At 80, billionaire T. Boone Pickens could choose to bask in his successes as a wheeler-dealer in the oil industry’s drilling fields, boardrooms and futures markets. But he’s far too restless to consign himself to such a passive existence.

Instead, the wily billionaire is developing wind as an alternative energy source, buying up water rights in Texas, where he lives, and managing hedge funds. In his spare time, he gives away his money.

Pickens has operated this way for a halfcentury— full steam ahead in seeing and seizing opportunities, working hard, thinking innovatively and taking calculated risks. His fortunes have been down at times, and his key to bouncing back is to build on what he learns from every experience.

“Feeling the pure joy of work and success— jumping out of bed in the morning charged up to accomplish in the day ahead—is necessary for an entrepreneur,” Pickens says.

“I’m convinced that a person with average intelligence can work hard and have it made,” he tells SUCCESS.

“I also think it’s important to get with people you’re happy with and happy to be working with.” Happy team-building has been critical to his success. “I hire people with a good work ethic.... You don’t want to be around me if you don’t have a good work ethic, because you’re going to have to work hard.”

FORGING AN ENTREPRENEURIAL MINDSET
Pickens’ own work ethic—plus his resilience and determination—was molded by his parents and grandmother. Before he ever set foot in a high school, he showed a budding awareness of entrepreneurship and the environment.

“I remember the trees lining the creeks along the road to Seminole [in Oklahoma]. By the time I was 5 or 6, they were all dead,” he writes in his autobiography Boone. “My father explained that it was because the salt water that came out of the wells was just dumped into the creeks. ‘Well then,’ I asked, ‘why did they do that?’ [He answered:] ‘Because that was the easiest way to get rid of it.’ ‘But,’ I persisted, ‘couldn’t they do it another way?’ My father changed the subject.”

That flicker of Pickens’ environmental awareness later manifested itself in careful stewardship of his Texas ranch—letting the overgrazed land renew itself as a wildlife habitat—and in pushing cleanenergy initiatives.

His entrepreneurial spirit bloomed during a summer of mowing lawns for his grandmother and in his paper route. At 10 cents a lawn for his grandmother’s rental properties, the youngster quickly realized he had settled for a pittance, but his grandmother, whom he adored, made him live up to their bargain. He says that lesson taught him not to jump into a deal without a plan.

At 12, Boone earned 28 cents a day, a penny per paper delivered to each house on his route. “When the route next to mine opened up, I talked my supervisor into letting me have it, too. A few years later, the route on the other side became available, and I got it as well,” Pickens says. “I was delivering 125 papers a day and making more money than I could imagine.”

GROUNDWORK FOR SUCCESS
As a 20-something geologist working for Phillips Petroleum, management indecision and wasteful procrastination frustrated him, he says. “I’ve seen lots of managers who could never say yes or no. I saw that at Phillips, and it drove me crazy. When you have a [finished] study and put it before a decision-maker, a manager should say yes or no. I don’t hold up my people. I’m still impatient, but I’ve got it under control. [At 80,] I want results now; I don’t have a fi veyear plan.” “I’m convinced that a person with average intelligence can work hard and have it made.”

But in 1954, three years into the job, Pickens—then the father of three—abruptly quit Phillips amid a project that was needlessly stalled. He worked as an independent, taking with him his experience in analyzing the possibilities in a situation and then taking appropriate action.

Pickens put in long hours to compensate for his inexperience. “I would return to the office at night, after the kids had gone to bed, and work on my maps, looking for places where another well might be drilled,” he writes in Boone. After that, he still had to fi nd an investor to drill the well.

In 1963, Pickens needed an infusion of money to pay off a company debt and to ease cash fl ow in his 7-year-old Petroleum Exploration Inc. (which became Mesa Petroleum in 1964). With his back against the wall, he boldly took his small company public—then a business rarity—to raise funds.

During the late ’60s, Pickens wanted Mesa to become more of a player in the oil industry. To reach that next level, Pickens engineered a merger with Hugoton Production Co., many times larger than Mesa. He traveled the country to build support for this unlikely deal. He neutralized a hostile leading stockholder by helping him pen his cows and scored points during an angry showdown with Hugoton’s board of directors. Pickens won his merger, which he calls “the most important deal [Mesa] ever made.”

