The Richest Man of All Time: My Favorite John D Rockefeller Quotes

Concentration, boldness, and old grandmothers

Author

Ben Wilson
February 28, 2024

Hey 👋🏼

Last week featured an episode on John D Rockefeller. If you missed it you can find it on Spotify here, or on Apple Podcasts here. Rockefeller was a genius, but he believed that his leadership was learnable, or in his words, “as purchasable a commodity as sugar or coffee.”

Here are my favorite quotes from how he approached leadership and business:

The Quotes

They say the mustache makes the man

  1. A quote about what stops us from achieving great things:

"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.”

  1. Rockefeller had an extremely high pain tolerance. He could put up with anything to accomplish what he thought was important. Here is how he put it:

“You can abuse me, you can strike me… so long as you let me have my way.”

  1. This one just made me laugh and shows his boldness. This is what he had to say about a partner (who he soon dropped) who wanted to pull back on borrowing because he thought oil was a risky business.

“Clark was very angry when I borrowed money to extend our business of refining oil. Clark was an old grandmother and was scared to death because we owed money at the banks.”

  1. Always be on the side of those who want to be aggressive and move quickly.

“There are always aggressive and daring men, perhaps few in number, but impetuous and convincing. They want to accomplish things and to move quickly, and they don’t mind any amount of work or responsibility. At all events, this was the side I represented.”

  1. Rockefeller cuts a deal with the railroads and screws over every other refiner in Cleveland. He starts buying them all for pennies because they now have no way to ship their oil. One guy stands up for himself, screaming “I’m not afraid of you!” Rockefeller calmly responds:

“You may not be afraid to have your hand cut off, but your body will suffer.”

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