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Book_
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COPXEIGHT DEPOSIT:
Keys to Success
Personal Efficiency
Editor "Forbes Magazine"
Author, "Men Who Are Making America" "Finance,
Business, and the Business of Life," Etc.
B. C. Forbes Publishing Co.
299 Broadway
New York
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Copyright, 1917, 1918, by B. C. FORBES
JAN 24 1919
©CLA511388
To DUNCAN
INTRODUCTION TO KEYS TO SUCCESS WHAT IT'S ABOUT
Nobody can hand you a ready-made key to open the door of success. You must fashion your own key and find the combination of the lock for your- self.
No magician can waft you to the heights of for- tune and fame. You cannot fly there on the wings of an aeroplane.
The road, often rocky, has to be traversed on foot. You, and you alone, can supply the motive power. You, and you alone, must put forth the necessary exertion. No one can remove from your shoulders the burden of the effort. You must do your own climbing.
Nor are there any mystic short-cuts. The full distance must be honestly, even painstakingly traveled.
Then why such a book as this?
What help can it afford?
It can afford either much help or no help: all depends upon the spirit in which it is read and used.
No person sincerely anxious to attain success — - and willing to pay the necessary price — can fail to be stimulated, aided, enlightened, and encouraged by perusing it, for it contains, not solely old-as-the-hills platitudes and generalities, but the greatest wealth of specific, concrete pointers from our most successful
INTRODUCTION TO KEYS TO SUCCESS
present-day men of affairs that has ever been gath- ered between two covers. It contains not only the cream of the wisdom accumulated by these brainy, mature, practical men, but hundreds of illustrations of how they applied their wisdom when put to the test. It abounds in actual incidents and anecdotes from the careers of men who have reached the sum- mits toward which we all are pressing, or, at least, to which we all aspire: in too many cases there is a super-abundance of aspiration but a dearth of per- spiration and pressing.
] I do not feel that I have written the book. Its authors, rather, are a hundred or more of our best- known captains of industry, statesmen, writers, and a few sages of former days. Much of the material comes direct from business men who have become recognized as the foremost authorities in their line. They have given of their best in the hope of helping others to rise.
While there are no escalators to the hilltop of success, and while every man and woman must do his and her own climbing, yet there is a right road to it — and many wrong roads which never lead the traveler to the desired goal.
The aims of the book are :
First — To guide the reader into the right paths.
Second — To warn him of difficulties he^will en- counter, show him how others overcame similar or greater difficulties, and hearten him to wrestle with and triumph over them.
Third — To inculcate correct ideas on what con- stitutes worthwhile success, so that the ambitious youth may be able, before it is too late, to differen- tiate between the true and the false, the tinsel and
VI
INTRODUCTION TO KEYSTO SUCCESS
the real, the showy shadow and the twenty-four carat substance.
Fourth— To invest life with a purpose that will yield satisfying joy at the end as well as during the early and mid- way stages.
One comforting thought driven home to me by these studies of the careers of successful men, a thought which I record in this foreword in the hope that it will induce the reader to act, is that an earnest, persistent effort to cultivate one "success quality" makes the cultivation of other helpful qualities very much easier. Indeed, the pursuit of one virtue often leads to the attainment of a group of equally valuable virtues.
Take, for example, the cultivation of a good mem- ory. Irregular, loose habits are fatal to the training of one's memory. By zealously, assiduously, con- scientiously, prayerfully concentrating on the build- ing up of the memory, a whole battalion of bad habits and injurious practices may be, almost un- consciously, subjugated.
Or, take the elementary — but all too uncommon — virtue of politeness. You cannot strictly adhere to the habit of politeness without eschewing a string of minor or major offences of which many people are constantly guilty. Politeness breeds gentleness, thoughtf ulness, consideration for others — unselfishness, in short, and it is selfishness which lies at the root of almost all our shortcomings.
Finally, there is more genuine joy in climbing the hill of success, even though sweat may be spent and toes may be stubbed, than in aimlessly sliding down the path to failure. If a straight, honorable path has been chosen, the gaining of the summit yields lasting satisfaction. The morass of failure, if reached
vii
INTRODUCTION TO KEYS TO SUCCESS
through laziness, indifference, or other avoidable fault, yields nothing but ignominy and sorrow for self and family and friends.
Most of these "Keys to Success" have appeared serially in either Hearsts or Forbes Magazine, and it was the reception accorded them that prompted their publication in book form. Each "Key" is here supplemented by a to-the-point, practical questionnaire, or exhortation, calculated to induce the student immediately to take up and apply in his daily activities the quality discussed. The author of this part of the volume is a business man who has attained national prominence through his success in developing young men and in applying to everyday business problems ripe knowledge and understanding of human beings and their psychology. Use of these articles in school has already been inaugurated in va- rious parts of the country, and the prospect that this volume may become helpful in molding the char- acters and directing aright the careers of many of our ambitious young men and women has invested the compilation of it with deep creative pleasure.
vm
KEYS TO SUCCESS
PFRSONAL EFFICIENCY
KEYS TO SUCCESS
YOU
Your success depends upon you.
Your happiness depends upon you.
You have to steer your own course.
You have to shape your own fortune.
You have to educate yourself.
You have to do your own thinking.
You have to live with your own conscience.
Your mind is yours and can be used only by you.
You come into the world alone.
You go to the grave alone.
You are alone with your inner thoughts during the journey between.
You must make your own decisions.
You must abide by the consequences of your acts.
"I cannot make you well unless you make yourself well," an eminent doctor often tells his patients.
You alone can regulate your habits and make or unmake your health.
You alone can assimilate things mental and things material.
Said a Brooklyn preacher, offering his parishioners communion one Sunday: "I cannot give you the blessings and the benefits of this holy feast. You must appropriate them for yourselves. The banquet is spread; help yourself freely.
KEYS TO SUCCESS
"You may be invited to a feast where the table is laden with the choicest foods, but unless you par- take of the foods, unless you appropriate and as- similate them, they can do you no good. So it is with^ this holy feast. You must appropriate its blessings. I cannot infuse them into you."
You have to do your own assimilation all through life.
You may be taught by a teacher, but you have to imbibe the knowledge. He cannot transfuse it into your brain.
You alone can control your mind cells and your brain cells.
You may have spread before you the wisdom of the ages, but unless you assimilate it you derive no benefit from it; no one can force it into your cranium.
You alone can move your own legs.
You alone can use your own arms.
You alone can utilize your own hands.
You alone can control your own muscles.
You must stand on your feet, physically and meta- phorically.
You must take your own steps.
Your parents cannot enter into your skin, take control of your mental and physical machinery, and make something of you.
You cannot fight your son's battles; that he must do for himself.
You have to be captain of your own destiny. •?
You have to see through your own eyes. /
You have to use your own ears.
You have to master your own faculties.
You have to solve your own problems.
You have to form your own ideals.
You have to create your own ideas.
4
YOU
You must choose your own speech.
You must govern your own tongue.
Your real life is your thoughts.
Your thoughts are of your own making.
Your character is your own handiwork.
You alone can select the materials that go into it.
You alone can reject what is not fit to go into it.
You are the creator of your own personality.
You can be disgraced by no man's hand but your own.
You can be elevated and sustained by no man save yourself.
You have to write your own record.
You have to build your own monument — or dig your own pit.
Which are you doing?
5
How You Can Develop Your Personal Efficiency
Modern psychology has exploded the old idea that a man is born with certain mental powers, and with these he must be content till the day of his death. We all know that if the muscles of our arms are weak, we can develop them by exercise; if our touch on the typewriter is slow we can speed it up; and if our mem- ory is weak we can develop it. It is equally possible to develop any other personal qualities if we go about it in the right way; but most people haven't the remotest idea how to go about it.
The process is perfectly simple — it escapes us be- cause it is so simple. It is nothing more than fixing our attention on the particular personal quality, in the particular way in which we exercise it in our business, for a few minutes each day or each week for a sufficient length of time. Unless we get our attention sharply on the right point (and that is where we need instruction to see the right thing clear- ly), and unless we have the patience to keep at it persistently for a few weeks or months, we shall not succeed; but if we do we shall succeed beyond a doubt.
We get increased personal efficiency not alone by sheer development of personal power, but quite as often by various compensations. For example, I am lacking in "personality," so radically lacking that no amount of effort I can make will develop enough of it to match the fine analytic power of thinking and planning which I have as a native gift. What shall I do? Why, naturally I look for a partner who has personality but lacks power of analytic thought
6
YOU
and organization, and we two make a team that can't be beaten. Many a man knows he is weak on a certain side, and yet he persists in undertaking duties that require strength in those directions, and of course he fails. He is simply a fool to try to do what he can't do; and he would be equally a fool to be discouraged on that account and not try to do all he could with the powers which he does have, seeking ways to compensate for his special weakness.
The first step toward efficiency is the personal check- up.
Self-analysis is not easy for many persons, but self-analysis is the first step toward analysis of others, and that means mastery of that very helpful instrument, modern practical applied psychology.
On a following page you will find a blank in which the various "Keys to Success" are listed in the first column, and in the spaces opposite you should check each quality by a cross in the proper column.
In the first column mark the qualities you know you are strong in, and which you exercise now regularly in your business.
In the second column check with a cross the qual- ities you think you have in good natural development but which you do not have an opportunity to use at present in business.
In the third column check with a cross the quali- ties about which you do not feel at all sure.
Beyond the double line we will check the qualities in which we believe we are particularly weak. In the first column check the qualities in which you feel particularly weak and which you require in your present or prospective business.
In the second column beyond the double line check the qualities in which you think you are weak
KEYS TO SUCCESS
but which are not important in your present or prospective business.
In the third column check the qualities which you suspect may be weak but about which you are uncertain.
The columns beyond the triple line you should use after you have been over this course by way of checking up the results — in the first column the qualities you have assured yourself you are all right in or in which you have attained satisfactory improvement, in the second column the qualities on which you are still working for improvement, and in the third column the qualities for which you have found compensations. Every personal quality should be accounted for under one of these three heads.
GOOD |
xm- USED |
? |
WEAK |
xm- IMP. |
? |
SAT- IS. |
WORK- ING |
COM- PENSA- TIONS |
|
Think |
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Self-Education . . |
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Work |
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Self-Denial . |
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Health |
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Will-Power |
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Self-Respect . |
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Self-Reliance |
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THINK
The Woolworth Building was once only a thought. Thousands of years ago an Egyptian king had a thought, and lo! every generation since has gazed on its fulfilment — the Pyramids.
Thought is the parent of progress. Thought creates all. Everything springs from thought. Human beings are distinguished from other animals by this one power, the power of thought.
The immortals of this world are they who thought deeper or more brilliantly than their fellows.
I recently asked one of America's foremost interna- tional bankers, Otto H. Kahn, what one thing more than another a young man should do to succeed.
He replied in one emphatic word: "Think!"
Harriman liked to drop in unannounced and find an executive lying back in a chair, feet on desk, "for then I know he is taking time to think," said the railroad wizard.
The Tobacco King, James B. Duke, attributes his rise largely to a thought that came to him when a young man. "Why can't I do in tobacco what John D. Rockefeller has done in oil?" he asked himself. "And then," he told me, "I started out to do it." Note that: "I started out to do it."
Henry Ford says: "My advice to business men is to reap! a lot and thinjc a lot, and work a lot. I startecf that way. I kept on thinking and I am still thinking. The habit of analysis, the ability to get
9
KEYS TO SUCCESS
under the surface of things and at the vital essentials, gives a man a tremendous advantage over those of his competitors who do not do likewise."
"You know, boys," Henry L. Doherty once impressed upon one of the remarkable engineering classes conducted by his organization, "we study too much and think too little. Cultivate ability to think, and think straight. A lot of men are crammed full of knowledge but don't know how to use it."
Just as the unit of human society is not a man or a woman, but a man and a woman, so the basis of achievement is not thought or action, but thought and action.
Inventors are notoriously lax, unsuccessful in- dividuals for the very reason that most of them, after evolving a brilliant idea, do not act and keep on acting — do not, in other words, pursue it further by carrying it into practice and profiting by its devel- opment and application.
Edison both thinks and acts. That's why he has been successful beyond every other inventor known to history. The phonograph is the only one of his important inventions which worked at the first trial. Some of his inventions called for ten thousand experiments and one of them for fifty thousand!
The greatest piece of sculpture in the world was once only a thought; the thought was hewn into a boulder of rough marble — and the Venus of Milo sprang into immortal existence.
The billion-dollar United States Steel Corporation of to-day, with its three hundred thousand employees and its two billion dollars of assets, was once merely a thought, a thought in the brain of a young man
10
THINK
named Charles M. Schwab, who not only conceived the idea but went to work and acted on it.
The great positions are filled, not by the thought- less, but by those who think — and follow up their thoughts by deeds.
Kitchener conjured up a vision of an army of three millions at a time when Britain had never known an army of half of one million. His thought saved Britain and France.
As civilization advances, thought becomes more and more vital to success. The time is coming when virtually all tasks not requiring human thought will be performed by machines.