BRILLIANCE FROM SETBACKS
Pickens wasn’t immune to failure, though. In an attempt to diversify, he steered Mesa into the business of feeding beef cattle in preparation for sending them to market. The venture concluded with an $18 million loss and a lesson during the mid-1970s: “We’ll remember this the next time we’re tempted to diversify,” Pickens says in Boone.

Mesa was in much worse shape in 1982 after disappointing wells in the Gulf of Mexico. “We’ve got to figure out a way to make $300 million, and we’ve got to make it fast,” Pickens recalls telling Mesa’s movers and shakers. He had a revolutionary idea for saving the company. He knew that the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries had propped up oil companies by reducing the crude supply, which elevated its price. American oil executives continued enjoying perks and high salaries while living off the accumulated fat OPEC provided. Management did little to help shareholders, the owners, prosper.

Pickens exploited that situation during the 1980s, with Mesa and investment partners buying stakes—often 10 to 20 percent of a company’s stock—in poorly managed corporations including Gulf, Phillips and Unocal. Through shareholder showdowns with company executives, corporations were forced to restructure, and in doing so shareholders—including Pickens’ investors—reaped tidy profi ts.

One tactic that helped Pickens’ cause was his careful handling of the news media. Mesa was depicted as an underdog battling for shareholders, which persuaded many to work with him against company management.

THE DARK DECADE
During the 1990s, Pickens took serious business hits, however. Mesa was performing poorly, Pickens was involved in a brutal divorce, and he was forced out as its chief executive offi cer in 1996.

Reeling on all fronts, Pickens never considered retiring: He was off to his next great adventure. Pickens wasn’t reinventing himself, he tells SUCCESS; it could be more accurately termed a career progression. “Do what you know best,” he advises, and he did just that at age 69, beginning his resurgence by founding BP Capital, which runs hedge funds that mainly invest in natural gas and oil.

“A long time ago, I came to realize the power that change brings. Because with change comes challenge. So leaving Mesa wasn’t an end, but the opportunity for a new beginning.... Sure, there were seeds of doubt,” he writes in his new book, The First Billion Is the Hardest: Reflections on a Life of Comebacks and America’s Energy Future. “I learned that if you push through the resistance and keep driving for what you want, you will ultimately achieve rewards beyond any you had hoped for.”

Early on, BP Capital investors were far from lining up. In some quarters, Pickens was considered a has-been, although loyal friends chipped in. The new company got off to a bad start, he writes in The First Billion. “I was preoccupied. And a loser. The performance of the BP Capital Energy Fund mirrored my sinking spirits” with investors losing 90 percent of what they put in. Pickens ultimately was treated for depression and “began emerging from a really dark decade.… Once I put the past behind me, my mind cleared, my focus returned, and I was on my way.”

And so was BP Capital, a turnaround that Pickens fully and absolutely expected, he tells SUCCESS. “I knew we were good fundamental players on commodities. We were sure it would happen, but we weren’t sure when.”

NEW HORIZONS
A crucial ingredient in Pickens’ personal revival was to ratchet up his commitment to physical fitness with a trainer. “I noticed a big difference in how I felt,” he writes in The First Billion. “My stamina improved. So did my powers of concentration. I rarely feel tired despite one of the toughest business schedules I’ve ever had.”

That schedule has included forays into the purchasing of water rights with Mesa Water (which could pipe water from the Texas Panhandle to a city such as Dallas, where he lives) and becoming an alternative-energy evangelist with Mesa Power LP, a wind power initiative.

Pickens champions wind power as the centerpiece in his Pickens Plan, which calls for a nationwide program to eliminate U.S. dependence on foreign oil. He terms wind power a “pioneer move” to assure energy security for the United States. “I certainly expect to make a profi t,” he tells SUCCESS, but says it’s not his main motivation. The assertion has the ring of truth, because Pickens already has given away generous chunks of his wealth.

Among his recent contributions have been $265 million in gifts to his alma mater, Oklahoma State University, and $50 million each to two University of Texas healthcare institutions: UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas and the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. The UT donations come with a catch. Each must grow to $500 million within 25 years. If they don’t, all of the money goes to Oklahoma State University. “The University of Texas is never going to write a check to Oklahoma State for anything,” he confidently predicts in The First Billion.

“I like making money. I like giving it away… not as much as I like making it, but it’s a close second,” Pickens says. “I fi rmly believe one of the reasons I was put on this earth was to make money and be generous with it. And that’s what I’ve continually tried to do.”