How Not to Get Rich Read online

  Twain had other jobs in Hannibal and seems to have been fired from all of them. He worked in a grocery store, in a tannery, and in a blacksmith shop. He worked at an apothecary, though “my prescriptions were unlucky, and we appeared to sell more stomach pumps than soda water.” He worked in a bookstore, but that didn’t work out either, because “customers bothered me so much I could not read with any comfort.” Eventually Orion took him on in the newspaper’s print shop. In time, Twain did get paid, and it was in the Hannibal Western Union that his first literary efforts were published.

  Only in retrospect does the appearance of Twain’s first writings seem like a historic occasion. He never viewed them as such, because he was not aware, then or for years to come, of any great literary calling. Self-styled “thought leaders” who say great success depends on finding one’s passion in life and pursuing it like a honey badger with an unrealistic agenda will find little support in these pages. Twain’s passion wasn’t to work in a print shop, pilot riverboats, write for newspapers, or even—as he would do in his twenties—prospect out West for gold and silver. Twain’s goal was to make money and then make even more money. Writing books was just a means to an end, and in 1886, when he wrote that check for $200,000 to General Grant’s widow, he was well on his way to realizing his dream.

  And now that he was amassing his fortune, he could accomplish even more. Because he was a successful publisher, he could stop writing altogether and make money off other authors’ books. He could invest in other businesses as well. He could be what we’d call an “angel investor” or venture capitalist. He could even turn his attention to his own inventions. He could do what his luckless father and brother had tried to do with their inventions but lacked the aptitude, connections, and financial wherewithal to succeed.

  Twain felt there was almost nothing he could not accomplish, as he admitted to a friend just months before his first payments to Grant’s widow. “I am frightened by the proportions of my prosperity,” he said. “It seems to me that whatever I touch turns to gold.”

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  “That Splendid Enterprise”

  Like many boys full of spirit and imagination, Mark Twain was never comfortable in the classroom. Albert Bigelow Paine, his authorized biographer, said Twain “detested school as he detested nothing else on earth,” and scholars seem to agree that his formal education ended when he was twelve. Upon his father’s death in 1847, Twain’s mother took their mischievous son into the room where the body lay and implored him to be a better boy. “I will promise anything,” he said, “if you won’t make me go to school.” Twain assured her he would hereafter be industrious and responsible, and forswear alcohol (but not tobacco). Twain’s mother consented. He never darkened a schoolhouse door again, except in later life when he took a daughter off to college or agreed to make an appearance or give a lecture.

  But Twain was an avid reader. In 1856, when he was not yet twenty, he was working as a typesetter in his older brother Orion Clemens’s new print shop, the Ben Franklin Book and Job Office. This was in Keokuk, Iowa, where there wasn’t much to do but read. Biographer Ron Powers describes Keokuk as a “hotbed of rest.” It was there that Twain happened onto William Herndon’s Exploration of the Valley of the Amazon: 1851–1852.

  This book made a slam-bang impression. Lieutenant Herndon was a great explorer who, while serving in the U.S. Navy, led an expedition from the headwaters of the Amazon to its mouth, over mountains and through jungles as yet unknown except to the tribes that lived there. Herndon’s 4,000-mile trek was a magnificent adventure, Twain recalled years later, “through the heart of an enchanted land, a land wastefully rich in tropical wonders, a romantic land where all the birds and flowers and animals were of the museum varieties, and where the alligator and the crocodile and the monkey seemed as much at home as if they were in the Zoo.”

  But what caught Twain’s fancy was not the fauna but the flora—one particular specimen of flora and its effect on the Inca Indians of the Andes. Herndon said these Indians were “silent and patient” in their seemingly endless labors in the silver mines because they enjoyed a ready supply of the Erythroxylon coca plant, now known as the source of cocaine. Chewing coca evidently elevated the workers’ mood and suppressed their appetite. It enabled them to labor tirelessly without complaint, precisely as would be wished by the industrialists who soon made their appearance in North and South America.