To rise above the level of a machine a man must develop the power of thinking. Become a thinker, learn to produce useful, valuable thoughts and ideas, and no machinery inventable by a thousand Edisons will ever be able to displace you.
Germany overran her opponents early in the war simply because she had given more thought to war and the preparation for war. In the war to follow the war — the war of industry and commerce — victory will be won by the nation which out thinks its rivals.
Rule-of-thumb methods will no longer suffice for either nation or individual. New formulas must be the product of thought, of hard, serious, sustained, clear-headed thinking.
For centuries men sought and searched for the Philosopher's Stone. You can find the Philosopher's Stone — in your own mind.
What has enabled us to talk from America to Europe with wire or without wire? What has given us the awe-inspiring science of astronomy? What has given us a device capable of weighing the globe
11
KEYS TO SUCCESS
on which we live? What has brought forth machines on which man may outfly the eagle?
Thought— Mind.
What glorious opportunities will unfold for the thinker once peace comes! Our old economic, industrial, and financial systems have creaked and cracked under the stress of world-war.
Who shall evolve new and better systems? Who shall lead in establishing the new order? The think- ers, men who have tilled and cultivated their minds, men who have thought and thought and thought, men who have so exploited their minds that they have therein found the Philosopher's Stone.
The victors in the battles of to-morrow will be those who can best harness thought to action. From office-boy to statesman the prizes will be for those who most effectively exert their brains, who take deep, earnest, studious counsel of their minds, who stamp themselves as thinkers.
Unless you strain every power and spend every available moment to rise above the level of a ma- chine, in future you are more likely than ever before to be cast on the heap of the unsuccessful, for machines hereafter will do the work of mere automatons.
Runs a trite saying: "We are the sum of all our thoughts." A man's real worth is the quality, the value, of his thoughts, his mind. Real riches are the riches possessed inside. Mental riches cannot be gathered, cannot be garnered, without effort, without brain-sweat, without stern exertion.
Are you thus striving to obtain mental riches? To the man of rich mentality it is easy to acquire all needful worldly riches.
There are two main keys to success — Think and Work. And the first is : Think !
12
How You Can Develop the Power to Think
The men who do big things are the men who think. Are you one of them? Have you systematically cultivated the thinking habit? Be truthful with yourself — absolutely truthful. You can't afford to be anything else — with yourself.
If you want to learn to think effectively, first of all you must be alone for at least half-an-hour at a time — absolutely alone and uninterrupted.
Men never think in crowds. In crowds they are governed by the animal herd instinct, which is directly and powerfully opposed to the thinking principle, which is strictly individual. A person must be alone.
Some people think best in the morning, some at night. Which is your natural tendency?
Settle that point right now. If you are a morning- bird you will not mind going out for a half -hour's walk before breakfast, and if you get into the country, into the woods, or by a lake, you have ideal conditions for thinking.
The present writer likes the morning best, but is so situated that he can't get out into the woods as he would like. Instead he is up and around the house at least an hour before any one else, and as he does his morning duties mechanically from long habit he does his thinking for the day. Wife says she doesn't see for the life of her how so much time can be killed in making a toilet — but she doesn't know about the thinking.
If you are your own boss you can say," I shan't be back this afternoon," and go off for a trip in the park or country for a good solid afternoon of
13
EEYS TO SUCCESS
thinking. If you are employed, my advice would be to go frankly to your employer and tell him squarely that you need to be alone to think things out, and ask if you cannot have a small room some- where, where you can shut yourself up and nobody will be allowed to disturb you for at least an hour.
But what shall you think about?
Why, the biggest thing in your life at the time being. But whatever you start in to think about, think it through to the end, till you reach a con- clusion that at least satisfies you as the right one, the genuine mathematical solution of your puzzle, or of some stage of it.
Take out a pencil NOW and write down the several things you know it is your duty to think through to a decision.
Then number these in order of importance — No. 1, the most immediately important, or the biggest and most vital; No. 2, next on the list, and so on.
How long do you think you ought to take to think through to a conclusion the first item on your list?
See if you can't do it on schedule, and be ready to take up the next item.
And how shall you test your thinking?
Why, by constituting your friends a "conference board," or an "expert staff," like the board of directors of a corporation.
Of course, you must write out your line of thought and take it to the person most likely to be a good judge. Ask your friend how that impresses him. Then take it to another friend. If you get two or three to agree with you, you are probably right in your conclusions.
Nothing ever comes of assigning a thinking job
14
THINK
to two or three persons at one time. One does the thinking. Then the staff members try to pick his thinking to pieces. They often send the thinker back to do his thinking job all over again. You want to be prepared to do your thinking jobs over many times. That is the scientific method — trying, testing, and trying again, thus getting grad- ually nearer and nearer to the truth. ^ Is this your habit of mind?
Are you training yourself to be a thinker?
Is there any reason why you should not start right now?
No? Then START!
15
SELF-EDUCATION
Education is not merely "a" key to success; it could almost be called "the" key to success.
No uneducated, uncultured person is really suc- cessful, for true success consists less of money than of mentality, an inward thing, not an outward thing.
Education is both a means to an end and an end in itself.
Without education, no man or woman can reach the highest pinnacle of success.
But education does not consist of school learning.
Our education comprises the sum total of what we know.
Our education comes, or should come, from our daily experiences in life.
Education is observation rather than perspiration.
Books form the groundwork of one's education. Without well-directed, diligent reading, few persons can hope to become really educated or cultured.
But all wisdom is not contained between the covers of books.
We can learn daily from all sorts and conditions of men and women and children, from what we see going on around us, from what we hear.
Self-education can become one of the pleasantest of habits, and certainly it is of all habits the most profitable.
Education — knowledge — means power. It begets ability, and ability means advancement.
16
SELF-EDUCATION
The records reveal that not half of our most successful men of affairs received a college education and that many of them never completed even the common school course.
Andrew Carnegie was taken from school when only about ten.
William L. Douglas, who became governor of Massachusetts and also one of the world's largest manufacturers of shoes, received hardly any schooling at all.
The most notable man on the Pacific coast, Robert Dollar, lumber king and steamship owner, left school at twelye and was exiled in a remote Canadian lumber camp, far from civilization, where he at one stage could scarcely read or write; he is now a notable public speaker and the author of a fascinating volume of "Memoirs."
James B. Duke, the tobacco king, had scanty schooling.
Edison was cast out of school when about seven because he was adjudged by the teachers too stupid to learn!
George Eastman, of Kodak fame; E. C. Simmons, the greatest hardware merchant in the world; Henry Ford; F. W. Wool worth, the largest retail merchant in the world; Henry C. Frick, the coke king and steel master; John G. Shedd, head of Marshall Field & Company; James A. Farrell, president of the greatest industrial organization In history, the United States Steel Corporation; Thomas E. Wilson, the famous packer — these and hosts of others who have made their marks received a very moderate amount of school education.
But most of them have become educated men, men of wide knowledge, men of powerful mentality,
17
KEYS TO SUCCESS
men of the keenest observation, men of the soundest judgment, men who have studied human nature as well as business.
Andrew Carnegie had a tutor even after he graduated to a Fifth Avenue mansion.
Discussing this subject of education in course of a series of articles in the Wall Street Journal on "Characteristics of Captains of Industry," I re- marked that: "There is hardly a captain of industry, no matter how meager his schooling when a boy, who has not become an educated man, a man of wide knowledge, of keen judgment, a student of human nature. Most financial and business leaders have also contrived to steep themselves in history, and particularly the biographies of the world's most famous achievers. (Napoleon, I find, is their favorite study.)
"Even the busiest of financiers and captains of industry find time to read a great deal. Quite a few of them, including Otto H. Kahn, to mention a financier, and Daniel Guggenheim, to mention an industrial giant, have a cast iron rule to read for at least an hour every night before going to sleep, no matter how late they retire.
" Only the other day I ran into one of our foremost railroad presidents, Daniel Willard of the Baltimore & Ohio, and found he was wrestling with an advanced book on French — a change of occupation from the time he was sleeping all night in an engine house on a pioneer road out West so as to be able to get up two or three times during each night to feed the fires with wood in order to keep the engines from freezing.
"Frank A. Vanderlip, head of the National City Bank, has a theory of education for young men which
18
SELF-EDUCATION
appears to have been followed by the majority of our famous men of affairs. Says Mr. Vanderlip: 'In addition to doing a full day's work at his bench or his desk, a young man should daily devote another day to studying all about his work or his profession so that he can better understand the meaning of everything he does, the why and the wherefore of it, the principles underlying it, and thus equip him- self to rise to any height.'
"I have been struck with the fact that com- paratively few American youths whose parents paid for their university course have reached the topmost rung of the ladder. Perhaps I should rather say that it is astounding to note how many of those at the very top had to work their own way through college. We don't appreciate anything we get for nothing, 'tis said. This manifestly applies with special truth to university training. The fellows who by their own sweat and their own self- sacrifice had to pay for their learning derived most benefit from it. They were wise enough to make the most of their opportunities. This also taught them frugality.
"Darwin P. Kingsley, president of the New York Life Insurance Company, existed a full college year on $165; he earned his tuition by ringing the college bell, 'an experience,' he once remarked to me, 'which so thoroughly taught me punctuality that I don't believe I have ever been a moment late for an engagement in my life.' Vanderlip's year at college cost him $265, so economically did he live.
"That a college education, however, is not essential to tremendous success in business has been demonstrated over and over again. Did you ever stop to think that scarcely one of the men who
19
KEYS TO SUCCESS
have made the very greatest business marks in America graduated from college?
"John D. Rockefeller never graduated even from high school. Harriman was neither an A. B. nor an A. M., nor was James J. Hill. George F. Baker, now the dean of America's bankers, is not a college man. I do not think that one of John D. Rockefeller's partners was a college graduate, nor is his present- day successor as head of Standard Oil, A. C. Bedford."
Let me repeat, however, that whether poorly educated or well educated in youth, almost every notably successful man I have ever met clearly revealed that he had not gone through life lazily or with unobserving eyes or inattentive ears, but had exercised his mentality to the very limit.
The vitally important thing for the young man or young woman is, first, to realize the value of education, and then to cultivate earnestly, aggressive- ly, ceaselessly, the habit of self -education.
Education is to the brain what food is to the body. Without fresh supplies of knowledge the brain will not develop healthily and vigorously any more than the body can be sustained without fresh supplies of food. *
The mind can be trained to become as a magnet which attracts true steel but ignores dross.
The mind must be disciplined to absorb useful, helpful valuable information, and to ignore whatever is not helpful or valuable.
Education is really a matter of selection — a matter of selecting what we shall become interested in, selecting how we shall employ our time, selecting things that will increase our knowledge and wisdom and power, or the reverse.
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SELF-EDUCATION
Competition is so keen to-day that only the well- informed person can hope to draw ahead of the crowd.
No corporation, no firm, wants an ignorant em- ployee for a responsible position.
"Andy, here is a young man who knows as much about this mill as I do," was how young Charlie Schwab's boss introduced him to Andrew Carnegie and that was how Schwab's phenomenal rise start- ed— through his knowledge, through his self-educa- tion in all matters pertaining to the production of steel.
Let no young man or woman feel discouraged because of meager schooling. I know of a woman who learned Greek after she was almost seventy; she learned it because she wanted to be able to read the New Testament in its ancient language.
It may require effort, it may require rigid self- discipline, it may require painful self-denial to switch from careless, idle habits to a course of study. But very soon the pleasure derived from the good habit will immeasurably outweigh the false pleasure de- rived from the bad habits.
When the most successful of our present-day leaders were youths the facilities for self -education were lamentably meager.
To-day there are not only facilities but induce- ments on every side.
You cannot open a magazine or newspaper which does not contain announcements of educational courses of one kind or another.
Perhaps the most helpful and practical are the courses of study prescribed by the leading corre- spondence schools, or institutes, as some of the very best are called.
21
KEYS TO SUCCESS
One excellent institution, for example, offers a business course which I know has proved of ex- traordinary benefit to thousands of young men as well as ambitious business men, including execu- tives, of middle age.
Then there are courses in law — and it is re- markable how many men have found a knowledge of law of great help to them in handling their daily problems.
There are courses, too, in accountancy — and many promotions have likewise been won through possess- ing a grasp of the fundamental principles of keeping accounts.
r, A course in English, if wisely selected, is also well worth while.
i In short, there is no self-education need which cannot be obtained by the average American youth if he can but muster the will to learn.
Self -education consists chiefly of reading, observa- tion, conversation and reflection.
"Knowledge," says Sir Thomas Lipton, "should be a compound of what we derive from books, and what we extract, by our observation, from the living world around us. Both of these are necessary to the well-informed man; and, of the two, the last is, by far, the most useful for the practical purposes of life. The man who can combine the teachings of books with strong and close observation of life, deserves the name of a well-informed man, and presents a model worthy of imitation."
