My highlights from the book:

1. They had carried with them the frugal culture of Puritan New England, which John D. Rockefeller would come to exemplify. 

2. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that there was something extraordinary about the way this stolid boy pinpointed goals and doggedly pursued them without any trace of childish impulsiveness. 

3. Rockefeller later cited his mother’s altruism a the genesis of his philanthropy. Early in life, he learned that God wanted his flock to earn money and then donate money in a never-ending process. 

4. I was trained from the beginning to work and save. I always regarded it as a religious duty to get all I could honorably and to give all I could. 

5. His Baptist upbringing also predisposed him to follow the cult of perpetual self-improvement that played so prominent a role in nineteenth-century American culture. 

6. He wasn’t the sort to persist in a flawed situation. 

7. He had the ability to bear a large burden for long periods of time in an unruffled way. 

8. From his mother he learned economy, order, thrift, and other virtues that figured so largely in his success at Standard Oil. 

9. His mother trained her children to reflect cooly before making decisions; her frequent admonition “We will let it simmer” was a saying John employed throughout his business career. 

10. He learned to see himself as a reluctant savior, taking charge of troubled situations that needed to be remedied. 

11. The impression was gaining ground with me that it was a good thing to let the money be my slave and not make myself a slave to money. 

12. I have no recollection of John excelling at anything. I do remember he worked hard at everything; not talking much and studying with great industry. 

13. In an extremely peculiar arrangement, John, age fifteen, was already lending small sums to his father at interest; never sentimental when it came to business, he simply charged his father what the traffic would bear.

14. Rockefeller was the sort of stubborn person who only grew more determined with rejection. 

15. Rockefeller’s ecstatic boast to an older businessman one day: “I am bound to be rich—bound to be rich—BOUND TO BE RICH!”

16. If motivated by greed more than he ever cared to admit, Rockefeller also derived a glandular pleasure from work and never found it cheerless drudgery. 

17. Starting work at 6:30 am he would often return after dinner, staying late. One day he decided to throttle this obsession. “I have this day told myself not to be seen in the office after 10 pm for 30 days,” he wrote himself. It is telling that the young man made such a pledge to himself and equally revealing that he found it impossible to obey. 

18. He became a perceptive observer of the businessmen around and noted their avoidance of ostentation. 

19. As he said, “What a school—the school of adversity and stress—to train a boy in!”

20. John D. Rockefeller wasn’t one to dawdle in an unprofitable concern. 

21. His career had few wasted steps, and he never vacillated when the moment ripened for advancement. 

22. Oh how blessed the young men are who have to struggle for a foundation and a beginning in life. 

23. When rebuffed by a bank officer for a loan, he shot back in anger, “Some day I’ll be the richest man in the world.” 

24. He warned himself, “Because you have got a start, you think you are quite a merchant; look out, or you will lose your head—go steady. Are you going to let this money puff you up? Keep your eyes open. Don’t lose balance.” 

25. “These intimate conversations with myself had a great influence on my life. I was afraid I could not stand my prosperity, and tried to teach myself not to get puffed up with any foolish notions.”

26. The spot chosen for the new refinery tells much in miniature about Rockefeller’s approach to business. It seemed at first glance an inauspicious site for a refinery. But for Rockefeller, the inconvenience was outweighed by the fact that it would soon adjoin railroad tracks. Able to ship by water or over land, Rockefeller gained the critical leverage he needed to secure preferential rates on transportation—which was why he agonized over plant locations throughout his career. 

27. Since a residual of sulfuric acid remained after refining, Rockefeller drew up plans to convert it to fertilizer—the first of many worthwhile and extremely profitable attempts to create byproducts from waste materials. 

28. Shaped by a childhood of uncertainty, he aspired to be self-sufficient in business no less than in life and reacted to a perpetual shortage of barrels by deciding to build his own. 

29. Despite the unceasing vicissitudes of the oil industry, he would never experience a single year of loss.

30. Never one to do things halfway. 

31. The more agitated others became, the calmer he grew.

32. From this point forward, there would be no zigzags or squandered energy, only a single-minded focus on objectives that would make him both the wonder and terror of American business. 

