#427 How Raymond Plank Built a $50 Billion Oil Company

The capacity of the human mind for learning and personal growth greatly exceeds that which I would have deemed plausible in my early years. The purpose of this memoir is to open the window of my life in the hope that readers may find parts useful in achieving a fuller measure of their own capacities, to attain worthy goals on behalf of self and others, in the certain belief that happiness and understanding uplift the human spirit, contributing to the base for a full and happy life. I look back through the years of my life from the vantage point of now being in my ninetieth year. I look back in order to see forward. Hindsight informed me of several primary individual lifetime learnings which might be useful to others, especially those who desire to expand the remarkable individual capacities granted us when we seek beyond self the greater common good. My values have been influenced by a few cornerstones. First, at perhaps the age of 10, when I was on a walk with my dad, he dropped my hand, put his arm around my shoulder, and noted, Son, over my life, I've found it very useful to try to make a very small difference on behalf of others. He concluded with, Mother will be calling us to dinner. Time to get back. We never again discussed the topic, still fresh and off recurring in my mind now, nearly eighty years later. The second cornerstone was that of this postcard that my mother had written just prior to her death at age 47 when I was just 15 years old. She wrote, my son, the fifteen years of my life which you have shared have been such glorious ones. How I have loved them. You are so fine and unselfish. You have given me such love and consideration. I have known no joy which could equal that of your companionship. My pride in you will go on through the years if you keep your head up and your courage and faith high. Mother died of a blood clot to the brain following a routine appendectomy only hours before I was to drive my father to the hospital and bring her home. She wrote that postcard a few days before she died. With the clarity of hindsight, I see that these cornerstones had much to do with the career path that I pursued. I chose to be self employed rather than working for a large company. I wanted a smaller, riskier initiative. Apache Corporation had a very modest beginning, founded with just $250,000 in 1954. By mid two thousand eight, that $250,000 had become 50,000,000,000. Teddy Roosevelt once opined, it is better to have lived one hour of glorious strife than never to have lived at all. You be the judge. Let the tale begin. So that was from the introduction from the book I wanna talk about today, which is a small difference, and it was written by Raymond Plank. …