The Templeton Plan

by Sir John Templeton

  For John Templeton, nothing in his religious training had more influence on him than the parable of the talents. What exactly did he learn from it? He learned that God gives talents to each of us. He also learned that God hands these talents out in uneven measure. But, although God may have given more talents to one person than another, he expects everyone to use those they have to the utmost, no matter how great or meager they might be, and to use them in the service of others. The point is simply this: God is responsible for what talents you possess. From there on, the responsibility is yours. You have to develop them as far and as deeply as they will go. And the people who use their talents completely—and most of all to help others less fortunate—will be rewarded. Those people will find success.

  At least ninety-nine people out of a hundred are born into the world with talents that can be developed. Most of us are given more talents than we realize, and it’s up to us to mine those at which we’ll be best. Also, in developing your own talents, you should help other people develop theirs. The great ministry is not to build yourself into a model but to help others discover and develop their abilities, to help yourself by helping them. Sometimes people don’t know their own worth and need praise and encouragement.

  An illustration of this is the story about a priest named Bourne, counseling an unhappy man who claimed to have no talents. The priest disputed him. He said, “As long as you are able to speak to me, you are not one of those people. Anyone who can carry on a conversation has been given a talent. Suppose your talent is to keep a street clean. Suppose that’s your chief qualification in life. So go ahead and clean that street. Clean it with love and care to make others happy as they walk on it. Then, as your talent for cleaning that street grows, it should become a famous street.”

  When he first heard this story, Templeton thought of the street as Bourne Street, after the priest who encouraged the man. He says that if he were given that one talent, he would have tourists coming from hundreds of miles around to marvel at his clean street, and in its glory it would be renamed Bourne.

  Success takes many forms; wealth and fame are only one kind of success. Perhaps you have a talent to help those who have no talents. There are such people. For example, the severely brain-damaged are unable to develop talents; taking care of them can help us to grow by helping them to function.

  The aged and infirm, the mentally and physically handicapped, those beyond hope and caught in the coils of mental disease—they are the people who teach us the meaning of spiritual principles. John Templeton knows a Christian minister who was awarded grants from the federal government to maintain a home for sixteen severely mentally retarded people. Through his efforts, all sixteen have developed at least minimal abilities: Some wait on tables and carry out garbage, others plant vegetables and mow lawns. That Christian minister may not have large bank accounts and a Rolls-Royce. Nonetheless, he is among the richest and most successful of men.

  Every act of helping is a way of saying yes to life. And saying yes is a profound form of successful behavior and happiness.

  Step 3 suggests the following course of action:

  Explore your talents carefully; choose your career with care; make certain you love what you do.

  Share your talents in ways that truly benefit others, particularly the less fortunate.

  Develop an attitude of greatness by applying the “Bourne” principle.

  Share your greatness, as described in the “Bourne” example, with others.

  Ask yourself these two key questions:

  Am I doing the thing that I am best qualified to do?

  Is my work helping me by helping at least one other human being?

  STEP 4

  PUTTING FIRST THINGS FIRST

  ALL OF US believe in virtue, but few of us give much thought to the varieties of virtue that exist and to their relative spiritual weights. One of the best methods for examining virtues is to try to decide in your own mind which virtues you think are the most important. Draw up a list of them. What virtue would you put first? In what order would you assign their importance? No two people will compile the same list, but the effort of preparing it will help you clarify your thinking.

  All of us have been taught that crime does not pay and, of course, it’s true. Crime of any kind is a sin and leads to failure. The virtues provide the underpinning for success in life, both in business and spiritually. Study the virtues. Start family discussions around the dining room table, having each member draw up his or her list of virtues. This can also be done in college classrooms, or at church prayer meetings, or wherever people gather socially. Encourage others to draw up their own list of virtues in order of importance. There is no surer way of growing spiritually than to discuss and study priorities in the field of virtues.

  The purpose of The Templeton Plan is to help people become successful in the full sense of that word. No matter what career you might embark on, success comes from knowing the importance of the virtues. It is not enough to live them unconsciously; you must struggle to know them and live them consciously.

  Each person will have a different list of virtues, with different priorities. It will be helpful to discuss virtues with people who have viewpoints different from yours. By exchanging viewpoints on virtues, everyone can grow more open-minded and productive.

  Here is the start of a list, which you can add to and change as you produce your own:

  gentleness,

  humility,

  self-control,

  hopefulness,

  perseverance,

  enthusiasm,

  responsibility,

  farsightedness,

  unselfishness,

  honor,

  hard work,

  generosity,

  promptness,

  thrift,

  originality,

  judgment,

  calmness,

  loyalty,

  forgiveness,

  thanksgiving,

  common sense,

  honesty,

  bravery,

  and love.

