The document begins with an exclamation mark:
Thirty-three and an income of $50,000 per annum!
It is headed St. Nicholas Hotel, New York, December, 1868. Andrew Carnegie was living in the hotel with his mother, and at some point in the last days of that year he sat down and added up what he was worth and what it was doing to him.
It is usually described as a letter to himself. It is not addressed to anybody, including him. It is a memorandum, and the only reason anybody can read it is that when his Autobiography was prepared for publication after his death, the editor added it as a footnote with this introduction:
The ambitions of Mr. Carnegie at this time (1868) are set forth in the following memorandum made by him. It has only recently come to light:
Fifty-two years after he wrote it.
What He Planned
The first two paragraphs are a schedule, and they are startlingly concrete for a document nobody was going to see.
He gives himself two years to arrange his affairs so that they produce at least fifty thousand dollars a year, and then a ceiling: beyond that he is never to earn, and is to make no effort to increase his fortune, but to spend the surplus every year for benevolent purposes. Then: “Cast aside business forever, except for others.”
After that a geography. “Settle in Oxford and get a thorough education, making the acquaintance of literary men”, three years of it, with particular attention to public speaking. Then London, and a controlling interest in a newspaper or a review, and from there “taking a part in public matters, especially those connected with education and improvement of the poorer classes.”
Hold on to that last clause. We are going to come back and mark it.
The Paragraph That Is Not a Plan
The last paragraph is different in kind, and it is the reason this document is worth an article rather than a quotation.
He writes that man must have an idol, that the amassing of wealth is one of the worst species of idolatry, and that no idol is more debasing than the worship of money. That much is quoted constantly, usually with nothing attached to it. What almost never gets quoted is the sentence after it, which is where he turns the observation on himself:
Whatever I engage in I must push inordinately; therefore should I be careful to choose that life which will be the most elevating in its character.
And then:
To continue much longer overwhelmed by business cares and with most of my thoughts wholly upon the way to make more money in the shortest time, must degrade me beyond hope of permanent recovery.
A thirty-three-year-old, at the beginning of an extraordinary run of success, writing down that he thinks it is going to ruin him.
That is not an aspiration. It is a diagnosis of something already in progress, and getting one of those onto a page is the hardest thing in personal writing. It is also, reliably, the kind of thing that makes an entry worth rereading years later, because a plan tells you what you wanted and a diagnosis tells you what you were actually like.
One note on the text, since the wording matters. Reproductions of this memorandum differ slightly from one another, because some derive from the manuscript and some from the printed Autobiography. Everything quoted here is from the Autobiography‘s own text, which is the version read for this article.
The Deadline
Then he sets one.
I will resign business at thirty-five, but during the ensuing two years I wish to spend the afternoons in receiving instruction and in reading systematically.
Thirty-five meant 1870.
This is a written, dated, checkable commitment made by a specific person on a specific evening, which is exactly what future-self journalling asks a reader to produce. The site has a page teaching that exercise. Until now it has never had a case where the letter can actually be marked, because almost nobody’s survives and almost nobody’s is specific enough to score.
Carnegie’s survives and it is specific enough. So let us score it.
Marking the Schedule
He did not resign business at thirty-five.
By his own account in the same book, the release came in March 1901, when Charles Schwab told him that J. P. Morgan “should really like to know if I wished to retire from business”, that Morgan thought he could arrange it, and that the partners were disposed to sell. Carnegie’s own summary of the moment is four words long: “and we finally sold.”
He was sixty-five. He missed his own deadline by thirty-one years.
If you have ever written down a date by which you were going to change your life and then watched it go past, that is roughly the worst-case outcome, and it happened to one of the most disciplined and effective people of the nineteenth century.
Marking the Direction
Now mark the rest of it, and the picture changes completely.
Here is how he describes the same period, in his own words:
After my book, “The Gospel of Wealth,” was published, it was inevitable that I should live up to its teachings by ceasing to struggle for more wealth. I resolved to stop accumulating and begin the infinitely more serious and difficult task of wise distribution.
