John Morgan says he tried to raise his kids with the same grit that shaped him when he was young. He is the eldest of five and started working various jobs at a young age to help his financially strapped family.
Today, his legal firm, Morgan & Morgan, is one of the largest personal-injury law operations in the country, and he has an estimated net worth of $1.5 billion, according to Forbes. He attributes his extreme wealth partly to luck.
“I think when people start making money, they think they’re a lot smarter than they actually are, and that arrogance is how they lose,” he recently told Business Insider’s Kevin Reilly. “And so I believe luck has had an incredible amount to do with what happened to me.”
See Morgan’s full interview below:
That same mindset is why he tried to raise his kids to be more self-aware than spoiled. “These rich people buy their kids great cars, I never did,” he said. “I gave them like an 8-year-old Navigator, and they had to work, and they had to pay for their insurance.”
Morgan has three sons and one daughter. His sons now work at his law firm, but when they were younger, some of them worked at WonderWorks, Morgan’s chain of science-focused entertainment centers. That didn’t go over so well for one of them.
Morgan fired his son to teach him responsibility
“I had to fire Dan once,” said Morgan, who had heard that his son, Daniel Morgan, was slacking off at work. “I said, ‘Hey man, you’re fired. And you’re not going out until you get a new job,'” Morgan recalled.
Daniel Morgan told BI in a follow-up email that getting fired for showing up late to work at WonderWorks was embarrassing. “But it turned out to be one of the most important lessons of my life,” he wrote.
“The golden rule in our house was that you always had to have a job,” wrote Daniel, who said he started working for his dad at age 14.
After he was fired, Daniel Morgan ventured outside the family business. He landed a new job at Boston Market, but it didn’t last long. About a week later, Daniel quit because they had him washing dishes, and it made him vomit, Morgan said.
“I said, think about that, Dan. They got you doing the worst job in the place. That’s what they think of you,” Morgan said.
For Morgan, firing his son was about teaching him perspective and that his last name couldn’t buy him respect. It had to be earned.
After leaving Boston Market, Dan found a job at Firehouse Subs, where he “excelled,” Morgan said.
Daniel Morgan wrote that working in the fast-food industry taught him “the value of humility and hard work (and showing up on time).” He went on to become a lawyer, along with his two brothers.
“When I eventually joined Morgan & Morgan, I started in the call center and had to work my way up, earning every opportunity,” wrote Daniel, who is now a managing partner at Morgan & Morgan.
Morgan says his family is his real fortune
For all the wealth and size of his empire, Morgan’s family is what he holds most dear. He built homes for his kids at the beach so they could raise their own families side by side.
“I would not understand life without them,” Morgan said. “Now I’ve got all these grandchildren, which is just another huge gift. And three of them live across the street from me.”
While he has ensured his kids are well-off, Morgan says he hopes they appreciate how lucky they are and the value of money. Morgan’s mentor once told him, which he’s passed down to his children:
“The money belongs to God,” he said. Whatever luck granted them this wealth and fortune, it’s simply that — luck. The money doesn’t belong to him or his family — it’s simply theirs to do the most good with while they can, he added.
Morgan plans to put all his wealth into a trust that his daughter will manage once he’s gone, he said. The trust will be used to fund causes he cares about, which are providing food, water, medicine, shelter, and clothing to those in need.
He hopes his children will also contribute to those causes after he passes. “What we’re now doing is we’re taking all of our fortune, and we’re going to build a permanent foundation to do just those things, and that hopefully will go on way after my death. So that’s the game plan.”
Daniel Morgan said he’s proud of the mission he and his family are building. “My siblings and I are living proof that my dad’s hard lessons paid off,” he said.
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