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Before venturing into the oil industry and becoming one of America´s wealthiest individuals in modern history, John D. Rockefeller was a regular book-keeper and aspiring investor working in Cleveland, Ohio.
Two years after starting his first job, he found himself in the midst of one of America´s worst crisis, the Panic of 1857.
Over 5.000 businesses closed within a year, failure of several prominent banks, widespread unemployment and economic contraction, were among the several far-reaching effects the Panic of 1857 brought to America.
Rockefeller was in the thick of such crisis, but unlike most of Americans, instead of bemoaning the economic upheaval and blaming everyone and everything for his misery, he eagerly observed such momentous events knowing there was something to be learned.
He realized:
The market was inherently unpredictable and often vicious - only the rational and disciplined mind could hope to profit from it.
Even years after said crisis, when the storm had passed, Rockefeller found himself a “once in a lifetime” opportunity: $ 500.000 at his direction if only he could find the right oil wells.
A couple of days later, Rockefeller returned with his hands empty and immediately returned the money.
Why?
He felt the opportunity wasn’t right, regardless of how excited the market was.
Twenty years after the first crisis, Rockefeller alone would alone control 90% of the oil market.
For the rest of his life, the greater the chaos, the calmer Rockefeller would become, particularly when others around him were either panicked or mad with greed.
What made Rockefeller different?
He was able to see opportunity within obstacles.
Not many had trained themselves to see opportunity inside this obstacle, that what befell them was not unsalvageable misfortune but the gift of education.
Rockefeller wasn’t born this way, this was learned behavior. And it all began in what he later called “the school of adversity and stress”:
Oh, how blessed young men are who have to struggle for a foundation and beginning in life. I shall never cease to be grateful for the three and half years of apprenticeship and the difficulties to be overcome, all along the way.
Rockefeller didn’t gave in to emotions. He didn’t gave in to his primal reactions of fight/flight.
He was able to chose how he would react.
He saw things as they were, not as what he felt.
And here’s the framework he used when facing seemingly unsurmountable obstacles:
To be objective
To control emotions and keep an even keel
To choose to see the good in a situation
To steady our nerves
To ignore what disturbs or limits others
To place things in perspective
To revert to the present moment
To focus on what can be controlled
It’s not easy to take ahold of our emotions. To percieve things without any sort of bias. But remember:
It takes skill and discipline to bat away the pests of bad perceptions, to separate reliable signals from deceptive ones, to filter our prejudice, expectation, and fear. But it’s worth it, for what’s left is truth.