The Templeton Plan

by Sir John Templeton

  Templeton recalls a school near where he grew up in Winchester, Tennessee, that tried to teach more than reading, writing, and arithmetic. The Webb School was started by an elderly man named Shaunee Webb. The motto of the school was “We Teach Character.” Webb regarded it as his principal purpose to teach students the laws of life along with Latin, history, and mathematics. Many graduates of the Webb School became nationally known, their success based on what they learned from the founder.

  Templeton says: “I am now offering prizes for the best essays on the laws of life, written by high school and college students. My hope is that this will create a beautiful snowball effect. The students writing the essays will have to read extensively in the fields of ethics, religion, and philosophy. Consequently, at a very young age, they will have formulated their own laws and will learn to focus on them. When the prizewinning essays are published, they will reach others, and gradually a literature on the laws of life can be built up.

  “Taking that thought a step further, it might even be possible to develop a world council on the laws of life. I believe there are such laws that every religion believes in. We might thereby produce a world view, thus eliminating conflicts between individuals and even nations, because we will have developed a more sophisticated understanding of the principles that unify us.

  “My guess is that there are literally hundreds of such laws that can be agreed on by 99 percent of all people. It would then be possible to prepare textbooks for high schools and colleges so that there could be courses on the laws of life. I believe that such a program would help religions and governments to cooperate with one another more easily.”

  Step 1 teaches you to study the laws of life as you proceed on the road to success and happiness. Study those you know and search for new ones. The list of those laws we have examined is small:

  Truthfulness Humility

  Reliability Pleasing others

  Faithfulness Giving

  Perseverance Learning from others

  Enthusiasm Joy

  Energy Altruism

  There are many more laws, perhaps hundreds more. Start with these twelve and apply the meaning of each law to your own life. Are you lacking in energy? Could you use an extra dose of enthusiasm? Consider this a checklist to use to monitor your own strengths and weaknesses. Remember: The laws of life are the basic building blocks for a successful and happy life.

  STEP 2

  USING WHAT YOU HAVE

  DURING JOHN TEMPLETON’S four decades as an investment counselor, he has seen many families who have left their children great wealth. But that kind of inheritance can create more problems than it solves. He likes to quote the founder of Pennsylvania, William Penn, who said, “He who is taught to live upon little owes more to his father’s wisdom than he who has a great deal left him does to his father’s care.”

  In studying hundreds of clients, Templeton has never been able to discern a connection between happiness and inherited wealth. In fact, in most cases the inheritance of wealth has done more harm than good. It tends to give people false values and causes them to show personal pride without having earned that pride. It causes people to take the edge off their efforts.

  Templeton is convinced that the young should earn their own spending money. A child needs to learn to work as early as six years old. Although it takes an expenditure of time and imagination for the parent to figure out what a child of six can do that is useful, there are many activities that will teach a child the meaning of pride in work. In the country, children can tend a lemonade stand, or grow radishes to sell to the grocery store, or collect cans for the return of the deposit. In the city, children can be assigned chores around the apartment.

  Templeton, who grew up in the rural South, feels that it’s rare for a country child to get in trouble with the law later in life. On a farm, children can feed the farm animals or help with the preparation of food; they are more likely than their city counterparts to become useful members of the family at a very young age. As a result, they will mature earlier and have a firmer grasp of the laws of life.

  Contrary to current psychological opinion, children in many respects are miniature adults. They have a burning desire to stand on their own two feet. Thus, when a mother does her daughter’s homework, feeling she’s helping the child, she is actually doing her harm in the long run. Granted, the child will get good grades the next day in school. But it’s far better to take the longer and more arduous route and show the girl how to do the long division herself. She will then have more personal pride and self-confidence, feel more adult, and be better able to take the next step in school, because today’s lesson is based on what was learned the previous day. If the mother causes her daughter to miss out on that single step in her progress, then the daughter may have trouble picking it up later.

  As mentioned in Step 1, the successful person learns from others. By careful observation, you can monitor the mistakes of others and not make them yourself. You can also begin to see who is happy and why they are happy. Train yourself to watch those in your school, at your place of employment, in your own family. And listen to what they say. Listening intelligently is a key to success, because you are storing up the wisdom and the folly of others and beginning to discriminate between the two.

  Never forget that learning is a lifetime activity of vast importance. John Templeton recalls a friend from his high school who, upon graduating, got a job and never read another book. He watched television in his spare time, went to movies, did some hunting and fishing, but made no effort to expand the frontiers of his mind. At age forty, he was no better educated than he’d been at sixteen, and that’s the sign of a wasted life. Wasted lives are never successful lives.

