he is still the wealthiest person in modern history. He was the first man to ever accumulate $1 Billion US Dollars.
By age 31 he had become the world’s largest oil refiner – Standard Oil Company (which was eventually broken up by the US government into what would later become ExxonMobil, Chevron, and Amoco).
As at the age 38, he commanded 90% of the oil refined in the U.S. By the time of his retirement at age 58, he was the richest man in America. As at the age of 74, his peak net worth was estimated at $340 billion in 1913.
By the time he died at age 97, he had become the richest man in the world. This was on May 23, 1937. What a life worth studying!
Let’s examine some of his life and business principles:
Life and Business Principles of John D. Rockefeller
(1) If you want to succeed you should strike out on new paths, rather than travel the worn paths of accepted success.
(2) Don’t be afraid to give up the good to go for the great.
(3) Live within your means. One of the swiftest pitfalls I know of is for a young man just starting in life to get into debt.
(4) Good management consists in showing average people how to do the work of superior people.
(5) I do not think that there is any other quality so essential to the success of any kind as the quality of perseverance. It overcomes almost everything, even nature.
(6) If your only goal is to become rich, you will never achieve it.
(7) I believe in the dignity of labor, whether with head or hand; that the world owes no man a living but that it owes every man an opportunity to make a living.
(8) Charity is injurious unless it helps the recipient to become independent of it.
John D. Rockefeller believed that true giving is more than just money. You must give power to the recipient in the form of skills, knowledge or a simple investment in their goal pursuit.
(9) There’s no mystery in business success. If you do each day’s task successfully and stay faithfully within these natural operations of commercial laws which I talk so much about and keep your head clear, you will come out all right.
(10) I would rather earn 1% off a 100 people’s efforts than 100% of my own efforts.
(11) The most important thing for a young man is to establish a credit, a reputation, character.
(12) Many of us who fail to achieve big things, fail because we lack concentration – the art of concentrating the mind on the thing to be done at the proper time and to the exclusion of everything else?
Which of these principles make the greatest impression in you? I particularly like (8). Feel free to share your thoughts with me in the comments below.
Talk soon!
