What Dawned on Rockefeller: Making Money Your Slave, and What Really Happened
What actually helped, or pushed, John Rockefeller to become rich?
I think it wasn’t only that he could see and notice things, but that he acted on them. Read his biography; it’s really interesting.
The story that goes around the internet
There’s a story circulating online, supposedly told by Rockefeller himself:
Once, when I was 12, my brothers and I worked in the potato fields of a neighbor, a very enterprising and prosperous farmer. He paid us almost nothing, and whatever I had at the end of the day I put into a china piggy bank… Some time later I learned about bank interest: if you put money in the bank, you can earn income without doing anything at all. From then on I decided to make money my slave.
What really happened
It’s a nice story, but in this form it isn’t in Rockefeller’s memoir, Random Reminiscences of Men and Events (1909). There he tells a different one: he started his first “business” at seven or eight with his mother’s help, raising turkeys and selling them. And from childhood he kept a little book he called “Ledger A,” where he recorded his income, his expenses and the small sums he regularly gave to charity.
Potatoes did play a part too: as a teenager he hired himself out to neighbors to dig potatoes and lent his savings at interest. That’s when he noticed that the interest on a small loan brought in as much as several days of hard work. His biographer Ron Chernow quotes Rockefeller on this in the book Titan: the impression was growing on him that it was a good thing to let the money be his slave and not make himself a slave to money.
And the rule about passive income?
This story usually comes with a “Rockefeller rule”:
The only path to great wealth is passive income! Income that comes to you regardless of your efforts.
There’s no such rule in his memoir; it’s a modern phrasing attributed to Rockefeller. And he didn’t get rich from bank interest either, but from work and business: in 1870 he founded the oil company Standard Oil. Still, the core idea is right: money should work for you, not the other way around.
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