Stop accumulating. Begin distribution. That is the 1868 memorandum’s first instruction, arriving three decades late.
And the clause I asked you to hold on to, the one about taking part in public matters “especially those connected with education and improvement of the poorer classes”, is a fair one-line description of what he spent the remainder of his life doing. He did not settle in Oxford and he did not buy a London review. But the direction he wrote down at thirty-three is the direction he went.
Almost every article about writing to your future self is written by someone who has no way of knowing whether it works. The interesting cases are the ones where the letter survived and the life can be checked against it, and there are more of those in the archives than you would think. That is most of what I put in a short email. You can subscribe here.
Write the Direction, Not Just the Date
Carnegie’s memorandum contains two different kinds of statement, and they came out very differently.
The schedule failed absolutely. Two years to restructure the business, retirement at thirty-five, three years at Oxford, a newspaper in London. None of it happened, and the parts that did happen happened in a form he had not imagined at an age he had not planned for.
The description held. What kind of life. What he thought money was doing to him. What he wanted his attention spent on. Every one of those survived thirty years of contact with reality, and they are the parts he could not possibly have scheduled.
I want to be careful here, because this is one document and one man and that is not evidence of anything. The site cannot tell you which of your own written intentions will hold. But it is worth noticing which half of his did, because most letters to a future self are written entirely in the half that failed. They are calendars. Dates and targets and by-thens.
There is a real counter-case, and it is worth naming rather than hiding. A written goal document can work as a schedule when the horizon is short enough and the person is checking it constantly. That is a different instrument for a different distance. Over thirty years, a date is a wish and a direction is a compass.
Benjamin Franklin, the other American self-improver with a written scheme for his own character, made much the same discovery from the opposite end. His system was daily and granular, and what he got out of it was not perfection but a lifelong sense of which way he was facing.
He Never Showed It to Anyone
The footnote is worth reading again. The memorandum, it says, “has only recently come to light”.
He wrote it at thirty-three. He lived another fifty years, wrote a great deal for publication, dictated a long autobiography, and never used it. It surfaced only after his death, when the manuscript was being sorted.
This is the ordinary fate of the honest page. The notebooks this site keeps track of are almost all like this: the useful document is the one that was not performed, and the reason it is useful is precisely that nobody was going to read it. The site’s account of papers that only just survived their owners makes the same point from the other direction, which is that this kind of document survives by luck far more often than by design.
The Other Note About the Future
Carnegie left one more instruction, and it is the most practical thing in this article.
His widow, Louise Whitfield Carnegie, quotes it in her preface to the Autobiography. It was written in his own hand on the fly-leaf of the manuscript:
Whoever arranges these notes should be careful not to burden the public with too much. A man with a heart as well as a head should be chosen.
Two documents, half a century apart, both addressed to somebody who was not there yet. The first was for a version of himself that never quite arrived on schedule. The second was for a stranger who would one day be holding his papers, and it worked: the man chosen was John C. Van Dyke, who said in his editor’s note that he had “done little more than arrange the material chronologically and sequentially”, and who is the reason the 1868 memorandum is readable at all.
If you keep notebooks, that is the cheapest useful thing here. Not the income ceiling and not the deadline. The fact that a man who wrote a great deal for himself took twenty seconds to write down what he wanted done with it afterwards, and to say what kind of person should be trusted with it.
The rest of it, the thirty-one years and the missed date, is just what happens. Keeping a practice going at all is the hard part, and he managed the harder thing, which is holding a direction long after the timetable had gone.
If you have a letter to your future self sitting in a drawer with a date on it, the useful move is to add one line saying what kind of life you are aiming at rather than when you will have it. That is the half of Carnegie’s memo that survived. I write about what is actually in the famous notebooks, which is rarely what the legend says. The email goes out from here.