  In fact, we’re in a position to learn more once we’re out of school, because school is a kind of hothouse environment; it is later, out in the world, that we meet the realities of life. Once we are involved in the world of work, books should take on an even greater importance. We can test them against our greater maturity and knowledge. We can absorb their messages with a more profound understanding.

  Years ago John Templeton set himself a goal to learn something new each day. It is important not to let a day go by without learning the meaning of an unfamiliar word, without a new insight, without experiencing a fresh taste, thought, or sensation. If you travel to your job by bus, watch the other passengers. You will discover that the majority of them do absolutely nothing. They simply sit there. Are they thinking something significant? Are they working out a problem? The chances are they are letting time die, unused.

  But those who are going to get ahead, who will achieve success, will refuse to waste their moments on that bus. They will study. They will read or write. They will use their time, to and from school or work, for self-improvement, production, and continued learning.

  By listening to the passengers on that bus you can guess with fair accuracy who is going to achieve success and who is not. If you hear someone saying that “he said so and so and she said so and so and then he said so and so,” you can bet that person is not forging ahead. But the one who is saying that “this is what I learned yesterday; this is what I hope to accomplish today” is a person on the road to success.

  Besides perfecting the art of listening, the successful person is the one who asks questions. You don’t learn much if you’re doing the talking. Form the habit of asking yourself, “What can I learn from this person?” Discover what the individual likes to talk about and then ask questions in that area of interest. This practice will pay off in two ways: You will please the person by asking intelligent questions and at the same time you will learn something yourself.

  Successful people seek advice more often than they give it. John Templeton gives an illustration of this strategy from his days as a young man working for the National Geophysical Company in Dallas, Texas. It was his first major job after college and he was bent on succeeding. At least once a month he approached his employer and said, “What can
I do to improve my work?” Again, there was a twofold benefit: While Templeton learned how to do a better job, his boss realized how sincere he was in his desire to improve. Within a year, he became financial vice-president of the company; the key to his advancement, he’s convinced, was his attitude of constantly asking questions.

  The question “What would you do if you were me?” is a stepping-stone toward success. By asking that question, you’ll not only get creative suggestions but other people will realize that you’re the type of person whose career course is decidedly on the upward swing.

  A candidate for success should always carry a library. You can make the minutes count, whether waiting at the airport to board an airplane or holding on to a strap on the subway. You may be catching up on office work, or analyzing current events, or simply reading to improve your mind and widen your knowledge.

  If you arrive early for an appointment, you can have papers to occupy you while you wait. By having books and papers with you at all times—your portable library—you can always accomplish something that will advance your career that much more quickly.

  Success comes more easily to those who were given sound role models. John Templeton was most fortunate in that respect. He was born into a family of modest means in the small town of Winchester, Tennessee. His father, Harvey Maxwell Templeton, was a lawyer by profession, even though he’d never attended college. But, in a town of fewer than 2,000 people, you couldn’t earn a living from legal work alone. Showing the entrepreneurial flair that would become his son’s trademark, he built and operated a cotton gin, which sometimes produced as many as 2,000 bales of cotton in one season. Even though the farmers paid Harvey only two dollars a bale, that was enough to support the Templeton family throughout the year.

  But it was only a beginning. Like his son, Harvey Templeton was never satisfied with less than the utmost effort.

  His business led to a cotton storage venture, to fertilizer retailing, to profitable speculation on the New York and New Orleans cotton exchanges. Young John listened eagerly to tales of the wheeling and dealing that engaged much of his father’s attention each week.

  Nor did Harvey Templeton stop there.

  He was also an agent for a number of insurance companies. He was acutely sensitive to ways he could profit from the rise and fall of the rural economy in his section of Tennessee. When farms came up for auction because of non-payment of real estate taxes, he would buy a farm if the price was unusually low. He would then plan to resell the farm for a profit at a later date.

  Young John was always watching and evaluating his father’s enterprises. John’s convictions about the hazards of incurring debt were reinforced as he saw many farmers losing their land at auction. And his natural inclination toward independence and self-reliance grew stronger as he saw the excitement and potential profit that accompanied his father’s business activities.

  By 1925 Harvey Templeton owned six farms, in addition to his cotton gin, legal work, and other business activities. Also, by using low-cost surplus lumber and workmen who couldn’t find other jobs, he was able to build about two dozen small homes on his growing real estate holdings. He then rented them for from two to six dollars a month—a good return on houses that cost only $200–$500 to build.

  John Templeton learned the uses of ambition and drive from his father, who provided a relatively good living for his family during hard times. Even though they were not wealthy by the outside world’s standards, they were the second family in the county to own both a telephone and an automobile. And, significant for John’s development, year by year he observed a gradual increase in the family’s financial position through his father’s hard work and creative business flair.

  But his father was only half of John Templeton’s background.