It is true that in many homes the facilities for quiet reading, study and reflection are far from ideal. Yet the young man or woman thus un- fortunately circumstanced will, if sufficiently in earnest, find a way to overcome this difficulty, either
SELF-EDUCATION
by visiting a public library, joining an evening school, becoming a member of the right kind of a club, or arranging to study in company with some companion whose home environment is more con- ducive to study. "Where there's a will there's a way."
By becoming better educated than the average and by keeping your mind on helpful subjects, you will not only qualify for higher financial rewards and for positions of wider responsibility and influence and power, but you will lay up for yourself riches which "neither moth nor rust doth corrupt," riches which will become valuable beyond price to you in later life when the things which money can buy cease to satisfy and one must find pleasure and satisfaction and joy from the inward, not the out- ward life.
In old age millions can do little for a human being; the mind alone can yield that which counts.
The motto of Forbes Magazine is "With all thy getting, get understanding." Self -education will enable you to get the other things and also "under- standing."
23
How to Plan and Carry On a Course for Self- Education
By long odds the chief means of self-education is systematic reading. Those who spend an hour or two hours daily on trains travelling to and from business have a splendid chance for systematic reading. They can soon accustom themselves to the crowd and the noise, and ignore them completely. Let us plan an interesting reading course right now.
Biography. Among the biographies every one should have read are — Lincoln, Washington, Franklin (Autobiography), Edison, Napoleon, Alexander the Great, just for a start. "Men Who Are Making America" (B.C. Forbes Publishing Co.) gives short, fascinating biographies of fifty of our leading financial and business men. How many of these books have you read already? Which will you decide right now to start on next?
Science. Popular writings of Tyndall, Huxley, and Spencer, and the easy Science Primers series — chemistry, physics, biology, sanitation and hygiene, botany, geology and mineralogy, economics and sociology, and also modern psychology. Which of these subjects do you know something about? Which will you select to make a start on now? You will not be able to get very deep into these sciences, but you will at least have some notion what they are about, and from all of them you will absorb a con- ception of the method of modern science, which is precisely the method which ought to be used in the study of all business problems.
History. Have you read extensively in American history — something more than a superficial school
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SELF-EDUCATION
history? I recommend the American Statesman series. The "Life of Henry Clay" by Carl Schurz covers fifty years just before the Civil War, and is remarkably well written. Such a book as Parkman's "Oregon Trail" shows how the northwest was opened up. Motley's "Rise of the Dutch Re- public" will prove a very interesting study of Europe that will be of special interest to Americans. Every American ought to be familiar with the American romance of Prescott's Pizarro and other tales of Mexico and Peru. The present writer enjoyed immensely J. A. Symonds' "History of the Renascence in Italy." For a general history Guizot's "History of Civilization" is excellent, and for English history Green's "Shorter History of the English People" is the one classic. Which of these have you already read? Which will you choose for a starter now?
Literature. Have you read Shakespeare's "Merchant of Venice," "Hamlet," "Julius Csesar," "Tempest," "Taming of the Shrew," "Much Ado About Nothing," "Midsummer Night's Dream," "Othello," "King Lear?" ^ Have you read the chief works of the great novelists — Scott ("Ivanhoe," "Kenilworth"), Dickens ("David Copperfield," "Pickwick," "Tale of Two Cities"), Thackeray ("Vanity Fair"), Hugo ("Les Miserables"), Dumas ("Three Musketeers"), Balzac ("Country Doctor," "Caesar Birroteau," "Eugenie Grandet")? Among Americans, Poe's short stories ("Gold Bug," "Pur- loined Letter," "Murders in Rue Morgue"), Haw- thorne's "Twice-Told Tales" and "Mosses from an Old Manse," and the "Scarlet Letter," Cooper's "Last of the Mohicans," "Deerslayer," and "Prai- rie," and Irving's wonderful "Sketch-Book" and
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KEYS TO SUCCESS
"Alhambra"? We can leave poetry to those who have a taste for it. Which of these books have you read? Which will you read next? Decide right now.
Fundamental Education. Are you weak on spelling, punctuation, grammar, use of words? On Arith- metic? On Geography? Get a really elementary correspondence course if you can, and also find a private teacher to drill you. Make it a practice course from start to finish to correct bad habits by doing the same exercise over and over tilt you can do it right. Merely reading about these things will do little good — only the practice exercises will correct your bad habits. Most school courses are very poor. You will have to hunt to find a good teacher. On which of these will you start first? Decide now.
Technical Education. Last of all, you need to study the technic of your own business, and it is surprising how many persons in business know noth- ing about the latest developments in their own line. For this purpose, first go to the library and find some of the best technical books — get advice from the librarian or from a good professor in a technical school, and get abreast of the times. Have you ever read even one current technical book? If you read one you will read many. Then see what even- ing technical school is within your reach. If you know of none, look for a good correspondence course of a technical character.
This outline is very sketchy, but it will enable you to check over your own actual present education and will reveal to you where you probably are weakest. The great thing is to devote at least one hour each day systematically. In a few years you will be astonished at how your mind has developed, as well as at your increased knowledge.
26
IDEALS
Ideals are the most powerful force known to man.
They are more mighty than armies with banners.
They can create armies — greater armies than the Kaiser and all his junker Generals can create, as America is now demonstrating to the whole world.
One thing, and one thing alone, is strong enough to arouse the United States from the somnolence of peace and to force or entice her into war — idealism, ideals.
America has never fought a war for material gain, never fought a war for conquest, never fought a war for expansion or imperialism.
Her every war has been born of ideals, most often the ideal of freedom.
This idea] inspired the war of '76, just as it in- spired the war of '61; in one case the people fought for freedom for self, in the other for the freedom of the colored race. The Spanish war was waged to bring freedom to a New World people who were being oppressed by a decadent Old World power.
And what is this World War but a war begotten by clash of ideals, a war waged by us for freedom, for the freedom not of one people, not of one color, not of one race, but all mankind, including even those now our enemies?
For no other goal, for no less a prize, would the United States have unsheathed her sword and offered the sacrifice of so many of her noblest sons. America came to recognize that the victory of
KEYS TO SUCCESS
Prussianism would mean the banishment of ideals, the enthronement of tyrannical, barbarous might, the doom of all that this Commonwealth holds dear, of all that it has fought and bled for, of all that it embodies, of all that it is. For, do not forget that the German Emperor blatantly and bitterly told Ambassador Gerard that once he had conquered Europe he would bring America under his sharp- spurred heel.
The ideal of Prussia is might, "Our strong sword," autocracy.
The ideal of America is right, freedom, democracy.
And because our ideal is bred of justice, because it is in accordance with the onward trend of the universe, because it partakes of the very nature of the Lord God Almighty, it must and shall prevail.
In the soft days of peace the ideal of America was beginning to be misunderstood. Other lands were beginning to picture our ideal by the $ sign. It may even be that our national ideal was beginning to be lowered, to be materialized, to be tainted with greed of gold and lust of ostentation.
But the call, the crisis, has not found us wanting. The pristine national ideal has reasserted itself with a force, a power, a strength that has dazzled the world. No golden calves disfigure our altars. We worship not Mammon. We are dedicating our all — our blood, our treasure, our resources — to the Cause, to that same Cause, that same ideal, which gave this nation birth.
No nation's greatness long survives the lowering of the greatness of its ideals.
And, as with nations, so with individuals.
Low ideals and high station cannot long retain company.
IDEALS
The world of affairs, the financial, the industrial, the commercial world, never observed and never demanded as high ideals as to-day.
Business ideas to be colossally successful to-day must embody, must partake of the ideal.
The $ sign is no longer "almighty." Dollar- making must not be inconsistent with Service; rather must it be wedded to Service.
The firms, the institutions, the companies, the corporations having the highest ideals are the ones that are to-day universally recognized as the most successful.
So with executives: the ones who are in keenest demand, the ones who command the largest salaries, are the ones who have impressed the public with their fairness, their integrity, their character.
We have outgrown many old, unworthy practices. Rebates, the bribery and corruption of legislators, "yellow dog funds," the debauchery of buyers, the "fixing" of judges, illegal, cut-throat competitors — such secret, underground, unwholesome practices are no longer rife, no longer countenanced, no longer condoned.
* Lawyers now receive fewer fat fees for coaching corporations on how to get round laws; more fees are now paid to show corporations how to comply with laws.
In business mere cleverness is at a discount. The man who has ideas is not sought after if his ideas do not harmonize with ideals.
Ideals and "I deal" should mean the same thing.
We all must have ideals unless we are content to drift along aimlessly, ambitionless, ineffectually. Ideals vitalize. Ideals energize.
We must fix clearly before us our ideals and then
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KEYS TO SUCCESS
press on towards them as the captain steers for his port.
Without ideals we sail without a chart, we tread an undefined, unfenced path from which we are con- stantly in danger of falling or straying.
Ideals light up the journey of life. They are as "lamps to our feet."
The life barren of ideals is as a dark sky barren of stars.
Our ideal can be to us a veritable "cloud by day and pillar of fire by night" and can lead us to our desired haven as surely as the cloud and the pillar of fire led Moses towards the Promised Land.
Ideals can buoy us up. Ideals are to life what air is to the pneumatic tire, what gas is to the dirigible, what wings are to the aeroplane.
Our ideals enable us to separate the dross from the precious metal, the dirt from the diamonds.
The man without ideals is as a watch without a mainspring.
The man with ideals, the man who refuses to tarnish or barter his ideals no matter how high the price offered can never feel abjectly poor, can never feel bankrupt in mind and spirit and soul. He will retain a sense of wealth and worth which no multiple of millions could ever instil within a scheming, unscrupulous Croesus.
You have read time and again how the faces of the dead on the Allied battlefront seem to shine with radiant peace and contentment, how they appear to be lit up with something far transcending a smile — with "an indefinable glory," as one correspondent expresses it. May not the explanation be that our soldiers and the soldiers of our Allies, aglow with
30
IDEALS
the consciousness that they are fighting and dying for a glorious Cause, for that same Cause for which Christ himself gave His life, reflect in death the spir- it animating them in life, in battle?
What has raised up Woodrow Wilson far above the statesmen of any other land? What has won for him the gratitude and the homage of every free nation of the world?
Not his decision to fight Germany. Not his achievements as Commander-in-chief of America's army and navy, superhuman though our war activi- ties have been. No, not that, not these.
Woodrow Wilson has become the foremost figure of the whole human race because he, better than any other statesman, has expressed the ideals for which the Allied nations are fighting.
Wilson the idealist has become infinitely greater than Wilson the president.
His utterances, his messages, have been worth many army divisions. They have rallied and quick- ened and strengthened the Allied forces as no mere augmentation of armaments could have done, and have, by the same token, confounded and weakened and demoralized the spirit, the morale of the enemy as no number of cannon or rifles or battleplanes could have done.
Ideals need not be airy, vapory, unpractical things,
The idealist need not be an idle dreamer.
No man indeed, can become a really great doer who has not first been an idealist, who has not had before him, as a shining, guiding star, a fixed ideal towards which he steadily, courageously, unflinch- ingly pressed onward and upward.
Arid in the world of to-morrow ideals are to play an even more important, an even more vital, an
31
KEYS TO SUCCESS
even more practical part than they played in the world of yesterday.
For ideals the war is being waged.
Peace will bring the enthronement of these ideals.
The ideals of nations are but the embodiment, the combined embodiment, of the ideals of in- dividuals.
What standard are you helping to set for the Commonwealth which in time is to be the pattern for every other nation on earth?
How near do your ideals measure up to the ideals of those who are laying down their lives that we may live? Are we worthy of the price that is being paid?
32
How You Can Cultivate High Ideals
The difference between a person with ideals and one who lacks ideals is the difference between the person who guides his life by what he sees and knows and can touch with his hands, and the person who has enough of the visionary in him to adopt as his guide a dream which has not yet come true and perhaps may never come true. It is the difference between a person shut within four walls mentally, and the person who stands out under God's infinite sky and looks at the natural horizon of the earth — ■ the difference between the person who never gets his eyes off the material things about him and the person who is always looking out to the very limits of his vision even when he knows he never can reach the distant country he dimly descries.
Where are your eyes — on the dollars and cents you are handling, or on your mental horizon? Or to change the figure, how many degrees do you elevate your eyes from the ground? If you always walk with your eyes downward so that you can see only the earth beneath your feet, you have no ideals. If you habitually carry your eyes on your mental horizon, that is as far as you can see at all, so you now and then catch a glimpse of the sky above, you are guided by ideals. The person whose eyes are in the sky all the time, not focussed at the horizon, the meeting of earth and sky, is a visionary — he walks with nothing firm and fixed to guide him. But the man whose eyes are on the horizon is imbued with the mysticism that a sane American ought to have, and lives a big, broad, human life that takes in the whole world. He sees himself as part of
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KEYS TO SUCCESS
the universe, with a sense of playing his part as a citizen, as a human being partly responsible for all the other human beings in our great American republic or even now in the other countries of the world for which the United States is assuming responsibility. With the Great War, America great- ly extended her mental horizon, she found she had responsibilities as a leader among nations, and she began to spend billions of money she had no idea she would ever really get back. The world said the circle of the dollar was the boundary of the American horizon, that Americans as a nation were a little "nigh," that they lacked the splendid generosity with which the British and the French, for example, threw themselves and their money into the war for world freedom. But when the time was really ripe, the American people woke up to their hidden and neglected ideals and at one bound surpassed all the world. The twentieth century is the century of ideals, and if you are not a person of broad ideals, it is time you woke up and became one.
