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In 1919 Hilton went to Cisco, Texas, to buy a bank, but the seller raised the price and the deal fell through. The oil-boom Mobley Hotel was so crowded it rented beds in eight-hour shifts, and its owner wanted to sell and go after oil. Hilton examined the hotel's accounts and completed the purchase about a week later, and the Mobley became his first hotel.
Hilton called it 'digging for gold': checking every part of a building for space that brought in no revenue and turning it into space that did. He shrank dining rooms, split large rooms into more rentable ones, and leased lobby corners to shops and newsstands. The goal was to raise a property's yield without buying anything new.
In the early 1930s Hilton lost most of his hotels and owed hundreds of thousands of dollars. He kept going on small acts of trust, including a bellboy who handed over his personal savings so Hilton could eat. He also made an arrangement with a creditor that let him keep running hotels he no longer controlled. He stayed in contact with creditors and kept operating rather than walking away, and that let him buy the properties back as conditions improved.
Hilton argued that large achievements start as a specific, pictured goal held with faith, and that prayer and optimism keep that goal alive through setbacks. In 1931, while nearly broke, he clipped a photo of the Waldorf-Astoria captioned 'The Greatest of Them All' and kept it. He took control of the Waldorf in 1949. In his account, a vivid picture of the goal and a regular habit of prayer kept him committed long enough for circumstances to catch up.