Andrew Carnegie says you're too satisfied to be successful

Summary

one question for you. are you too satisfied to chase success. sit with it. read it again. it takes self awareness to answer and most people skip past it. that’s what this whole episode is.

1. I have a book of Andrew Carnegie’s collected speeches. I like studying the men who built America, Carnegie, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, less for tactics, more for mindset. their business practices would be illegal today. their head was right. one speech in particular is worth reading slowly.

2. Carnegie on the sons of rich men. every moralist hard up for a theme blames the foolish sons. Carnegie blames the fathers. there’s nothing wrong with the boys except they’re unlucky to be born to a man who refuses to make them work. he gives the deer hound metaphor. the dog hunted hard his whole life and then tells the puppies, here, eat as much as you want, don’t move. the puppies turn into mangy pug dogs, useless.

3. that’s what fathers are doing to their kids, Carnegie says. and he goes further, says it would be better if a son could inherit nothing but a good education and a good constitution. nothing else.

4. then he goes after our modern instinct to abolish poverty entirely. he argues poverty is the soil all virtues grow from. without effort, without honest work, the race regresses. it’s a stark take. it’s also useful in 2023 because most of us today are richer in quality of life than the rich men Carnegie was preaching to.

5. food is delivered. we sleep eight hours. we lift nothing heavier than groceries. we are the rich men’s sons of his time. so the question repeats. with all this comfort, are you too satisfied to keep chasing.

6. for someone in a stable W2 with the basics covered, the side hustle never has urgency behind it. for someone in a business making 20% more than they planned, the drive can quietly turn off. that slowdown is fine if you chose it. very not fine if it happened to you and you’re still wondering why nothing is moving.

7. people misuse “burn the ships.” they say it about focus, drop the other side projects, focus on one thing. that’s not what burning the ships means. burning the ships means there is no exit, no fallback, you hurt for it. that level of desperation forces a work ethic that comfort never demands. I’m not telling you to quit your job. I’m asking you to answer the question honestly. if you don’t have a big enough reason, the work ethic won’t show up. try harder.

Transcript

are you too satisfied to chase success

But that’s not what actually burning the ships means. But burning the ships mean is like you need to hurt. You need to be in pain. There can be no escape or exit. Once you are at that level of desperation, you’ll realize what kind of work ethic it actually takes to be successful and build a business.

But if you don’t actually hurt for it and you’re too satisfied, you may never actually be able to break the mold and get there. The most impactful business is the business that genuinely improves another human, a better human business. And to grow a business like this, you have to continually improve yourself.

This podcast is a documentation of that thesis, scaling businesses and also personal growth. My goal is for you to shortcut this journey. So if you’re ready to try hard, subscribe. If you like what you’re hearing, please share and enjoy. This is the Better Human Business Podcast. I am Jerred Moon. A question I have for you, something to be thinking about as we get through the content today.

Are you too satisfied to chase success? Really sit with that question and think about it as we go through some of the things I’m going to talk about. And if you have a job, a side hustle, or you’ve already grown a business to a point where you don’t feel like you’re driving as hard forward anymore, you may not feel like you’re driving as hard forward anymore.

My question to you is, are you too satisfied to chase success? And I think it takes a lot of self-awareness to be able to answer that question. What I’m going to be going over today, I have a book of collected speeches from Andrew Carnegie. And I’m always fascinated in studying other entrepreneurs.

I really like the very early, you know, the men who built America, Andrew Carnegie, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt. I like studying those types of entrepreneurs from an early standpoint in America, mainly to take away some of their mindsets and concepts, because tactically, a lot of their business practices would basically be illegal these days, but they still were smart dudes, and there’s a lot that you can learn from them.

And then more tactically, I love to jump to, you know, Bezos or Warren Buffett and those types of people to still stick with concepts and things that you can learn. But I have a book of his collected speeches. Some of his most popular ones, and I’ll probably reference it from time to time. But he, in this speech, I’m going to read a couple pages from this book.