  As long as they had “coca enough to chew,” Herndon observed, the Incas would do “an extraordinary quantity of work.” They would take a break every morning, chew a little more coca, and then go right back to work. “It has made me, with my tropical habit of life, shiver to see these fellows puddling with their naked legs a mass of mud and quicksilver in water at the temperature of 38 degrees Fahrenheit,” Herndon wrote. It bothered him to watch these men working as hard as they did, but as long as they had coca leaves to chew on, it didn’t seem to bother them. Morale might not have been high, but “corporate culture” wasn’t an issue one way or the other.

  Twain was even more impressed than Herndon with the secret of maintaining such a dependable workforce, which was not then to be found in team-building exercises or the incentives of stock options and bonuses. Twain thought the coca plant possessed “miraculous powers.” It was “so nourishing and so strength-giving” that Incas working the mines “require no other sustenance.”

  Of course, Twain did not understand coca’s addictive and otherwise harmful properties. Not even the American drug companies recognized its dangers when they first began to market it decades later. In the early days, coca was used to flavor Coca-Cola—hence the name. Cocaine’s so-called recreational use did not become widespread until the 1970s. The blame for this can be cast widely, but no one, so far, has accused young Mark Twain of anything untoward, and they should not. By recognizing the financial possibilities of the coca leaf030, Twain was simply ahead of his time.

  WE UNDERSTAND A GREAT DEAL that people in Twain’s time did not. One of the great discoveries of our own age is that to succeed in business, you have to have what James Collins and Jerry Porras, in their 1994 classic Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies, called a Big Hairy Audacious Goal, or BHAG. If you or your organization don’t have a BHAG, you are probably doomed to fail, no matter how smart you are or how hard you work or even how great your mission statement might be. A BHAG, they say, is a “huge daunting challenge” that might be absurdly bold, but is at the same time clear, compelling, and energizing; also, it has a readily identifiable goal, even if it takes decades to reach it.

  Collins and Porras didn’t invent BHAGs; they just identified them and gave them a name. In fact, BHAGs date back thousands of years, “at least to Moses,” as Collins said in an interview. Henry Ford had one, as did Tom Watson of IBM. And it’s significant that a true BHAG looks “more audacious to outsiders than to insiders.” Insiders don’t “see their audacity as taunting the gods.” It never occurs to true visionaries that they can’t do what they set out to do.

  Mark Twain’s BHAG was to corner the world’s cocaine trade. “I was fired with a longing to ascend the Amazon,” he recalled. Specifically, he felt “a longing to open up a trade in coca with all the world. During months I dreamed that dream, and tried to conjure ways to get to Para [Brazil’s seaport] and spring that splendid enterprise upon an unsuspecting planet.” To that end, he assembled an organization—also key to achieving your BHAG, as Collins and Porras advise. Twain talked up the enterprise and recruited at least two eager associates. One was Joseph Martin, a Keokuk physician and lecturer in chemistry and toxicology at the Iowa Medical College—an astute move on Twain’s part, since Twain knew next to nothing about either subject. The other was a man named Ward, supposedly a businessman in the neighborhood, but that is about all anyone has been able to figure out.

  Twain, Martin, and Ward “agreed that no more shall be admitted into our company.” Although Orion had
expressed interest in kicking in startup money, Twain didn’t even want his older brother included. Shortly before he set off for the Amazon, Twain told their younger brother Henry Clemens how skeptical he was of Orion’s reliability and motives. He and Ward had

  determined to start to Brazil, if possible, in six weeks from now, in order to look carefully into matters there . . . and report to Dr. Martin in time for him to follow on the first of March. We propose going via New York. Now, between you and I and the fence you must say nothing about this to Orion, for he thinks that Ward is to go clear through alone, and that I am to stop at New York or New Orleans until he reports. But that don’t suit me. My confidence in human nature does not extend quite that far. I won’t depend upon Ward’s judgment, or anybody else—I want to see with my own eyes, and form my own opinion. But you know what Orion is. When he gets a notion into his head, and more especially if it is an erroneous one, the Devil can’t get it out again . . . Ma knows my determination but even she counsels me to keep it from Orion.