Let us take the matter up point by point in your case.
How do you treat your office-boy, your stenog- rapher, your bookkeeper? Do you give them a little more than you feel they are at present really worth? Or have you a mean pride in getting their services for a little less than they are worth? Be sure if you pay them less, you get still less, but if you give them more you get still more, just as Henry Ford when he advanced his wages to a minimum of five dollars a day increased his earnings many times the increase of wages though Dodge Brothers, who were Ford stockholders, said they felt as if he
34
IDEALS
"reached down into their pockets and lifted a million dollars out." In the long run there is no such thing as beating the game of business — the game gets you sooner or later if you have set your mind on getting the best of the game.
But how about your ideals outside of your busi- ness? Do you give some time every month to public service as a citizen with the responsibility of a citizen? Perhaps you say, Why should I do a lot of work for nothing? I will leave that to those who like to work for nothing? But they don't work for nothing. They get the highest personal pleasure and satisfaction that any man can have. If you don't know the pleasure there is in that sense of public service, go out right now in your little home district, join the welfare or civic association, and see what you can do for the public good : you'll be prouder of yourself than a peacock, and you will have begun to be an American with American ideals of service.
? ? ? ?
I am the foundation of all business.
I am the fount of all prosperity.
I am the parent, most times, of genius.
I am the salt that gives life its savor.
I am the sole support of the poor.
The rich who try to do without me deteriorate,, languish and fill premature graves.
I am the primeval curse, yet a blessing without which no healthy man or woman can be happy.
Nations that woo me ardently rise; nations that neglect me die.
I have made the United States what it is to-day. I have built her matchless industries, opened up her rich minerals, laid her incomparable railways, reared her cities, built her skyscrapers.
I have laid the foundation of every fortune in America.
I alone have raised men up from the ranks and maintained them in positions of eminence.
I am the friend and guide of every worthy youth. If he values me, no prize or place is beyond his reach. If he slights me, he can have no enviable end.
I am the sole ladder that leads to the Land of Success.
Sometimes men curse me, seeing in me an arch enemy, but without me life turns bitter and meaning- less and goallesse
36
? ? ? ?
I must be loved before I can bestow my greatest blessings and achieve my greatest ends. Loved, I make life sweet and purposeful and fruitful.
Fools hate me; wise men love me.
The giants who fill the presidential chairs of our railroad systems, our great industrial organizations, our colossal mercantile establishments and our institutions of learning, almost without exception, owe their places to me.
I can do more to advance a youth than can the richest of parents.
I am the support of the millions; indirectly, the support of all.
I am the creator of all capital.
Wealth is but me stored up.
I am represented in every loaf of bread that comes from the oven, in every train that crosses the con- tinent, in every ship that steams the ocean, in every newspaper that leaps from the press.
I am sometimes overdone — voluntarily by the am- bitious, involuntarily by the oppressed and by thousands of the very young.
But in moderation I am the very oxygen of the ablebodied. Some, sure of my constancy, look upon me as loathsome, but a little taste of my absence quickly brings them to their senses.
My followers among the masses are becoming more and more powerful every year. They are beginning to dominate Governments, to overthrow anachronistic dynasties.
I am the mother of democracy.
All progress springs from me.
The man who is bad friends with me can never get very far — and stay there.
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KEYS TO SUCCESS
The man who is good friends with me, who is not afraid of me, can go — who can tell how far?
Who am I? What am I?
I AM WORK.
Here are some stimulating statements on work by men who have made their work count:
Sir Thomas Lipton: "Hard work is the cardinal requisite for success. I always feel that I cannot impress that fact too strongly upon young men. And then a person's heart and soul must be in his work. He must be earnest, above all, and willing to give his whole time, if necessary. Honesty, it goes without saying, is necessary, and if you want to be wholly successful, you must do unto others as you would have them do unto you. If you don't, they will be sure to retaliate, when you least expect it. If young men would follow these rules, they would get along very well; but few of them will."
Charles M. Schwab: "The man whom you hear say he 'never had a chance,' lacks something. He lacks that indefinable something that stands for success, and if you look far enough you'll find that something to be a capacity and a disposition for hard work. The only luck I ever had was to be born with good mental powers and a good physical
38
? ? ? ?
constitution that thrived on the hardest kind of work. I had enough hardships and trials."
Russell Sage: "I think that work is the best thing I know of for improving a man's constitution, for it makes a good appetite, and encourages diges- tion. It isn't work that ruins so many. It's the wine they drink, and the late hours they keep, and their general dissipation."
C. Louis Allen: "I believe, too, in the philosophy that hard work, not chance, makes successful men; but there are two kinds of hard work — the kind that goes along grubbing blindly in the same old routine, and the kind that plugs progessively toward a definite goal. Men must be adapted to the work they are doing, but hard work and self-analysis are the principal factors. I am one of those men who have little belief in genius so far as the great major- ity of successful men are concerned."
Benjamin Franklin: "Diligence is the mother of good luck. Plough deep while sluggards sleep and you shall have corn to sell and keep. Work as if you were to live one hundred years. Pray as if you were to die to-morrow."
D. O. Mills: "Work develops all the good there is in a man; idleness all the evil. Work sharpens all his faculties and makes him thrifty; idleness makes him lazy and a spendthrift. Work surrounds a man with those whose habits are industrious and honest; in such society a weak man develops strength, and a strong man is made stronger. Idle- ness, on the other hand, is apt to throw a man into the company of men whose only object in life usually is the pursuit of unwholesome and demoraliz- ing diversions."
Irving T. Bush: "Every man should approach]
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KEYS TO SUCCESS
every job with the idea that it is possible to do it more efficiently, for less money, and that he is the man to find out how."
Samuel Gompers: "I learned both to think and to act, and to feel strongly enough on the great ques- tions of labor to be willing to sacrifice my personal convenience for my aims. I have felt great devo- tion to the common cause of the manual workers, and I can say nothing better to young men than — 'Be devoted to your work.'"
40
How to Develop the Highest Efficiency in
Work
Dr. Winslow Taylor, the father of scientific management, describes in his book a man who was carrying pig iron on to freight cars. At the start he was carrying 12 tons a day. By following a scientific plan of work and rest he became able to carry 47 tons with no more fatigue than he carried 12 tons at first. Later Dr. Taylor found that only one man out of a large number was capable of de- velopment into a first class pig-iron carrier. Those few men thrived and grew strong and happy under carrying 47 tons of pig iron a day, while those who were not built for that sort of work soon went under.
Are you doing the kind of work you were built for, so that you can expect to be able to do very large amounts of that kind and thrive under it? Or are you doing a kind of which you can do compara- tively little?
You've got to settle that question for yourself by a careful comparative investigation which nobody else can conduct for you, because it will take an amount of time and study which nobody but you can afford to give — you can well afford to study that question most thoroughly.
Will you start the investigation right now, check- ing over all the facts and circumstances you know already? And then will you go on and look for more?
Do you enjoy hard work, either physical or mental, according to your training and occupation?
If your work drags, if you feel unspeakably weary in the morning, and think all day how soon night
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KEYS TO SUCCESS
will come, or rather how long it is in coming, by all means have a thoroughly scientific physical examination — urine, blood, stomach contents, etc., with an analysis of your condition by a competent physician to make sure you are not suffering from some disease such as diabetes, Bright's disease, heart irregularity, tuberculosis in an incipient and unnoticed form perhaps in the bones or glands. Perhaps your chest expansion is too small. Check over your physical condition in your own mind right now and decide immediately, while you are still reading this, whether you need suspect anything of this sort.
Next, consider most carefully whether your habits are such that you are getting the maximum amount of work from your body with the maximum pleasure and enjoyment in doing it.
It has been clearly demonstrated that laborers can do more work in eight hours than in ten, but if they are working only six or seven hours at physical labor they are probably loafing. On the other hand, six or seven hours of intense office work will tire out any person, and the writer or thinker who must concentrate with his brain with great intensity can tire himself out in two or three hours.
Just what is the real character of your work, and how many hours can you work with maximum results? If you don't know, begin now to experiment and find out. Lay out for yourself a definite plan of testing on this point.
If you are working for someone else, you may say that you cannot regulate your hours of work, etc. But to a very large measure you can. Even if you have to start on a time-clock and end with one, to a considerable extent you can regulate the
42
? ? ? ?
way you will spend the time between, and you may be very sure you will get credit for what you ac- complish. Explain to your superior how you can arrange your time or your work so that you can accomplish larger results, and nine times out of ten he will be grateful to you for the suggestion and will co-operate with you to arrange your work so that you can feel fit and happy.
Any person who robs himself of sleep, or exercise, or recreation, or proper time for food is a fool — he is not really working hard, he is just imagining he is working hard. Get all the sleep, exercise, and sound food that you need, and you will find it practically impossible to overwork if you are healthy. Overwork nine times out of ten is not too much hard work, but lack of sleep, exercise, or time and pleasure in eating the right food.
I have said nothing about what to do for laziness. Anybody who is downright lazy will never be reading this lesson. If you think you are lazy, if you think you dislike to work and work ward, check over your condition — your health and your habits, your sleep and recreation and fresh air, your habits of apportioning your time between intense applica- tion and proper rest and relaxation during the day.
What is your defect, your mistake? Find it and cure it — and there is no better time to start than NOW.
43
SAVING
Saving is the basis of every business success. No enterprise can be started without money.
The man who hasn't saved a dollar is not apt to command the confidence, the capital or the credit of others. Inability to save suggests the lack of other abilities.
Our most conspicuously successful men of finance and business began to save money early in life.
John D. Rockefeller was a saver before he was seven, and by the time he was nine he was quite a little business fellow. He is now teaching his grand- children how to save.
Andrew Carnegie had laid the first foundations of his fortune before he was of age.
Henry C. Frick began to save money before he began to vote and did not give up the habit after he had won his first million.
Only because he had saved $50 was Frank W. Woolworth able to find a position in a dry goods store. And this money he had saved under the most disadvantageous circumstances; he saved it while a lad working without regular pay on his father's farm.
The Armour fortune of to-day was made possible only by Philip Armour's industry and frugality when a young man working in California. He saved $5,000, earned chiefly by digging.
E. H. Gary, now the head of the Steel Corporation,
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SAVING
was well on his way towards a competency before he was thirty, every penny made by his own efforts.
We all know that the nucleus of the Vanderbilt fortune was laid by the rigid economy of the Com- modore's worthy wife.
George Eastman as a lad was haunted continually by the spectre of poverty, and from the day he began to work he began also to save every penny possible. Had he not done so, he would not have been able to start the business which was to make him one of the thirty richest men in America.
Henry Ford had an uphill fight to obtain the capital necessary to enable him to start the manu- facture of his automobile. Had he not saved a little himself, he would not have been able to induce others to extend him financial support.
Julius Rosen wald, multi-millionaire president of Sears, Roebuck & Company, made his first money peddling odds and ends. He saved every penny. (Should I add that this money went to buy his mother a wedding anniversary present?)
A. Barton Hepburn had to borrow money to put himself through college, and it was only because he was a saver that he was able to embark in business at an early age. To-day he is one of the country's most successful national bankers.
"No one can acquire a fortune," said D. O. Mills in discussing wealth — of which he had acquired' much — "unless he makes a start; and the habit of thrift, which he learns in saving his first hundred dollars, is of inestimable value later on. It is not the money, but the habit which counts. There is no one so helpless as a man who is 'broke,' no matter how capable he may be, and there is no habit so detrimental to his reputation among business men
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KEYS TO SUCCESS
as that of borrowing small sums of money. This cannot be too emphatically impressed upon young men."
"I have often been asked," said Sir Thomas Lipton, to define the true secret of success. It is thrift in all its phases, and principally, thrift as applied to saving. A young man may have many friends, but he will find none so steadfast, so con- stant, so ready to respond to his wants, so capable of pushing him ahead, as a little leather-covered book, with the name of a bank on its cover. Saving is the first great principle of all success. It creates independence, it gives a young man standing, it fills him with vigor, it stimulates him with the proper energy; in fact, it brings to him the best part of any success, — happiness and contentment. If it were possible to inject the quality of saving into every boy, we would have a great many more real men."
"The first thing that a man should learn to do is to save his money," says Andrew Carnegie. "By saving his money he promotes thrift, — the most valued of all habits. Thrfit is the great fortune- maker. It draws the line between the savage and the civilized man. Thrift not only develops the fortune, but it develops, also, the man's character."
Marshall Field, when asked what he considered to have been the turning-point in his career — the point after which there was no more danger of poverty, replied: "Saving the first live thousand dollars I ever had when I might just as well have spent the moderate salary I made. Possession of that sum, once I had it, gave me ability to meet opportun- ities. That I consider the turning-point."
