Millionaires: How They Do It

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Look for Problems. "Opportunities are usually found where the problems are found," says Los Angeles' Fred Bailey, 39, who founded a small microwave company on a $500 stake, foresaw a shortage of ordnance parts for brush-fire war, and started to make them, earning $2,000,000. His word to entrepreneurs: "Go into anything that will deal heavily in helping solve the problems of the population explosion—to help provide food and fresh water to provide transportation and communications systems, to clean the air." Charles Gelman, 33, a Michigan chemist who was brought up in an orphanage, figured that he could build an improved air-pollution sampler. He put together a device from hardware-store parts, has since amassed a $1,300,000 fortune from a filter-manufacturing business that is growing along with the public clamor for air-pollution control.

California's Fletcher Jones, the com puter programmer, believes that the fu ture belongs to "brokers in technology" —young men with the savvy in both business and technology to organize and manage the work of scientists. Say he: "Look for opportunities in the very newest technologies—oceanography, sub-miniaturization, information retrieval—where a man of 35 can have the experience of someone of 65. But stay away from law, medicine and architecture. Professional men almost always practice alone. To become a millionaire, you must get people behind you so that you can be multiplied."

The Honorable Ambition. Seventy-five years ago, the Rev. Russell Herman Conwell, a Philadelphia Baptist minister, went about the nation delivering a popular speech in which he praised not only the virtues of hard work but its rewards as well. "To secure wealth is an honorable ambition," he intoned, "and is one greattest of a person's usefulness to others. Money is power. Every good man and woman ought to strive for power, to do good with it when obtained. I say, get rich, get rich!" Conwell repeated the speech before 6,000 audiences, earned $8,000,000 in fees. He should have lived to see the U.S. of 1965. In no other country of the world, at no other time in history, have the chances to make a fortune been better than right now.

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