  This is by no means a complete list. But it’s a beginning. We all learn by setting down our own priorities in virtues. John Templeton discussed the priority of virtues with an acquaintance who placed labor at the top of her list. That told him a lot about the woman. It also made him consider labor in the vast scheme of virtues.

  Another friend of Templeton’s ranked loyalty first on his list. Templeton asked him for an example of what he meant by loyalty. His friend explained that he could think of nothing more beautiful than a married couple celebrating their golden wedding anniversary—two people having lived fifty years of their life together. This example was at the root of his concept of loyalty.

  Still another friend of Templeton’s, Royal Little, a successful businessman now in his nineties, assigns great importance to the virtue of modesty. He believes that a man must be willing to admit his mistakes and deflate his own balloon before he can call himself truly successful. Little actually wrote a book called How to Lose a Hundred Million Dollars and Other Valuable Advice.

  Here is a member of the Business Hall of Fame, a man who built a great corporation called Textron and later a company called Narragansett Capital, a man who is widely regarded as the originator of the conglomerate—a man famous in his field. And yet what is the subject of his book? He writes of his mistakes and of what he tried to learn from his mistakes. When discussing the book with Templeton, he said that many of his friends had written books detailing all the things they had done right, but he thought it would be much more helpful to the public to read about his various disasters. So he assembled forty different mistakes he had made in his career and explained to the reader what he had learned from each mistake.

  Thus the importance of modesty as a virtue. Through the example of this multimillionaire businessman we have a much clearer sense of what modesty can actually mean in practice and how, like all of the virtues, it can promote success. John Templeton himsel
f, in fact, wrote a book entitled The Humble Approach.

  Templeton has been a sharp observer of people all his life. During the thirty-seven years since he helped form the Young Presidents’ Organization, whose members were leaders in their fields, he watched these people carefully and studied their virtues. He believes that the virtues most visible among them were responsibility, energy, hard work, enthusiasm, and perseverance. Although he does not necessarily assign them the highest rank among the virtues, he is convinced they are significantly present in almost every prime candidate for success.

  To successfully complete Step 4, try to answer the following questions:

  List all the virtues that have special meaning for you.

  Rank them in order of importance in your life.

  Think of examples where you have been able to put various virtues into practice.

  Discuss virtues with family members, business associates, and friends. They may provide you with insights into the virtues you need to practice to lead a happy and successful life.

  STEP 5

  ACHIEVING HAPPINESS BY WHAT YOU DO

  JOHN TEMPLETON is fond of quoting financier Charles H. Burr, who said: “Getters don’t get happiness; givers get it. You simply give to others a bit of yourself—a thoughtful act, a helpful idea, a word of appreciation, a lift over a rough spot, a sense of understanding, a timely suggestion. You take something out of your mind, garnished in kindness out of your heart, and put it into the other fellow’s mind and heart.”

  And the world-famous philosopher and physician Dr. Albert Schweitzer: “I don’t know what your destiny will be, but one thing I know: The only ones among you who will be really happy are those who will have sought and found how to serve.”

  And Henry Ward Beecher, the religious leader and social reformer: “No man can tell whether he is rich or poor by turning to his ledger. It is the heart that makes a man rich. He is rich according to what he is, not according to what he has.”

  And the author Sidney Powell: “Try to forget yourself in the service of others. For when we think too much of ourselves and our own interests, we easily become dependent.”

  Hugh Black, who was for thirty years professor of practical theology at the Union Theological Seminary in New York: “It is the paradox of life that the way to miss pleasure is to seek it first. The very first condition of lasting happiness is that a life should be full of purpose, aiming at something outside self. As a matter of experience, we find that true happiness comes in seeking other things, in the manifold activities of life, in the healthful outgoing of all human powers.”

  And Robert J. McCracken, then pastor of New York City’s Riverside Church: “The most infectiously joyous men and women are those who forget themselves in thinking about others and serving others. Happiness comes not by deliberately courting and wooing it but by giving oneself in self-effacing surrender to great values.”

  The American Declaration of Independence states that the pursuit of happiness is an inalienable right, but the pursuit of happiness is never successful. The more you pursue it, the less it will be achieved, and the less your success will be assured.

  The way to capture happiness is to try to do something not directly aimed at giving you pleasure. Then happiness will come to you. If you develop your talents and become excellent at a particular line of work, you will realize happiness and success. Happiness and success are awarded to those who do not seek them as ends in themselves but struggle to excel at a given task. If you try to help someone else achieve happiness, happiness will come to you.

  We have all heard people say, “Oh, if only I had an extra $10,000, I’d be really happy.” But those are the very people who remain dissatisfied when they get an additional $10,000.

  If they had a million dollars more, they would not be happy, nor would they be successful.