A man who is unable to handle his own finances
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SAVING
successfully is little likely to handle successfully the finances of others.
Saving calls for prudence, self-control, self-dis- cipline, self-denial.
Employers to-day invariably ask an applicant for a position if he has a bank account. An un- satisfactory answer usually brings an unsatisfactory end to the interview, since improvidence and im- prudence go hand in hand.
No nation can be strong and powerful unless its people save money.
The establishment of new industries, the building of new railroads, the opening of new mines, the erec- tion of new buildings all necessitate capital, and capital is nothing but money that has been saved.
Saving, we thus see, is essential to progress in times of peace. And during recent months we have all learned how essential to victory saving is in times of war.
Your savings are your stored-up labor. They represent work you have done but have not spent. You can exchange this stored-up labor for things you desire.
The man who spends as he goes seldom goes far.
The old proverb truthfully says that the fool and his money are soon parted. There is no virtue in poverty. But poverty often breeds vice and disease and all manner of evils.
The spendthrift is never happy, never satisfied. He knows no peace of mind.
Have you ever known anyone who regretted hav- ing saved money?
Have you not known many who regretted not having saved money?
A bank account raises a man's self-respect,
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KEYS TO SUCCESS
enhances his manliness, increases his self-confidence, strengthens his peace of mind and thereby makes him a better employee, a better citizen, a better father.
The man who has saved nothing can seldom seize business opportunities.
Many a fortune has been made by a man's ability to seize an opportunity when it presented itself, an opportunity that called for the prompt furnishing of a certain sum of money.
The man who is dependent upon his next week's pay envelope for bis next week's meals is afraid to strike out for himself. He cannot afford to take any chance, to run any risk, to enter any new field. His poverty is as a tether. The poet Burns struck the right note when he urged the careful saving of money.
Not for to hide it in a hedge,
Not for a train attendant, But for the glorious privilege
Of being independent.
Poverty delayed for several years Columbus' am- bition to discover America and brought upon him all sorts of indignities, insults and hardships.
The Old World and the New World would not have been linked together by cable so many years ago had the project been undertaken by a poor man. It was only because Cyrus W. Field was a rich man and could command financial assis- tance from others that he finally succeeded, after very costly failures, in accomplishing his purpose.
The telephone was almost brought to naught as a commercial instrument because of lack of funds.
48
SAVING
Luckily, Alexander Graham Bell's father-in-law — who had saved money — came to the rescue.
The exploitation of the reaper was delayed several years because the McCormicks were without capital to manufacture and market it on a sizable scale.
Had not some people — many people — saved money, those of us who live in cities would not be able to turn a tap and have water gush forth, or to press a button and have our homes flooded with light, for the installation of water systems and light- ing systems costs money — millions of money, the savings of many individuals.
Nor would we be able to take a street car, a subway or an elevated train to carry us to and from our work had not frugal persons spent less than they earned and thereby accumulated savings which were made available for the building of traction lines.
During the war the virtue and the value of saving have been brought home to every man and woman in America as never before. Had the Liberty Loans failed, this country would have been disgraced. And they would have been failures had we had fewer savers.
The rational saving of money begets in the in- dividual valuable qualities, qualities which are as helpful as the qualities begotten by thriftlessness are injurious.
Then, to quote Benjamin Franklin: "Remember that money is of a prolific, generating nature. Money can beget money, and its offspring can beget more, and so on. Five shilling turned is six, turned again it is seven and three pence, and so on till it becomes one hundred pounds. The more there is of it the
49
KEYS TO SUCCESS
more it produces every turning, so that the profits rise quicker and quicker."
It is selfish to save nothing for a rainy day, to make no provision for old age, for when adversity comes the burden of support then falls upon others.
Don't be a leaner; stand on your own feet.
Be able to look every man straight in the eye.
To save your self-respect, save your money.
For age and want, save while you may, No morning sun lasts a whole day.
50
How to Become a Capitalist
Every person in business in America needs to be- come a capitalist to be a success. If he has any initiative he wants to get a business of his own some time, or reach a position where he can control some- body else. But if you are content to be a simple employee all your life, still you need capital to keep a good job and get a better one. Many a man has tied himself for life to a poor job because he didn't have the capital to wait for a better one and was forced to grab the first one that came his way. Whatever your position, it is imperative that you should be a big or little capitalist.
How can you become a capitalist?
By saving your own money till you've got some- thing ahead. A newsboy on the street sells papers for another boy until he gets enough money to buy his own papers and make all the profit instead of half the profit. A boy in the country saves up money till he can pay his carfare to the city and get a better job, or go to school and fit himself to fill a higher position. These are all embryo capitalists. The only difference between them and Rockefeller or Morgan is one of degree. If we get that fixed firmly in mind, that fifty cents is just as much capital as fifty million dollars, we have mastered our first basic principle.
The second basic principle is that the person who has money can get more. If you have fifty cents, very likely you can borrow a dollar to go with it, because the lender will say, "Oh, that fellow had to work like the devil to save that fifty cents of his, and he is the kind that will hang on to my dollar."
51
KEYS TO SUCCESS
If a man has five thousand dollars to put up a build- ing he can get twenty -five or thirty thousand to go with it, or if he has his lot paid for, he can borrow the money to build a house. If he has a house and lot of his own, he can get credit to buy the goods to start a business.
The chief part of it is the fact that he inspires confidence because he saved that money himself — not because he has it. If he was known to have picked it up in the street, or if someone gave it to him as a legacy, he wouldn't get much credit. The bigger part of capital is the confidence inspired by the way it was saved by the man himself. Money the man has made himself is the only real, basic capital in business, of course with the money this basic capital has drawn to it.
Now, my friend, what is your situation? Are you a saver?
You say, "I have all I can do to live and pay my debts. When I owe people, I can't put money in the bank till they are paid off."
What you want to do is to buy a Liberty Bond on the instalment plan — you have to get the money to pay for it or you lose it.
Or perhaps you buy a house on the small payment plan. You need something that will automatically remind you and force you to save.
What do you choose as your best savings-corn- peller?
Write it down.
Perhaps you are pretty well off, have a nice wife, a good home, and desirable friends. When you were young you saved. Now you have a good start, a family that is pressing on you, a business that is not expanding, and it is a deuced hard thing to save.
52
SAVING
What are you going to do in that case?
My advice is to call a family conference — wife and children old enough to understand. Make it a solemn occasion. State the whole situation brief- ly but clearly so they understand it just as you do.
Make them understand that THEY have got to do the saving, which means spending less money. Don't cut down their allowances, but make them save out of them. Start a bank account for each one separately. It doesn't do any good to say you will take care of the money for them: they need to see it grow. Then you start your savings account, and compare notes with all the members of your family once a week to see who has relatively the nearest his proportionate quota.
Will you start this plan to-day?
Write out the plan in detail, so that when you call the conference you won't forget the most im- portant points or lose your courage.
53
OPPORTUNITY
Ignorance 'is blind. The blind cannot see Op- portunity.
Fit yourself to see Opportunity. Knowledge illuminates.
Mediocre men wait for opportunity to come to them.
Strong, able alert men go after Opportunity.
The brainiest of men make Opportunities.
Opportunity can benefit no man who has not fitted himself to seize it and utilize it.
Opportunity woos the Worthy, shuns the un- worthy.
Prepare yourself to grasp Opportunity and Op- portunity is likely to come your way.
Opportunity is not so fickle, capricious, and un- reasoning as some complain.
Opportunity shuns the idle, the worthless, the ignorant.
Great men train themselves to see, seize, mold and master Opportunity.
The echo of the first shot in the European war had scarce died away when Charles M. Schwab, in post-haste, presented himself at Kitchener's desk — and came away with contracts which have led to the enrichment of Schwab, his workmen, his stock- holders and his country by hundreds of millions of dollars.
Henry P. Davison went to London, convinced
54
OPPORTUNITY
the British authorities J. P. Morgan & Company could serve them — and his firm skilfully and prof- itably handled several billions dollars of business as fiscal agents of the British Government.
George A. Gaston, a little-known but not unready New York business man, was also prompt to see Opportunity, and he made such an impression upon the British War Office that Gaston, Williams & Wig- more, then incorporated, have developed an export and import business which already covers more than half the earth and runs into tens of millions a year.
Henry Ford is an instance of a man creating his own Opportunity.
John D. Rockefeller was a youthful produce commission merchant in Cleveland when the oil industry was born, but, to use his words to me, "I saw that there was an opportunity to enter a field which could be made as broad as the world, something that everybody could use if given it cheap enough; so I became interested in oil." To quote Mr. Rockefeller further: "There are a hundred opportunities to-day for every one there was fifty years ago."
H. C. Frick, the barefoot boy and obscure book- keeper who discerned the possibilities of coke and was making a million dollars a year when in his thirties, gave me as one reason for his success: "I worked very hard and always sought Op- portunities."
Thomas E. Wilson, the now famous packer, was a $40-a-week railway clerk when Morris & Company asked his superior to send them a smart young clerk to keep tabs on their refrigerator cars. The man sent returned hastily, refusing to work in "so smelly a place." "Let me go," said young Wilson. He
55
KEYS TO SUCCESS
went — and became president of Morris & Company. Now he heads Wilson & Company, successors to Sulzberger & Sons Company, one of the largest pack- ing enterprises in the world.
E. H. Harriman was an inconspicuous stock broker when he spotted Opportunity in the form of the possibilities of rehabilitating the bankrupt and dilapidated Union Pacific Railroad. Through that door he entered millionairedom. But a less well- equipped aspirant would neither have seen the Opportunity nor been able to master it.
James J. Hill was equally obscure and equally poor when he likewise took hold of a bankrupt little rail- road and made it the stepping-stone to higher things.
Three of the first five stores Frank W. Woolworth opened were failures, but he kept chasing Opportun- ity until he learned to locate it here, there, almost everywhere.
John N. Willys hadn't a thousand dollars when he jumped in and saved the Overland Automobile Company from imminent collapse. His heroic, indefatigable, never-say-die handling of that Op- portunity paved for him the way to fortune.
"Are you a believer in opportunity?" Theodore Roosevelt was asked. He replied: "To a certain extent. Many of the great changes in our lives can be traced to small things, a chance acquaint- ance, an accident, or some little happening. ^ A time comes to every man when he must do a thing or miss a great benefit. If the man does it, all is well. If not, it isn't likely that he will have the chance again. You can call that opportunity if you wish, but it is foresight that leads a man to take advantage of the condition of things. Fore- sight is a most valuable thing to have."
56
OPPORTUNITY
The Biblical story of burying the talents in a napkin is merely a sermon on Opportunity. The brother who diligently seized Opportunity became "ruler over many things." The other who loafed lost even what he had.
How are you using your talents?
Are you zealously, industriously, painstakingly in- creasing them?
Or are you letting them lie dormant, rusting and rotting?
Opportunity can be spelt with four letters.
But these letters are not L-u-c-k.
They are W-o-r-k.
"Opportunity" thus speaks:
Master of human destinies am I !
Fame, love, and fortune on my footsteps wait.
Cities and fields I walk; I penetrate
Deserts and seas remote, and passing by
Hovel and mart and palace, soon or late
I knock unbidden once at every gate !
If sleeping, wake; if feasting, rise before
I turn away.
57
How You Can Find or Make Your Opportunity
At this point you will probably remark im- patiently, "Where does good luck come in? You talk as if I were responsible for everything, that all the elements of success were in me, in myself."
Yes, it is a terrible pity that you should be de- prived of the scapegoat of bad luck, and that you should be deprived of the satisfaction of unloading responsibility for your failure on some one or some- thing else. And I admit it is going the limit when I talk about "finding or making your opportunity. "
Of course there is such a thing as luck — it is all around us, it is with us every day. The world is streaked with sheer bad luck. But there is so much bad luck that every one suffers from it at times, the so-called luckiest as well as the unluck- iest. And that's the point of it — opportunity, the opposite or counterpart of bad luck, comes and goes, the bad alternating with the good and the good alternating with the bad. The world is just chock full of good luck and bad luck — of opportunity and waiting for opportunity. And success lies in taking your bad luck cheerfully, and in never letting your good luck go by. If opportunity seems persistently to avoid you, there is certainly some- thing the matter with you, and it is high time you looked into the matter to find out what the trouble is.
Here again all the personal qualities seem to come into play. Any one of them may be the reason why opportunity passes you by. Turn back to the first lesson of this course. Check yourself all over again and see why opportunity does not seem to
58
OPPORTUNITY
like you. Is it your personality? Or do you lack courage? Or haven't you judgment to recognize the good thing when it is before your eyes?
