About the billionaire who figured out how he got rich and let that influence his Christmas gift-giving.

You can only sleep in one bed.

It's easy to be jaded in an age where most of the human interest stories are about rich people behaving badly.  There seems to be no end to news and feature stories of people who have more wealth than most everybody else--only to learn that they hardly seem to have figured out how to manage it and how it affects their lives.  There are plenty of thoughtful, put-together people who have a great deal of money--but you just don't hear that much about them.  

I'm going to point you today to a man--Clive Palmer, a Queensland businessman and Australian nickel magnet--who struck me as being not only well-off, but pretty smart about the ways of both business and how to manage his personal wealth.  A few days ago he handed out $10 million in gifts to his staff who worked for him and helped him make a lot of money.  Here's his logic:  While he was was shrewd-enough to buy a failing nickel mine could be brought back to commercial vitality, he wouldn't have extracted an ounce of the mineral if it hadn't been for the people who worked for him to make that possible.  

People helped me make a lot of money.

Among his bonuses for an employee force were 55 Mercedes-Benz B-class 180s sedans and everybody--about 800 strong--got an amazing overseas vacation paid for--all from one happy man who's now referred to these days as St. Nickel!  Says Mr. Palmer:

“These people have made a lot of money for me this year, and I thought I’d give some of it back,” he said. “You can only sleep in one bed, have one meal at a time, drive the one car, and go out with the one woman–that is, if you’re sensible. I’ve got enough money to do all that, so I thought I’d give some away.”

So there you have it: A man who was smart enough to know what to buy [i.e., the failing nickel mine], savvy-enough to figure out how to bring it back to life [including hiring and overseeing the people who made even those plans become a reality], and then insight enough to know that he couldn't really have done it all by himself--and thus decided to share about 5% of the profits.  

Few achieve very much all by themselves.

Come to think of it, I'm a part--as well as a product--of a process that gives people the proverbial keys to the bank; when individuals apply themselves to the pursuits of management and commerce with undergraduate and advanced degrees in business, they likely will profit handsomely from the knowledge and skills that become theirs; they have the opportunity to personally benefit from enormous wealth, certainly compared to what most other people walking on the face of the earth today are able to acquire. 

I strongly suspect that one probably doesn't have to be a billionaire to cultivate the good-sense of appreciating what has become theirs as a result of events beyond their own direct doing or what other people have done for them to make it all possible; indeed, few people achieve very much all by themselves.  What impresses me most about Clive Palmer is not his wealth, but his wisdom to have figured out how he got to be that way in the first place!
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