Landscape of the Very Large Antenna (VLA Telescopes), NRAO/AUI

In 1932, as the Great Depression took hold, Templeton headed off to Yale University, but after one year there, his father could no longer afford the tuition. From that point on, the young Templeton was forced to live thriftily as he earned every dollar for his education himself. “That was the best education. I had to go back and take three jobs and learn to be useful in three different jobs,” says Templeton, who finished his bachelor’s degree in 1934. “Back in those old days, universities didn’t give scholarships because a child needed the money. They gave scholarships because they had high grades. So knowing that, I decided that I was going to get high grades. This competition meant that I had to work hard; I learned to be a hard worker, a very hard worker. I worked nights and days and weekends, which I still do.”

At one time, Templeton—who continued his studies in Balliol College at Oxford University on a Rhodes Scholarship and graduated with a law degree—thought about being a Christian minister, then a missionary. In the end, he decided “the best I could hope for in a spiritual way was to be a missionary’s helper. When I was 18, I came to believe that the talents that God had given me —not many, and not so different from other people’s—were elements of judgment and foresight. Where would they be useful?” he remembers wondering. “So I undertook at age 18 to educate myself on judging the value of corporations. I thought that would help religion in the sense that, if I were good at it, I would be able to do things like what I’m doing now.”

Templeton was better than good at the mutual fund business, becoming one of the most successful entrepreneurs of the 20th century. On Wall Street, he founded his own investment management company and created some of the world’s largest international investment funds. After several years of increasing success as an investment advisor, he then launched the Templeton Growth Fund, which allowed investors to take advantage of foreign growth opportunities by maximizing a disciplined, long-term approach to identifying bargain stocks worldwide.

“I was so busy trying to accumulate some money, since I started with none, that I was over 50 years old when I began to wish that I could devote my time to helping people. Gradually, by the time I was 80, I looked around for my strongest competitor in the management of other people’s money. It was a group named Franklin Resources in California, and I sold all my mutual funds to them.”

Armed with the millions of dollars he made on the sale, he was ready to “take up the more important career of trying to spread progress in spiritual information.”

More and more, Templeton felt that the search for spiritual truth was “one area in life where I could spend my time and money in ways that would benefit humanity, and maybe make a small contribution to the future of civilization. There is a big blank to be filled in by somebody with money to donate in the encouragement of research and discoveries about aspects of reality related to the invisible and intangible.”

Templeton—who believes “Joy comes from giving, not getting”—says he is having more fun giving his money away than he ever had making it. Today, the John Templeton Foundation helps to finance more than 300 projects, studies and award programs, based on the principle of inviting proposals from bright people who say, “I can do this if I had a little bit of money.”