  Although Orion “talks grandly about furnishing me with fifty or a hundred dollars in six weeks,” Twain wrote, “I am not such an ass as to think he will retain the same opinion such an eternity of time—in all probability he will be entirely out of the notion by that time.” Orion probably just wanted Twain “to take all the hell out [of] pioneering in a foreign land, and then when everything was placed on a firm basis, and beyond all risk, he could follow himself.”

  So, on April 15, 1857, Twain set off for New Orleans on the Paul Jones, with thirty dollars to his name. By now, Martin and Ward had—for unexplained reasons—lost interest in the project. This left Twain, as CEO, on his own. With stops along the way, the Paul Jones reached New Orleans on April 26, by which time Twain was so low on funds as to be suspected of vagrancy.

  In New Orleans, Twain “inquired about ships leaving for Para and discovered there weren’t any and learned that there probably wouldn’t be any during that century.” He also found out that no ship had ever left New Orleans for Para. This was bad news. Twain needed to think about what it meant. “I reflected,” he would recall. “A policeman came and asked me what I was doing, and I told him. He made me move on, and said if he caught me reflecting in the public street again, he would run me in.”

  Twain biographer Albert Bigelow Paine says it never occurred to Twain “that it would be difficult to get to the Amazon and still more difficult to ascend the river. It was his nature to see results with a dazzling largeness” that sometimes blinded him to unpleasant realities. Or, as Twain himself admitted much later in life, beyond getting to New Orleans and from there to Brazil and making his fortune, “This was all the thought I had given to the subject. I never was great in matters of detail.”

  ON THE STREETS of the City That Care Forgot, Twain’s grand scheme to corner the cocaine market died. But for a mere quirk in maritime transport, the man we know as the creator of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn would never have had to go to the trouble of writing those books at all. Literature was Twain’s side hustle, after all, and had there actually been ships traveling from New Orleans to Brazil and back, he might be known today as the El Chapo out of Keokuk or as a proto–Pablo Escobar.

  But to his great credit, Twain seems to have lost little sleep over this early setback, which is a characteristic of all great business leaders. They are resilient. They let the past go, acknowledge their own shortcomings, and take reversals of fortune in stride. They see new opportunities and grab them. Twain said,

  By temperament, I was the kind of person that DOES things. Does them, and reflects afterward. So I started for the Amazon without reflecting and without asking any questions. That was more than fifty years ago. In all that time my temperament has not changed, even by a shade. I have been punished many and many a time, and bitterly, for doing things and reflecting afterward, but these tortures have been of no value to me; I still do the thing commanded by Circumstance and Temperament, and reflect afterward. Always violently. When I am reflecting on these occasions, even deaf persons can hear me think.

  Realizing he needed a Plan B, Twain left New Orleans on April 30, just four days after his arrival. And even before his boat pulled out from the docks, being smart, resourceful, and quick on his feet, Twain had found his new calling.

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  “Do You Gamble?”

  The pilot of the Paul Jones was Horace Bixby. This veteran of the Mississippi was at the wheel on the return trip from New Orleans when he turned to see a young man with a mop of red hair. Bixby noticed that the stranger spoke in a peculiar, drawling manner. People in that part of the country called it “pulling” one’s words.

  After introducing himself, the young man said he wanted to be a pilot too and asked if Bixby would train him. Pilots in those days could keep such an apprentice, or “cub.” The cub could travel with the steamer, at no cost to himself or to the ­pilot.

  There was something oddly endearing about this visitor, and Bixby was intrigued. Keeping his eyes on the river, he asked, “What makes you pull your words that way?”

  “You’ll have to ask my mother,” Twain said. “She pulls hers too.”

  What followed was a job interview, or what passed for one in less officious times.

