Ancient Wisdom: What Charles Koch Learned from Failure

I’m often asked a simple question: “Charles, how did you become so successful?” My answer is equally simple: by applying principles and being willing to make mistakes. Much of my life has been a combination of wandering in the wilderness, and trial and error. I freely acknowledge that I won the birth lottery. My father Fred was an entrepreneur and inventor who co-founded the company that became my life’s work. Both of my parents worked hard to give my brothers and me a head start in life. But I nearly squandered my blessings many times. I spent 20 years lost, narrowly avoiding catastrophes. My early life was defined by a search for meaning. I vividly remember my third-grade teacher writing math problems on the blackboard. The answers were obvious to me, but not to others. That realization was my first clue that I had a gift. It took many years before I realized that my gift went beyond solving basic math problems; rather, I had a talent for understanding and applying abstract concepts. As a child, however, I had no time for the abstract. I was too busy getting in trouble. My father had no intention of allowing my brothers and me to grow up to be “country club bums.” His solution was a daily regimen of manual labor. Starting at age 6, I spent my afternoons and weekends feeding animals, shoveling manure, and milking cows on the family farm. I didn’t respond well to my father’s hard-nosed approach; it left me feeling like I had little value. Despite my third-grade epiphany about math, I put no effort into my education, so my grades were less than stellar. My parents sent me to eight different schools with little improvement. Starting at age 14, I sneaked out at night on the weekends. My friends and I would head for bars and strip clubs. Only later did I begin to see that I needed to associate with people I could learn from, rather than those who brought out the worst in me.