  Happiness is never the completion—the getting. Happiness comes from the work, the endeavor, the pursuit of a goal—the giving. Production, not consumption, is at the core of happiness and success.

  If you can see progress in your work, then you will know happiness in that very process. Process is production, and production is giving. As Templeton is fond of saying, “Happiness pursued eludes, happiness given returns.”

  One way to understand happiness is to study happy people. Think of those you know or see who radiate happiness. What is the source of their joy? What lessons can you learn from them?

  Templeton saw true happiness in the novices in Mother Teresa’s order as they dedicated their lives to Jesus. As an investment counselor, he has considered it his business to closely observe his clients. Who is happy? Who is not? And what makes the happy ones happy?

  His richest clients, he has come to realize, are not necessarily his happiest clients. He sees no clear correlation between wealth and happiness. It is not money alone that makes people happy. In gambling casinos, you rarely see anyone smiling, even those who have beaten the odds and are standing behind stacks of chips.

  In fact, a sure system for understanding unhappiness is to assume the attitude of the gamblers in the casino. They have made the accumulation of money an end in itself, related to nothing but the turn of a card, the roll of the dice. If you do this, soon your own face will reflect the gambler’s anxiety, unhappiness, and selfishness—even when beating the odds and winning large sums of money.

  When you meet someone, always ask yourself this question: What makes him or her special? Look for the glow that person gives off, because everyone has a glow. There is a tendency to see only the faults in others. Obviously, all of us have personalities that are a mixture of good and bad elements, but if you form a habit of looking for the bad, then that’s all you will see. If, instead, you train yourself to look for the good, you will find it. Seek out the good and your mind will fill with happiness. And happiness, being one of the purest forms of strength, is crucial to success.

  Pleasing others is an avenue to happiness. If you please others, you please yourself. Early in his career, John Templeton learned that each client had to be treated differently. He worked diligently to answer the special wishes and needs and to solve the tax problems of each client. He asked a lot of questions; he listened carefully—he pleased. By pleasing others, he helped to fulfill himself. Today John Templeton has few individual clients; those individual accounts he does accept invest a minimum of $10 million.

  Yet another success and happiness strategy is never to argue unless a useful purpose can be served. Too often we are ruled by our emotions. We start an argument without stopping to think of the consequences; nothing is achieved in the end except a mutual feeling of ill will. The proper tactic is to remain silent until you have determined that the disagreement will have positive results that can’t be arrived at through reason and quiet discourse.

  Once involved in debate, it is vital that you know your facts. Your argument should proceed from facts, not emotion. If you’re well prepared, it’s possible to disagree with someone in a way that is convincing and helpful to that person.

  Templeton has sat in many board meetings, involving both large and small corporations, and he has carefully observed how directors behave in those settings. The successful directors (and the ones who run the most profitable companies) tend to be thoughtful and long-range in their thinking. When they raise a prickly issue, they will have the facts; they can prove why their way would bring better results. Poor leaders, on the other hand, will sometimes prove to be wrong after they have already lodged a complaint or an objection.

  Know your facts. Speak only after you have thought. And hold your fire.

  There are psychologists today who believe that anger can play a positive role in our dealings with others. Experience with successful people, however, has convinced John Templeton that anger is a retrograde emotion that should be banished from our lives. It is not an intellectual pursuit. Basically, it unleashes destructive forces that cripple communication. Successful people think in terms of respect for others, not ange
r toward others. They reach out for accommodation rather than confrontation.

  You should say to yourself, “Those people are doing what they believe is right. I don’t have to agree with them, but there has to be a reason for their actions.” Perhaps they recently received bad news. They may not be feeling well. The proper action is to answer their anger with love and logic.

  Make them happy, not angry. Anger hurts no one more than the person entertaining it. It is a negative emotion that leads to unproductivity.

  Jesus says, in the Gospel according to Saint Matthew (7:1–5): “Judge not, that you be not judged. For with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get. Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye’ when there is the log in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye.”

  John Templeton believes strongly that people should not take others to court. He is in favor of settling problems short of litigation. The speck is in your neighbor’s eye, the log is in yours, and two civilized people should be able to arrive at a peaceable solution.

  Templeton says, “One of the things I have most pride in in my life is that I never sued anybody for anything, even though I’ve been the chief executive of literally dozens of corporations, including a group with as many as 500,000 shareholders. Nor have I, or any company controlled by me, ever been sued in my seventy-four years. I think that’s a wonderful thing to try to achieve. In a way, it’s a form of happiness.

  “When I was a student at Yale, Professor Glenn Saxon, who taught industrial engineering, said we should try to solve problems by what he called integration. By integration he meant trying to understand the basic prevailing forces on both sides, rather than resorting to argument and name calling. If you can decipher those forces, you have a better chance of arriving at a solution that everyone can live with.