You know, he’s kind of talking to, you know, like what’s happening to young men as we gain more wealth. And he’s talking specifically about the wealth of rich men’s sons. So I think this applies to men. Women doesn’t matter. Obviously from his time, he’s going to be focusing on men, but I think it’s applicable all across the board.

carnegie on the sons of rich men

And what he’s talking about, a rich man’s son back then in the late 1800s, early 1900s. You right now listening to this are probably 10 times richer than that person. And I don’t mean by dollar amount, I mean by quality of life. Getting your food delivered to you, being able to sleep eight or nine hours a day, not having to do any manual labor for anything ever at all.

It’s just, we’re all wealthy, whether you think you are or not. So let me get right into it. Every moralist hard up for a theme asks at intervals, what is the matter with the sons of our rich and great men? The question is followed by statistics on the wickedness and bad endings of such sons. The trouble with the moralist is that they put the question wrong in first.

There’s nothing wrong with those foolish sons, except that they are unlucky. But there is something wrong with their fathers. Boom, I love how Andrew Carnegie is just going straight to ownership. There’s nothing wrong with the son, the father messed up. All right, back to the speech. Suppose that a fine specimen of an old deer hound, very successful in his business, should collect untold deer in the park, fatten them up and then say to his puppies, here boys, I have had a hard life catching these deer.

And I mean to see you enjoy yourselves. I’m so used to racing through the woods and hunting that I can’t get out of the habit. But you boys just pile up into the park and help yourselves. Such a deer hound as that would be scorned by every human father. The human father would say to such a dog, Mr. Hound, you’re simply ruining those puppies.

Too much meat and no exercise will give them the mange and 17 other troubles. And if this temper doesn’t kill them, they will be a knock-kneed, watery-eyed lot of disgraces to you. For heaven’s sake, keep them down to a dog biscuit and work them hard. Not at today’s reference there on deer hound, but it makes sense, right?

The same human father does with great pride the very thing that he would condemn in our dog or cat. He ruins his child. And then when he gets old, profusely and sadly observes that he has done everything for them. And yet they have disappointed him. He who gives to his son an office which he has not deserved and enables him to disgrace his father and friends deserves no more sympathy than any Mr. Fagin deliberately educating a boy to be honest.

The Mr. Fagin reference to Oliver Twist in 1838. The fat, useless pug dogs which young women drag wheezing about at the end of strings are not to blame for their condition. And the same thing is true for rich men’s sons. The young women who overfeed the dogs and the fathers who ruin their sons have themselves to thank.

No man would advocate the thing perhaps but who can doubt that if there could be a law making it impossible for a man to inherit anything but a good education and a good constitution it would supply us in short order with a better lot of men. Okay, so just real break from that real quick. First, I think it’s interesting that he’s saying that people were fattening up dogs.

the over fed dog metaphor

That was probably newer back then. Dogs had a lot of utility. And then once people started putting them on leashes and overfeeding them, feeding them human food they got fat and then basically saying that’s what’s happening to humans today and what rich men are doing to their sons and daughters as I’ll throw in there.

And then he’s saying if there was any law that would be awesome is that you can’t pass your money down. It’s just that the only thing that you could inherit would be a good education and a good constitution like a good work ethic. He’s saying how much better would mankind be if that’s all you could have.

He continues, it is not the poor young man who goes forth to his work in the morning and labors until evening that we should pity. It is the son of the rich man to whom Providence has not been so kind as to trust with this honorable task. It is not the busy man, but the man of idleness who should arouse our sympathy and cause us sorrow.

Happy is the man who has found his work says Carlyle. I say happy is the man who has to work and to work hard and work long. A great poet has said, he prayeth best who loveth best. Someday this may be parodied into he prayeth best who worketh best. An honest day’s work well-performed is not a bad sort of prayer.

He goes on and continues and this even gets into politics today. He’s talking about how people are crying like, hey, we should abolish poverty. We’re in such a rich time, no one should hurt for money or hurt for the normal things. And he argues that’s not really possible. He says, abolish poverty and what would become of the race?