We will suppose, however, that you have checked * over all your personal qualities and do not find any sufficient explanation for your lack of opportunity. A writer many years ago was in New York but seemed unable to get any of his books published. Were they so bad no publisher could afford to bring them out? Or was good writing not appreciated in New York just then? He decided to try London, and within a few weeks after arriving in that city he had made contracts for two books rejected in New York. But for two years he couldn't make any money in London, and made up his mind that, while recognition there was easy, cash was not, and so he moved on to Chicago. There were very few publishers of any kind in Chicago, but it was the center of sale for half the books issued in the United States, and after a while the author pub- lished his own books and sold them by the hundred thousand sets. With reputation and highly devel- oped skill, in the course of time this same writer needed distributing machinery for his works. It didn't exist in Chicago, but when he moved on to New York he found it waiting for him, eager to handle his publications on a large scale. So he had come back to his starting place, but had found his opportunity in each city he had visited. Moral: Pursue opportunity and you will catch up with her in time.
Now what is your next move? After checking over your character, check over your situation and circumstances in the same way — make a list of their advantages and disadvantages and come to
59
KEYS TO SUCCESS
a sane conclusion where you ought to look next for opportunity, or opportunities. If you have had some opportunities, may there not be many more and bigger ones which you have missed simply because you never thought to look for them? Make a list of all the possible ones and consider them one by one on all sides.
60
SELF-DENIAL
Sweating early in life will prevent suffering late in life.
Most mortals have to face difficulties, undergo hardships, toil and sacrifice at one period of their earthly journey.
The man who idles away his youth and early man- hood, who chases pleasure instead of achievement, who prefers dalliance to diligence, who woos indul- gence instead of industry, who seeks the nectar cup rather than the iron wine of success, is destined to pay the penalty of lost opportunity in after life.
There is an eternal law of compensation; it may seem to sleep, but it never does sleep.
This law was proclaimed of old in these words: "As ye sow, so shall ye reap."
The wise man will choose to do his exertion while yet he is young, while yet he can strain brain and body with zest and with impunity, while yet hardship and fatigue and self-denial sit lightly on his forehead and daunt not his spirit.
He elects to pay the price of a happy, comfortable, poverty-free old age when he is best fit to pay it.
Voluntary self-denial at the beginning of life's journey will avert involuntary poverty, stress, sweat and indignity towards the end.
Every human being must put something into the world before he can hope to get all he reasonably needs out of the world — even millionaires' offspring
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KEYS TO SUCCESS
are less exempt from this decree than we sometimes are tempted to imagine.
You have to contribute before you can collect.
You have to sow before you can reap.
Self-denial is a basic ingredient of genuine success — mere rolling up of riches, by hook or by crook, is not necessarily a token of success.
Call the roll of this nation's most illustrious doers and note whether or not they practised self-denial.
Washington was wealthy, but he loved his country more than he loved his own ease, and did not hesitate to undergo strenuous and perilous days and nights to attain a glorious ideal.
Lincoln's learning and wisdom and statesmanship did not descend unsought and unearned from the skies. How many studious hours he spent while others about him idled and played; what measure of self-denial he practised during the preparatory years of his obscurity, who can reckon?
Edison slaved sixteen and eighteen hours a day before he won a foothold on the ladder of fame. When he arrived in New York he had to beg a tea- taster for a cup of tea, so starved and penniless was he. Years later difficulties innumerable overtook him, and at one stage he feared he could not pull through. But even then he gave way to no despair. "If the worst comes to the worst, Sam, I can return to the telegraph key and you can get a job as a short- hand writer," he told his faithful young aid, Samuel Insull, now head of the greatest electric power enter- prise in the world.
Alexander Graham Bell and Theodore N. Vail were reduced to borrowing quarters for lunch money before they succeeded in establishing the telephone on a paying basis — they indulged in no two-dollar meals.
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SELF-DENIAL
But for rigid self-denial and extraordinary de- termination in the teeth of a thousand discourage- ments, McCormick, the farm worker, would not have given the world the reaper, and mankind might still have been confronted with the im- memorial spectre of famine.
Charles Goodyear almost starved to death in his long, disheartening effort to evolve a substance that would become an invaluable servant of man. To- day the rubber industry is ranked fourth among the great industries of the land.
Fulton did not flinch at hardship and self-sac- rifice to produce the first steamboat that sailed up the Hudson.
Elias Howe subordinated every consideration of personal comfort during the years he toiled to bring forth the sewing machine.
Cyrus W. Field, though rich, did not disdain to become poor and to incur every species of self- sacrifice in order to span the Atlantic with his civiliz- ing cable.
Turning to men still alive:
Henry Clay Frick, coke and steel king, con- tinued to live in one room after he was making a million dollars a year, so anxious was he to conserve his capital for the expansion of his business.
James B. Duke, the tobacco king, for exactly the same reason, lived in a hall bedroom costing $2.50 a week and ate all his meals at an East Side (New York) lunchroom when earning $50,000 a year, and not until he was earning $100,000 a year did he move into a $4-a-week room.
Andrew Carnegie's mother used to take in shoes to sew for Henry Phipps's father, a shoemaker, and Andy himself, for a period, worked overtime
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KEYS TO SUCCESS
every night for an extra dollar a week, and in- cidentally, denied himself all sorts of pleasures so that he could save money.
Henry P. Davison, the greatest of all the Morgan partners, cycled through New York's streets ten miles to and from work every day to save ten cents when he first got a job as a teller in a small New York bank. His nights were spent in study.
Frank A. Vanderlip, president of the country's largest national bank, began in a machine shop, saved enough while toiling at a lathe to go to college one year. His total living and educational ex- penses, thanks to unbending self-denial, amounted to only $265. Moreover, he adopted as his success maxim one he has ever since preached: "Every day, after doing your day's work, put in another day's work studying what its relation is to the scheme of things" — another form of self-denial.
Bake your cake in the morning or noonday of life and when old you can live on it.
If you begin by denying yourself nothing the world later is apt to do your denying for you.
Deny self, or be denied.
64
What Self-denial Is Reasonable and What Is Unreasonable
In this world both extremes are bad — wisdom is in the golden mean. In the matter of indulging in luxuries or starving yourself, are you hitting the happy middle course?
If you are young, self-denial is a cardinal virtue; and 3 you are old and have made money, you are a mere miser if you don't spend it. The boy who works his way through college and boards himself in his room, cutting the amount and variety of his food down to the danger point until he is sent to a hospital, is a fool — he would have done better to stay on the farm. Baron Rhondda, food ad- ministrator of England, though he was rich, indeed, very rich as the largest owner of anthracite coal mines in Britain, wanted to set an example of self-denial to the people of England and lived strictly on the diet that he recommended to them — but he lost thirty pounds in weight and then died. He made a splendid sacrifice — but was it wise?
The greatest danger lies, however, in most cases in unwisely following what is thought to be the golden mean. Many a young man spends very nearly all he earns. His salary is not large, and he can't indulge in many luxuries on it at best. He feels virtuous to think he really manages to live within his income, or to sponge on his father only a little. He doesn't go to the theatre often, but sometimes; he plays a game of billiards now and then, or joins the boys at poker for a small limit. These indulgences require a great deal of time and
65
KEYS TO SUCCESS
thought to make them just balance with conditions — with the small salary. Self-indulgence is syste- matically cultivated, where self-denial ought to be as systematically cultivated.
Which are you cultivating — the art of moderate self-indulgence or the art of reasonable self-denial?
You don't have to starve yourself, you don't have to work yourself to death, you don't have to forego all pleasures — but if you want to get on in life, to accumulate in youth that which will give you a competence in old age, you must systematically and thoughtfully cultivate self-denial.
Are you doing it?
Answer honestly and frankly to yourself. If you can't be entirely honest with yourself, with whom can you be honest?
There are other forms of self-denial than those which pertain to mere money. The whole basis of an unselfish character is self-denial. You can deny yourself the pleasure of making an unkind or cutting remark which will do no good to anybody but may spring spontaneously to your lips and give you a certain satisfaction to speak. You will get a far deeper satisfaction by refraining from say- ing it.
Perhaps in business you are quick to see how you can take advantage of an opportunity to make a profitable turn. You get a certain satisfaction out of realizing on your cleverness. But you will in the end get a far greater satisfaction out of denying yourself the privilege of taking advantage of this opportunity if it is going to be at the expense of somebody else who doesn't happen to be looking, somebody who really is robbed because his attention is turned. Self-denial is at the bottom of the
66
SELF-DENIAL
American business principle of Service. Instead of being a squeezer, you carefully protect all your customers against being squeezed by you or anybody else — and you get paid big dividends on your restraint.
67
STICK-TO-ITIVENESS
"We shall reap if we faint not." — Galatians, chapter VI, verse 9.
Diamonds are chunks of coal that stuck to their job.
If it has taken millions of years to develop man- kind, must we fret if it takes us a few years to rise above the rank and file of mankind?
Must we quit if we don't get there quickly?
Note this: There is not one major figure in American financial, industrial or commercial life to-day under forty. Not one.
And what of the past?
The original J. P. Morgan, though born rich and reared as an international banker, was sixty before he did his greatest work and nearer seventy before Wall Street, in its hour of trouble, acknowledged him as its undisputed leader.
Harriman at fifty was an obscure broker with a penchant for railroading.
Hill's hair was gray before he became Empire Builder of the Northwest.
At fifty Woodrow Wilson was a little-known col- lege professor.
Washington was no youngster when he won the immortal title of "Father of His Country."
Lincoln midway through life was in the coal, not the diamond, class, and was fifty-two before he loomed
68
STICK-TO-ITIVENESS
up as Presidential calibre. He was fifty-four when he made his imperishable address at Gettysburg.
But all were stickers. They conceived their goal and pressed on courageously, unflinchingly, un- swervingly, hurdling more obstacles than you or I are ever likely to meet.
Most people show more persistency in their first twelve months than they show later in twelve years ; did they not, they never would have learned to walk.
Robert the Bruce six times failed to free Scotland, but a struggling spider on the wall which climbed up successfully after six falls revived his courage, and at the seventh attempt Bruce won a crown and un- dying glory.
Charles M. Schwab was president of the world's first billion-dollar corporation before he was thirty- five, lost his steel throne, dropped from the lime- light for a decade, but during this time he redoubled his efforts and he has done his greatest work since he crossed the half-century mark. He did not quit. He stuck.
The two most influential bankers in America to- day, George F. Baker and Jacob H. Schiff, average seventy years of age, while such leaders of the "young- er school," Henry P. Davison, Frank A. Vanderlip and Otto H. Kahn, have all lived half a hundred years or more.
There is not one leading railroad president in the whole land not old enough to be a grandfather.
Ninety per cent, of America's business leaders be- gan at the bottom — of the fifty men voted the great- est business stalwarts in the country not half a score were born to luxury.
At least forty of them sweated blood before they
69,
KEYS TO SUCCESS
gained a foothold on the ladder, sweated and toiled with brain and often with body from early morning to late at night, many times all night, tasting defeat but never despair.
Employers to-day shun shifters.
There is no market for rolling-stones.
Life is so specialized that jacks-of -all-trades are wanted by none.
To last, a man must stick to his last — he cannot hope to be a good shoemaker to-day and a capable plumber to-morrow.
The pace to-day calls for men of red blood, not of white livers, men of grit, not grouch.
Stickers, not sticklers, are wanted.
"Tenacity is the only key that will open the door of success," recently declared Daniel Guggenheim, head of the greatest mining and smelting family America has ever known.
"What one trait of your character do you look upon as having been the most essential to your successful career?" Marshall Field was once asked. "Perseverance," he replied without hesitation.
E. H. Harriman's favorite motto was: "Many spoil much good work for the lack of a little more."
When Edison was asked, "What do you think is the first requisite for success in your field, or any other?" he replied: "The ability to apply your physical and mental energies to one problem in- cessantly without growing weary. I never did anything worth doing by accident, nor did any of my inventions come indirectly through accident, except the phonograph. No, when I have fully decided that a result is worth getting, I go about it, and make trial after trial, until it comes."
Said Ben Franklin: "Perhaps you are weak-
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STICK-TO-ITIVENESS
handed, but stick to it steadily, and you will see great effects, for constant dropping wears away stones, and little strokes fell great oaks."
Even a postage stamp knows enough to stick till it gets there.
It is stick-to-itiveness that has made both nations and individuals great.
Decay and decline come only when nations or in- dividuals relax, when they become slack, slothful and shiftless.
" The moment a man feels he can rest on his laurels, that moment he begins to slide back; he must stick at it and at it," says Thomas E. Wilson, the former penniless stockyard clerk who became a national figure through displacing by his own firm name that of Sulzberger & Sons Company after a career the very embodiment of stick-to-itiveness.
Is it not the literal truth that America, as we know it, owed its discovery by Christopher Columbus to this very virtue of stick-to-itiveness?
Without stick-to-itiveness no man is likely to climb to the top of the ladder — and stick.
71
How to Develop Staying Powers
Of course if you are lacking in patience and persist- ence, this course of study will not make you over. But personal effort can and will increase any mental power by several degrees, and those few degrees may mark the turning point of your life.
It is said that when the Allies in the Great War were bombarding the Turks at the Dardanelles the Turkish ammunition had become exhausted and in a few more hours the Allies would have seen that the Turks were at their mercy and perhaps could have captured the great strategic situation for which they sacrificed so many lives. Whether this was actually true in this particular case or not does not matter: very often a similar situation exists in American business life — a few more days or weeks or months will turn the downhill slide into an upgrade, and the very momentum of the down slide will bring you up on the other side of the valley.