  John’s mother, Vella, provided a quite different—but equally important—example for John to incorporate into his own personality. First of all, she was very well educated among women of that era. She had attended grammar school and high school in Winchester, and then she went on to study mathematics, Greek, and Latin for more than seven years at the Winchester Normal College.

  Vella’s interests were as wide-ranging as her husband’s. Though well educated and an intellectual by inclination, she enjoyed raising chickens, cows, and pigs. She enjoyed gardening and raised peaches, corn, cabbage, cherries, asparagus, and green beans. The Templeton table was always well supplied with fresh vegetables, meat, and dairy products.

  Young John, along with his brother Harvey Jr., was often underfoot as his mother went about her daily tasks. And it was in this environment that he learned his first important lesson about profits—at the age of four.

  To start with, he found that, with a little work, he could grow his own beans in his mother’s garden at a cost of next to nothing for the seeds. Then he could sell the beans to a local country store for a handsome profit.

  John came up with the idea of selling produce on his own. His mother allowed him the freedom to set up his little business, but the outside advice and direction ended there. From then on, he was on his own.

  The practical business savvy that young Templeton inherited from his father was clearly one aspect of his inheritance. But his mother’s influence was crucial in bringing precocious financial achievement into perfect balance with sound spiritual values. John learned early from his mother that the content of his character could lead either to success or failure. His mother and his aunt Leila taught him how right thoughts can forge right actions. For a number of years they kept the Cumberland Presbyterian church going by raising enough money to pay the part-time minister. Thus they taught this future investment genius a valuable lesson on different ways to raise money and what money, once earned, can do to help others. It is clear that, in John Templeton’s case, his background helped point the way to success.

  But success is never a legacy. It must be earned by each individual on his or her own terms. Although young John was given a better start than many, like all of us he had a long way to go before, through growth and transformation, he could truly call himself a successful human being.

  A careful reading of Step 2 should help you to raise your success and happiness quotient. Try to follow these rules:

  Discover your strengths and then use them to the best advantage.

  Listen to others and learn from them.

  Observe the actions of others so that you can profit from both their strengths and their mistakes.

  Do not wait for goals to materialize but go out and actively seek goals.

  Money can be inherited but never success. It must be earned by each individual.

  The surest way to achieve success is to emulate sound role models, whether they be your parents, your teachers, your friends, or your business associates.

  STEP 3

  HELPING YOURSELF BY HELPING OTHERS

  WHEN PEOPLE HEAR the word ministry, they automatically think of a church or government office. But, in truth, everything productive that you can accomplish in life is a ministry. If you make shoes that last, you have performed a ministry. It’s a ministry to produce a bountiful harvest. If you’re an internist who saves lives or a novelist who creates beauty, then that too is a ministry.

  Because your ministry is also your livelihood, choose with care. Make certain that you love what you do. By loving your work, by taking the attitude that it should be done on behalf of others, you’ll be doing it as a ministry. You will be creating something that the world needs—which is dedication to the job at hand—and that makes you a genuine minister. As a giver, a helper, you are much more likely to be successful than the person who works simply to earn a living. You will make more money and receive greater recognition.

  The more one works and plants, the more one will harvest. The more good one can do, the more success one can achieve. Perhaps this is best explained by Jesus in the Bible parable of the talents. To quote John Templeton, who likes to tell his own version of the story: “A man going on a tri
p entrusted his property to his servants. He gave one man five talents, another two, and another one, each according to his abilities. While he was gone, the man with five talents traded with his money and made five talents more. And the man with two talents traded his and made an additional two talents. But the man with one talent buried his master’s money in the ground.

  “When the master returned, he went over his accounts with his three servants. The man entrusted with five talents explained that he’d invested and made five more. And the man given two talents also showed how he’d put his talents to work and now had four talents. The master complimented them both, told them that they had been faithful servants, and that he would entrust them with greater responsibilities.

  “The man with one talent came forward and said, ‘Master, I figured you’re a hard man and you might rob me of my earnings, so I hid this money in the ground.’

  “His master replied, ‘You’re a wicked and lazy slave. You knew I’d demand your profit. You should have put my money in the bank where it would draw interest. Give your money to the man with ten talents. For to the man who has will be given more. And from the man who has nothing, even his nothing will be taken away!’”

  In New Testament times, a silver talent was valuable currency, worth well over a thousand of today’s dollars. But Jesus spoke in parables and he used them to veil the truth from those who were not willing to see it. Those, on the other hand, who were zealous for the truth would not rest until they had found out his meaning. Thus the talent certainly stood for something else, something with a more spiritual weight than money alone. Many people, Templeton among them, believe that the talents Jesus spoke of were literally abilities that God bestowed on each individual human being—few in some cases, many in others.