Progress development would cease. Consider its future if dependent upon the rich. The supply of the good and the great would cease and human society retrograde into barbarism. Abolish luxury if you please, but leave us the soil upon which alone the virtues and all that is precious in human character grow.

Poverty, honest poverty. Really great and this goes on. I could read more and I probably will in future podcast episodes. But he ultimately says, what you wanna do for a living, he goes on and says, what you wanna do for a living doesn’t really matter. What matters is can you be useful to the community?

you are richer than 1900’s rich

Can you become proficient in that job? And then can you get paid for that? Can you do hard work? And if you’ve read my book, Killing Comfort, I highlight a lot of these kinds of things from John F. Kennedy to Theodore Roosevelt and a lot of different historical examples of you know, very successful people saying, hey, we need to focus on work ethic.

We need to focus on people killing comfort as I would say to continue to move forward. Now, the reason I bring this up is because I don’t feel like a lot has changed. The only thing that’s changed for us today is that we all, no matter your economic condition, are as well off or more well off than these quote unquote rich people from the early 1900s.

And so a lot of times I see it happening if someone’s starting a side hustle and they already have a really successful job or a job that to be honest might not even be like over the park awesome, but it hamstrings you just enough because you have all your basic necessities taken care of so you don’t actually have to grind that hard.

You want to, but the real desire is not there. And then if that’s going from side hustle to full-time, now what I see with people in full-time businesses trying to grow a business is they may actually just get to a point where they’re making more money than they thought they ever would. And for every human being that could be different.

But basically if there was an amount you thought you could earn per month that would just meet all your needs, say you earn 20% more than that number and you get there and you’re like, okay, why am I still pushing? Why am I still driving? And a lot of times people don’t know this is happening to them.

They don’t continue to push. They don’t continue to drive. They slow down a little bit and that’s fine. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that. If you make that choice consciously, if you’re like, okay, look, I am good. I don’t need more money. I don’t need more things. But you need to know, are you too satisfied to continue to chase success?

Because if you have a team, they want to keep pushing forward. They want a mission to be following. So you can’t become this overfed dog that just sits in the park and does nothing. You have to find some reason to push harder. So answering the questions beyond anything monetary, like what’s driving you?

what burning the ships actually means

Like, why do you want to do this? These are, that’s why these important, these questions are important to answer when you’re trying to figure out what’s driving you. These questions are important to answer because you have to have something that keeps you going. What keeps you moving? A lot of times I hear this like, okay, well, I’m going to burn the ships and go all in on this thing.

But a lot of times when I hear people reference this burn the ships analogy, they’re talking about, okay, I have too many things going on. I’m going to burn the ships so I can focus on this one thing. And they’re using it through the lens of focus. But that’s not what actually burning the ships means.

But burning the ships mean is like, you need to hurt. You need to be in pain. There can be no escape or exit. Once you are at that level of desperation, you’ll realize what kind of work ethic it actually takes to be successful and build a business. But if you don’t actually hurt for it and you’re too satisfied, you may never actually be able to break the mold and get there.

So I’m not telling you to go quit your job if you are in part-time mode and actually burn the ships. You know, but you have to know if you don’t have a gigantic reason why you’re chasing what you want, you’re not going to have the work ethic it requires to get to the next level. Are you too satisfied to chase success?

Answer that question. Give it two minutes to at least think about it today. Because I tell everybody to try harder all the time. And I say try harder because if your back was truly up against a wall and you had to have something work, you probably wouldn’t be talking to me. You probably would just be figuring it out.

You would just do what you had to. You would try harder. You would figure it out. But a lot of us aren’t actually in that position. We don’t have our backs up against the wall. We don’t have that level of desperation. The required work ethic is not there. And until you get there, you won’t understand it.

So if you’re wondering why the needle might not be moving or why the needle has stopped moving, it’s probably because you’re too satisfied to truly do what it takes to chase success. So answer the question, are you too satisfied to chase success? And what will actually make you try harder?