Do you know when to hang on and when to let go?
Reviewing the little things of your past life, do you see places where you would have won out if you had stuck a little longer? If you do, you need to start at once to develop your power of stick-to-itive- ness.
A boy out of school gets a job in an office. In six months he has learned something about the business and is beginning to be valuable.^ Another business house notices that and offers him a dollar a week more. He 1 eaves and goes to the other house. For six months he works to learn as much about the new business as he already knew about the old one when
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STICK-TOITIVENESS
he left it, and some third business offers him still another dollar. In this third business he works for six months and learns as much about that as he knew about either of the first two when he left them. Something happens and he loses this job — perhaps he is sick — and he is glad to start over again at his first wage.
If he had stuck to the first business, in eighteen months he would have been so valuable to the house that they would have held his place for him while he was ill. And at the end of three years he would have been among those from which the firm would choose in filling any important position that might have become vacant — probably at a very large increase of pay.
Did you shift about from one house to another in that way when you started out? If so, it was a sign, and very likely you are more or less casting here and there at present in your business, never hanging on to one idea till you make something good out of it.
The first thing is to have something worth sticking to. Take a pencil and write down a list of the things in your business or life which you feel are best worth having.
Why have you failed to get them ?
Which one of the lot is most important of all?
You can't very well stick to two things at the same time if they happen in the slightest degree to be pulling in different directions.
If you want to cultivate stick-to-itiveness your first step should be to settle on one big, important thing. Then say to yourself, "I am going to stick to that for five years anyway."
Some men are one-year stickers, some three-year, but only a few are five-year. If you are only a one-
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KEYS TO SUCCESS
year sticker, fix your eye first on three years for your project, and at the end of three years make it five.
Of course you don't want to stick to a dead horse; but you want to be mighty sure the horse is dead before you give him up, for a horse is a valuable animal — like opportunity.
Another thing you ought to do is to go over your plan step by step and see whether it is reasonable — whether it ought to succeed.
Every time you do this, if you are actually convinc- ed that you are right, you will become more firmly intrenched, and it will be easier to stick. It doesn't do much good to go around asking people whether you ought to stick or not — that is something you alone can decide, and you gain strength to persist if you stand squarely on your own good judgment.
Will you do this? Do it firmly? Do it at once?
74
CHEERFULNESS
Success is the summit we all seek to attain.
We can step on no escalator or elevator and be whisked up without exertion.
The road is steep, steep as a ladder, and the exer- tion of brain and muscle is necessary to climb it step by step, painstakingly, pluckily, perseveringly.
Cheerfulness is one step.
Gain it early.
Success in business, if not in life itself, is simply the art of pleasing.
The problem of capital is to keep labor content.
Corporations now refuse to elect crotchety ex- ecutives or managers or superintendents or foremen, for a crotchety overseer makes crotchety, dissatisfied men.
Promotion to-day is for the cheerful, not the choleric. Wise employers give preferment to good- tempered, enthusiastic employees, since a grouchy manager never yet inspired loyalty among his men.
To place a cantankerous individual in charge of a business or men is to pitch a crowbar into the ma- chinery.
A happy boss oils the whole plant — laughter is a lubricant.
What mean pensions, profit-sharing, sick bene- fits, compensation for accidents, group insurance and the like? Are they not but means to the one great end, the making of men satisfied?
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Dissatisfaction breeds carelessness, indifference and all manner of inefficiency.
Cheerfulness is the parent of competency.
The longest face is apt to be awarded the shortest envelope. The longest envelope is most likely to go to the fellow whose presence and personality inspire, stimulate and encourage others.
"I would give a million dollars to have Charlie Schwab's smile," J. Ogden Armour, head of the $500,000,000-a-year packing business told me.
Schwab himself attributes no small part of his success in building up a business employing 75,000 men to his inexhaustible sunshine.
If a smile can be worth a million, why cultivate a frown, for which there is no market?
The Lackawanna Railroad dismissed a superinten- dent solely because he could not handle men har- moniously.
There is philosophy in the motto overhanging many a desk: "Smile, darn you, smile."
It is true, also, as declared by Theodore N. Vail, telephone king, that "The voice with the smile wins."
Smiling will carry you farther than swearing.
Everybody prefers to do business and to associate with a pleasant rather than a peppery person.
"A happy man or woman," said Robert Louis Stevenson, "is a better thing to find than a five pound note. He or she is a radiating focus of good will and their entrance into a room is as though an- other candle had been lighted."
"A man too careful of danger liveth in continual torment, but a cheerful expecter of the best hath a fountain of joy within him," wrote another sage.
John Hays Hammond, the world's most noted
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CHEERFULNESS
mining engineer, told a New York University class: "One must be an optimist to be successful. As Shakespeare says, 'A merry heart goes all the day, your sad tires in a mile-a.' One of the worst things that a young man has to carry around in life is the grouch. I tell you it gets very heavy as the years run on. The man who fancies that the world owes him a living and starts in complaining because some- one else succeeds, trying to apologize for his own delin- quency, is a pretty poor fellow and gets very little sympathy."
Dame Fortune most often smiles on those who smile.
Were Commodore Vanderbilt alive to-day he would not act on the axiom, "The Public Be Damn- ed," but on its twentieth-century successor, "The Public Be Pleased."^
Frank A. Vanderlip, head of America's biggest bank, will engage no high-salaried man who has not demonstrated that he has the knack of making many friends.
One malcontent in an organization is as a rotten apple in a basket of fresh fruit.
Mankind's chief mundane end is the pursuit of happiness.
Learn to be cheerful and you will come near being happy.
It has been scientifically proved that worry, dis- cord and melancholy undermine health.
Good spirits make for good digestion.
Cheerfulness costs nothing, yet is beyond price.
It is an asset both of business and of body.
The big men, the leaders of to-morrow, will be those who can blend cheerfulness with their brains.
The wise owner will not enter his horse if it be in
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a funky mood, for he knows the race is already lost.
Life's race can best be run with a light heart and a buoyant countenance.
It was the original J. P. Morgan who proclaimed that only an optimist could win in this country.
Optimism and cheerfulness are brothers.
Cheerfulness will open a door when other keys fail.
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How to Cultivate Cheerfulness
Cheerfulness and freedom from worry are two sides of the same thing, for it is physically impossible to feel cheerful and worry at the same time.
Cheerfulness is also a habit of mind, and it can be cultivated just like any other habit. Some business concerns require all employees to say "Thank YOU" after taking every order. Others require employees to say "Good morning" to everyone as they come in and "Good-night" as they leave. Just saying those words habitually makes the person feel more or less cheerful. The muscles of the face are set in the cheerful mold, and by reaction that produces the cheerful feeling inside. That is a well dem- onstrated principle of psychology.
Worry is a killer of cheerfulness. The person who worries about big or little things, during periods of worry draws a veil across the cheerful side of life and shuts out the sunlight of good humor. Cheerfulness needs to be cultivated on the negative side of making a campaign against the worry that drives it out.
But you say, "I don't know how to keep from worrying. When things go wrong, I just can't help it."
You can help it if you resolutely set your mind on something that may become of greater interest.
Psychology teaches that the way to shut out one feeling is to surrender oneself to some other that is stronger and "inhibits the other current in the mind." The person who is very busy seldom has time to worry. If because of weariness work must stop and worry is likely to come in, turn resolutely to
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recreation of some sort, to some pleasure, or to physical exercise. Either of these is a pretty sure cure for worry.
Lack of cheerfulness often comes from self- absorption. A man is so occupied with his business that he can't seem to stop to be cheerful, or to let people around him know that he is feeling all right inside. On the contrary, he is likely to be abrupt, to shout his orders in a rasping tone, and without knowing it he gets the whole office-force by the ears. All that is sheer bad habit — you can cure it in a month if you will only set yourself to make the mental effort. You have no idea what you can do with yourself till you try.
Here is your range for self-checking.
Have you the mechanical habits of settling your exterior muscles for a smile, for a pleasant word, for a cheery good morniug or a kindly good-night? If not, start in at once to cultivate those purely mechanical habits.
Do you worry? If so, begin at once to fight the tendency by never giving yourself time or op- portunity to worry. Turn resolutely to work, to recreation, or in any case to physical exercise till you are so tired you can't help going to sleep, and when you wake up you won't want to worry.
Have you been careless about the right of others to have a cheerful tone from you, a gentle smile, a kindly manner? Unless you change that rasping manner of yours you will some day pay a terribly heavy business penalty.
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TEAMWORK
Unless you are a teamworker you are little likely to succeed under modern conditions.
Civilization is built on teamwork — is teamwork.
Savages do not practice teamwork. Each goes forth in search of his own food; each builds his own hovel (if he has one) ; each makes his own loincloth; each hews his own canoe (if he uses one). Each is independent of the others. Each is self-contained, self-sufficient, so to speak. And the life of each is precarious, uncertain, comfortless.
But the moment savages realize the advantages of teamwork and act on their new intelligence, they cease to be out-and-out savages and begin to travel the path that leads to civilization.
Even civilized peoples formerly practiced little teamwork. Each tilled his own little patch, wove his own rude clothing, traveled solely in his own ox cart or on horseback, built his own primitive dwelling, found his own (natural) fuel, made his own crude candles, baked his own bread, made his own soap.
To-day all these things are done by teamwork.
Teamwork has given us fine homes, palatial apart- ment houses, giant hotels.
Teamwork has given us machine-made clothing, machine-made shoes, machine-made foodstuffs, machine-made necessities and comforts of every description.
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It is teamwork that has displaced the canoe by the ocean liner, displaced candles by gas and electric light, displaced logs and peat by coal from mines, displaced the prairie schooner by steam and electric railways and Pullmans and automobiles and air- planes, displaced the hook and the scythe by the reaper and the binder, displaced the spade by the plough and the tractor.
All trade, all commerce, all industry sprang from teamwork.
So did our schools. So did our churches.
Stop teamwork and we would revert to an un- civilized mode of life.
But teamwork will not be stopped.
The trend is towards greater and still greater teamwork.
This trend, indeed, never before was so pro- nounced.
The world war has resolved itself into one colossal matching of teamwork.
Germany had a long and a strong start, for her rulers, invested with autocratic power, had welded the people into a nation of teamworkers, all working for and serving one common aim and end.
The Allies for over three years had no teamwork — and paid a terrible penalty. But finally, thanks in part to the Chief Executive of our own nation, they were prodded into taking concerted action, into agreeing to submerge all personal and national pride, preferences and prejudices for the sake of securing teamwork under the direction of one supreme head, Generalissimo Foch.
Armies represent superlative teamwork. With- out teamwork, armies would be little better than mobs. Their whole strength lies in their con-
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certed action, the perfect co-operation of each soldier with all the others.
And modern business — Big Business — what is it but teamwork on a colossal scale?
Who can produce this teamwork?
Why, team workers, of course, and none but teamworkers.
All of which leads up to this statement, the hub and nub of this whole article.
Big Business will advance to positions of great responsibility no man who has not demonstrated his ability and aptitude as a teamworker.
A widely known out-of-town banker was being selected by the National City Bank of New York as a vice-president. Salary — a large one — had been agreed upon and other arrangements completed. Then he wrote wanting to know precisely where he would rank among the institution's list of vice- presidents and laid stress upon his "standing." He was immediately dropped. "He will not make a good teamworker," was the management's verdict.
I once recommended an exceptionally capable man to a large organization. The executive, im- pressed with the man's knowledge, ability and experience, indicated that an important position would be given him. Nothing, however, resulted. "We checked him up carefully," the executive later explained to me, "and found that he is a hard man to get along with. We can use only team- workers here."
"I don't know who the Steel Corporation will be able to get to succeed Judge Gary," remarked a business man familiar with the workings of that mammoth organization.
"There are not many men qualified to handle
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successfully all the presidents and other heavyweight executives of the corporation's various subsidiaries. The Judge has a big team to keep satisfied and, at the same time, up to the scratch." The explana- tion? Judge Gary knows how to inspire and main- tain teamwork among his scores of high-priced, high-placed aides.
Had not Lincoln been able to evolve teamwork from his brilliant but high-strung, erratic Cabinet officers, the Civil War might not have ended when it did. He was big enough and broad enough to handle even the eccentric geniuses with whom he was surrounded. Often he submitted to what others, had they occupied his place, would have regarded as intolerable humiliation.
That's one secret of the successful team worker — he doesn't wear a chip on his shoulder; he doesn't look for slights; he is not constantly on the alert lest his "dignity" be insulted.
The teamworker need be no jelly-fish. He need never compromise his self-respect. He need never sacrifice his principles. He need not be forever ready to forswear his own opinions or his own convictions.
The teamworker can be — must be — every inch a man.
But he is something more.
He is a diplomat. He is not bigoted. He recog- nizes that others, especially his superiors in rank, are also entitled to have opinions and convictions of their own. He is ready to give and take. He does not expect to have everything his own way, to get always exactly what he wants. He is broad enough to try to see things from the other party's point of view.