  “Do you drink?” Bixby asked.

  “No.”

  “Do you gamble?”

  “No.”

  “Do you swear?”

  “Not for amusement; only under pressure.”

  “Do you chew?”

  “No, Sir, never,” Twain answered. “But I must smoke.”

  Twain had been a smoker since he was nine—“a private one during the first two years, but a public one after that—that is to say, after my father’s death.” Smoking wasn’t considered so objectionable then, except by exceedingly upright parents. It was not considered a problem, even in the workplace.

  “Did you ever do any steering?”

  “I have steered everything on the river but a steamboat, I guess.”

  “Very well,” Bixby said, stepping to the side. “Take the wheel and see what you can do with a steamboat. Keep her as she is—toward that cottonwood snag.”

  Twain must have done well enough, for the two soon entered into negotiations—or as Roger Fisher and William Ury of the Harvard Negotiation Project would have us say, they were Getting to Yes. For any negotiation to succeed, each party must want or need something from the other, as all the experts on negotiating skills tell us. What Twain needed was money. With his dreams of a world trade in coca leaves dashed, he also needed a career. And while Twain might not have known it at the time, there was something Bixby wanted from Twain, or from almost anybody, for that matter. Bixby had a sore foot. This made it painful for him to stand at the wheel for hours on end, maneuvering a 300-foot steamboat around tangles of fallen trees, as well as past islands that seemed to appear overnight, and steering the boat to ramshackle docks along the riverbank—half of the time when it was almost pitch dark and difficult to see.

  Bixby could use some relief at the wheel, but that assistance would have to come from someone who was confident, quick on his feet, and dependable enough to count on in the long days and nights ahead. Such a person would also have to be sufficiently intelligent to learn the river, which meant committing to memory the ever-changing Mississippi’s maddening idiosyncrasies.

  The youngster who stood before Bixby in the pilothouse seemed to fit the bill. Still, there remained the matter of money. Bixby said he would charge $500 to take Twain on. The training would take two years. After that, the cub could get his license and go out on his own. The pay would be handsome. But during his apprenticeship, he would receive no compensation, except for room and board, courtesy of the steamship company.

  “I haven’t got five hundred dollars in money,” Twain said. But, remembering the supposedly great fortune his father had left, he made a counterproposal. “I’ve got a lot of Tennessee land worth twenty-five ce
nts an acre; I’ll give you two thousand acres of that.”

  Bixby had no interest in “unimproved real estate.” The country had a surplus of it. You could see endless stretches of it up and down the river. There was almost nothing but empty land whichever way you looked.

  “Well, then,” Twain said. “I’ll give you one hundred dollars cash”—which of course he didn’t have—“and the rest when I earn it.”

  The Paul Jones was headed for St. Louis for repairs, which proved fortuitous. That is where Twain’s sister Pamela lived. Pamela (pronounced Pam-EE-lia) had married a prosperous merchant named William Moffett. Twain borrowed the $100 down payment from Moffett and paid Bixby. And when the Colonel Crossman—Bixby’s next piloting assignment—pulled away from the docks, Twain was in the pilothouse with him, studying the river and filling the first of several notebooks with what Bixby taught him.

  As for Bixby’s sore foot, history is silent. But he spent the rest of his life piloting riverboats and was still working until 1912, when, at the age of eighty-six, he died.

  THIS BEGAN THAT part of Twain’s life with which he is most closely associated, next to being an author. This at least is the period he romanticized, which is understandable. Being a steamboat pilot was a glamorous calling, especially for boys raised in drowsy river towns where the passing of these floating palaces was a momentous event. As a boy in Hannibal, Missouri, Twain and his friends had only one lasting ambition in life.

  When a circus came and went, it left us all burning to become clowns; the first negro minstrel show that ever came to our section left us all suffering to try that kind of life; now and then we had a hope that, if we lived and were good, God would permit us to be pirates. These ambitions faded out, each in its turn, but the ambition to be a steamboat man always remained.