33. Twenty-nine-year-old John D. Rockefeller demanded that seventy-four-year-old Commodore Vanderbilt come to him. This refusal to truckle, bend, or bow to others, this insistence on dealing with other people on his own terms, time, and turf, distinguished Rockefeller throughout his career. 

34. He worked at a more leisurely pace than many other executives, napping daily after lunch.

35. He mingled work and rest to pace himself and improve his productivity. “It is remarkable how much we all could do if we avoid hustling, and go along at an even pace and keep from attempting too much.”

36. Rockefeller never allowed his office decor to flaunt the prosperity of his business, lest it arouse unwanted curiosity. 

37. From the start, he owned more shares of Standard Oil than anybody else and exploited every opportunity to augment his stake. 

38. The year revealed both his finest and most problematic qualities as a businessman: his visionary leadership, his persistence, his capacity to think in strategic terms, but also his lust for domination, his messianic self-righteousness, and his contempt for those shortsighted mortals who made the mistake of standing in his way. 

39. Between February 17 and March 28, 1871—Rockefeller swallowed up twenty-two and his twenty-six Cleveland competitors. [This made him the world’s largest oil refiner. He was 31 years old.]

40. During the Cleveland Massacre, Rockefeller savored a feeling of sweet revenge against some of the older men who had patronized him when he started in business.

41. Rockefeller told him his firm would never survive if it didn’t sell out to Standard Oil. “I have ways of making money you know nothing about.”

42. As Rockefeller noted, “oftentimes the most difficult competition comes, not from the strong, the intelligent, the conservative competitor, but from the man who is holding on by the eyelids and is ignorant of his costs.”

43. Just as Carnegie expanded his steel operations after the 1873 panic, so Rockefeller saw the slump as a chance to translate his master blueprint into reality. 

44. Rockefeller could manufacture kerosene so inexpensively that he could sell below Warden’s [his competitor] production costs and earn a profit. 

45. He was now living a fantasy of extravagant wealth and few people beyond the oil business had ever even heard of him. 

46. Sell everything you’ve got even to the shirt on your back, but hold on to the stock.

47. Rockefeller seldom granted opportunities to strangers and preferred to be approached in writing.

48. Rockefeller equated silence with strength: Weak men had loose tongues and blabbed to reporters, while prudent businessmen kept their own counsel. “Success comes from keeping the ears open and the mouth closed.” and “A man of words and not of deeds is like a garden full of weeds.” 

49. “Do not 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?”

50. Rockefeller adhered to a fixed schedule, moving through the day in a frictionless manner.

51. Even his daily breaks were designed to conserve energy and help him to strike an ideal balance between his physical and mental forces. “It is not good to keep all the forces at tension all the time.”

52. Taking for granted the growth of his empire, he hired talented people as found, not needed.

53. Often the best way to develop workers—when you are sure they have character and think they have ability—is to take them to a deep place, throw them in and make them sink or swim. They will not fail.

54. I charted my course by figures, nothing but figures. 

55. That one drop of solder saved $2,500 the first year, but the business kept on increasing after that and became immensely greater than it was; and the saving has gone steadily along, one drop on each can, and has amounted since to many hundreds of thousands of dollars.

56. He saved on repairs by insisting that Standard build only solid, substantial plants, even if that meant higher startup costs. 

57. The thirty-eight-year-old Rockefeller had come to control nearly 90 percent of the oil refined in the United States. 

58. Rockefeller was a unique hybrid in American business: both the instinctive first-generation entrepreneur who founds a company and the analytic second-generation manager who extends and develops it. 

59. Standard Oil’s strategy was to furnish as little information as possible. 

60. His outside investments made him a one-man holding company. He held sizable stakes in 16 railroad companies, 9 real estate firms, 6 steel companies, 6 steamship companies, 9 banks, and 2 orange groves. 

61. Rockefeller entered retirement at the birth of the American automobile industry. The automobile would make John D. Rockefeller far richer in retirement that at work. 

62. Rockefeller’s psyche was like a set of Chinese boxes: If you penetrated the outer wall, then you faced another wall, then another, ad infinitum. 

63. His fortune had failed to purchase him even a poor man’s mite of tranquility.

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