Ambition

His father sent him into the Oklahoma oil fields as a three-dollar-a-day roustabout, and by the summer of 1916, not yet 24, he had made his first million and retired. In 1932, in the depths of the Depression, he started buying Tide Water stock at $2.50 a share, the first move in a two-decade fight for control. He then bet on a strip of desert between Saudi Arabia and Kuwait that took four years and tens of millions of dollars to produce a drop of oil, and in 1957 Fortune named him the richest American. He spent nearly $17 million building an art museum in Los Angeles, and never saw it.

This is the story of J. Paul Getty, and we have a lot to learn from him.

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What is Ambition?

Ambition is a podcast about the world's most ambitious people from history and today, and the lessons you can take from their lives and use in your own work and life. Each episode is deeply researched, built around the definitive biography of one person (or in some cases, two), with dozens of hours spent reading, synthesizing, and pulling out what actually matters: what they built, how they thought, the struggles they overcame, and the tactics, strategies, and principles underneath it all.