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The teamworker, also, is courteous, considerate, good-tempered.
He tries to meet others at least half-way.
He is accommodating, obliging, helpful.
He co-operates.
He is more concerned about getting things done than about getting credit for the doing of them.
He puts the good of the house, the firm, the insti- tution, the company first. To him it is the big machine, and the business of each and all is to gear it up to its highest pitch, to strain every nerve to in- sure that it shall run efficiently, to leave nothing un- done to bring about the fullest and best results.
He sees his life, his career, his future, not as a separate entity, not as the one thing about which he must concern himself, "looking out for Number One"; but as part and parcel of the concern of which he is a part. He reasons that his supreme duty is to see to it that the concern prospers, and that if the whole prospers, he, as an active, effective, pro- gressive part of it, is likely to prosper with it.
He has his eye and his mind less on himself, less on his individual aggrandizement, than on his in- stitution.
He sinks self in service.
And then, having done this, and having continued to do it if need be for years, Fortune will not forever pass him by.
Sooner or later Opportunity will come within his reach.
Henry L. Doherty defines as the very first and the most important key to success, Ability to get along with other people. A man who has mastered that faculty has the one great essential to success.
"Can you recommend a man of superior calibre,
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a man of executive timber, a man I could trust with real responsibilities?" a business leader asked Cap- tain Robert Dollar, the Pacific Coast lumber and steamship owner. "If I knew of such a man, unattached, I'd grab him myself," was the veteran captain's reply,
I know of more than one highly paid official who has been edged out solely because he failed to develop into a teamworker when growth made the engagement of additional officials imperative.
Credit in the long run usually goes to those who seek it least but deserve it most, not to those who strive to monopolize it.
Teamwork calls for a certain amount of unselfish- ness.
It calls for tolerance.
It calls for goodfellowship.
It calls for companionableness.
But it is worth infinitely more than it costs.
It is an asset without which a man is likely to bankrupt his career.
He who would take all and give none, he who can- not rise to the give-and-take level, can never hope to become a genuine teamworker.
And only teamworkers rise to the top under modern conditions, where one-man enterprises can- not withstand the competition of giant combinations of brains and capital.
Carefully scrutinize your make-up, and if there be weak spots or kinks in it, apply yourself to remedying them.
For large scale success to-day is spelled "Team- work."
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How You Can Become a Successful Teamworker
Some men like to work with others, they like to hunt in pairs, they always want a partner; and other men like to go it alone. The first man usually has little originality, he never thinks things out on his own account; and the second man is likely to fail, because the very best ideas amount to nothing unless carried into effect, and in these days it takes an organization to carry business ideas to the point of big money making. However strong and original your ideas may be, youve got to have teamwork to back them up or you won't make any money worth speaking of out of them.
How are you going to get teamwork?
First, no very young man has any business to go it alone, at first at any rate. He needs the educa- tion and training that an organization can give him, and his wisest plan is to pick the organization that can give him the best training. What is [a dollar or two of salary as compared to this training in one's chosen line of business?
Ask yourself, young man, have you gone out specifically to get the education which your organ- ization can give you?
That is the attitude of the teamworker in its first phase. If you look on every other worker in your concern, from the office boy to the president, as your teacher, from whom you are trying to learn something, you have the right attitude for the teamworker.
Are you doing it?
The man of thirty or over, who has mastered his
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business and begins to feel lie can do things on his own account, has a different problem before him: shall he start a business of his own, go into a part- nership with some other young men like himself, or stick with the older and bigger corporation with which he has previously been connected?
Is that your problem ? I'll give you the answer.
The answer lies in yourself. Have you a con- viction that you have it within yourself to dominate that big corporation by the time you are fifty or sixty? If you have that conviction, stick with it to the end, no matter whether your immediate superiors are just now friendly to you or not your loyalty is to the corporation, to the business, and if that loyalty is unswerving the time will come when, the big men now at the top having dropped out, you will be chosen because the business will have to have you even if your predecessor hated you like poison. Your loyalty to the business will keep under any little personal feeling of antagonism, and your devotion to teamwork will win out over any pos- sible shade of personal favoritism.
If, on the contrary you see a chance for a bigger and stronger business outside, because it is one with fresh blood all through it, and you can draw about you the right aides (just as a Prime Minister forms a Cabinet if he can get the right men to take port- folios), strike out for yourself. But don't do it unless you can command the right support, for if you don't have it you might as well throw up the sponge at the start.
You may, however, be something of a professional man, an engineer, an expert, a thinker par excellence. Such men must handle their business almost entirely alone. But they won't succeed any more than the
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TEAMWORK
others without teamwork, only their teamwork must be of a different sort: they must use the big organizations of outsiders, and they must set their faces to get those organizations. The lawyer must have his big corporations as clients — and he must go after that kind of client; the doctor must have his hospitals where he does an enormous amount of work for nothing but where he gets his connection and his prestige; the engineer must have his con- struction companies, and the business efficiency expert must have his staff of friends among big business men who will support and recommend him, always in return for valuable personal services which he renders them for which he makes no charge.
Write it down — just how are you systematically going after the co-operation without which you can't make a big success?
The attitude of seeking and cultivating teamwork is teamwork.
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POLITENESS
Politeness is the hall-mark of the gentle-man and the gentle-woman.
We all aspire to be considered well-bred.
A lack of politeness stamps us as coarse, boorish, brutish, ill-bred.
No characteristic will so help a youth to advance, whether in business or society, as politeness.
Genuine politeness is not veneer, is not mere pre- tension, is not assumed, is not artificial.
Polite acts spring from kindly thoughts. Po- liteness is only another name for thoughtfulness.
"Politeness is to the mind what charm is to the face," was Voltaire's happy definition.
Impoliteness is a species of selfishness, of putting self first, of trampling upon the feelings or the rights of others. Impoliteness is an ugly quality.
Nor does it pay. It arouses the resentment in others. It creates antagonism. It repels friend- ship. It does not attract.
"The spirit of politeness," to use the fitting language of La Bruyere, " consists in making others, through our words and manner, pleased with us and with themselves." And again, "A man's qualities must be very great indeed to be able to do without politeness."
Employers to-day give preference to employees wno are polite, who know how to please, who know how to win goodwill, who attract rather than repel.
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POLITENESS
Competition is so keen to-day, there is so much standardized merchandise, there are so many places where one's wants can be supplied, that the suc- cess or failure of a business may depend on the ability of employees to please customers or clients.
Courtesy — another name for politeness — costs nothing, but can gain much both for an individual and for an organization.
The greatest industrial enterprise in the world, the United States Steel Corporation, is noted for the courtesy it consistently shows towards not only*its customers, but towards its competitors, while this same spirit of thoughtfulness and consideration is extended also to its quarter of a million workers.
The next largest industrial employer in the coun- try, the American Telephone Company, will not retain a single employee who cannot learn to be polite. Persistent rudeness brings dismissal.
The extreme unpopularity of the New York sub- way management is due in large measure to the rough, unmannerly, domineering character of the man- agement which has contaminated many of the employees who come into contact with the public.
Theodore Roosevelt, privately, is one of the most polite and mannerly citizens in the United States, notwithstanding the pugilistic nature of many of his public utterances.
Ex-President Taft is likewise the personification of politeness.
So are some of our most successful men of affairs, such as Charles M. Schwab, J. Ogden Armour, George Eastman, John D. Rockefeller, E. H. Gary, Seward Prosser, Frank A. Vanderlip, James Speyer, Cyrus H. McCormick, H. P. Davison, Charles H. Sabin, H. C. Frick, James A. Farrell, Daniel Willard,
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Paul M. Warburg, John H. Patterson, Jacob H. Schiff.
The rough-and-tumble of life has not crushed out courtesy and politeness from these giants.
Politeness has been the passport to many a young man's success. A man recently died and was ac- corded columns and columns in the press, his funeral was attended by leaders in every walk of life, and President Wilson joined in sending condolences. This man was once a dishwasher in a restaurant but through an act of politeness he was enabled to become the most prominent hotelkeeper in America — George Boldt of the Waldorf-Astoria.
Numberless financial and business leaders have chosen as private secretaries clerks who were dis- tinguished by their good manners, and private secre- taryships have very often proved stepping-stones to higher things.
Universities in the olden days paid most attention to turning out gentle-men, men of polished man- ners, men taught to have regard for the feelings and the comfort of others.
Our modern colleges pay too little attention to teaching this everyday, humble quality of politeness with the result that many youths emerge bumptious, arrogant, forward, conceited, and inconsiderate of others.
The highest success in nearly every walk of Hie depends upon one's standing with others, upon the esteem in which one is held, upon the impression one's actions make upon others.
No universally unpopular person could ever be- come President of the United States. Not only so, but great industrial corporations, large railroad systems, influential financial institutions and the
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POLITENESS
like will not to-day choose as president a man dis- liked by his fellows or by the public, no matter what his technical fitness may be.
W. E. Corey was dropped from the presidency of the Steel Corporation solely because he aroused the ire of the public by his unhappy domestic escapade.
The Vanderbilts no longer occupy a dominant place in either the railroad or the financial world, not so much because they lack ability, as because their uppishness and purse-pride brought them into general disfavor.
Rudeness is not, as many misguided individuals seem to think, a mark of superiority. It is rather a sign of poor commonsense, of lack of thought, of failure to grasp the fundamental realities of life and of humanity.
We talk of a person's "innate courtesy"; we some- times say that "politeness is inbred."
But courtesy can be cultivated.
Courtesy and politeness are the flower and fruit of right thinking, of regard for others, of humane im- pulses.
Says the Bible: "The first shall be last and the last shall be first." That is a warning against im- politeness, against the undue thrusting of one's self forward, against bumptiousness, against pushing others aside in order that we may get ahead of them, against, in short, bad manners.
Nothing is more winsome in a child than polite- ness, and nothing more repellent than cheekiness.
In adults we are coming to attach more and more importance to this same quality of politeness, for as civilization advances, boorishness becomes more and more taboo.
Said one of the most prominent German-Ameri-
KEYS TO SUCCESS
cans in this country on returning from a visit to the Fatherland just before the war began: "I was pained to find the superior airs put on by the wealthy people over there. Their manners were positively objectionable. They were so blustering and proud and domineering that I told some of them that I feared the Germans were riding for a fall — they were living examples of the pride that goeth before a fall." His words proved tragically prophetic.
The execration, the hate, the loathing in which Germany is held to-day is due in no small measure to the utter lack of courtesy and politeness they have manifested throughout the war. They have acted more like fiends than Christians. It is their savagery, their barbarity, their cruelty which will keep them outside the pale of civilized human society for many years to come.
Politeness is a pleasing form of kindness — and nothing commends itself more than kindness.
The impolite person is invariably grouchy, dis- contented, unhappy.
Impoliteness and pessimism go hand in hand.
Politeness and cheerfulness are twin brothers.
Grouchiness and pessimism make for failure. ,
Politeness makes for success.
Cultivate politeness.
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How You Can Develop the Habit of Politeness
Politeness is not a coat that can be put on and taken off at will, but an innate habit of mind, an attitude toward all other human beings which becomes instinctive. The cultivation and test of politeness, therefore, is best judged by the way you treat the poorest and meanest persons around you.
Are you always considerate of the office-boy, or don't you think he counts? The elevator man? The old lady who comes into the store to buy ten cents' worth of darning cotton? The person whose politeness is shaky invariably thinks those humble subordinates do not count and speaks to them in a brusque, bossy way. Do you? You know.
The American "Service" idea of business is nothing more than the perpetual feeling of subordina- tion and attentive kindness to all classes of customers, not merely to the big and important customers. The old-world idea of business was the aristocratic idea of toadying to the big customer and ignoring or slighting the humble customer. The democratic principle is treating all exactly alike at all times.
Look at the enormous business of the five and ten cent stores! That shows what enough small cus- tomers will do for any business man. And you never can tell when a small customer will become a big customer. Politeness in business is, there- fore, a matter, not of treating the big customer well, but of treating the poorest and humblest customer JUST as well as the small customer.
Do you treat your small customers on a real
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level of equality with your best customers? You know. Answer the question honestly.
The office-boy, the stenographer, and the elevator- man, or the meanest little customer who comes into your store, these are the people on whom you can prac- tice politeness till you cultivate a real habit. They will not mind your awkwardness at first — in fact, they will appreciate anything you do for them.
Resolve this day that you will make yourself tremendously popular with the poorest and mean- est employees about your place of business, and you will have taken the first step toward cultivating true politeness. It will carry over into all your business transactions and will actually pay bigger dividends than almost anything else you can do. It will be that intangible thing that will "make people FEEL like doing business with you," and people do business chiefly because they feel like it, not because of any logical reason.
Do you feel that you like the people you deal with? If you don't like them very much you may be sure they don't like you very much. If you learn to like them more, if you try hard to like them, some intangible messenger will influence them and they will begin to try to like you.
Will you do that to-day? And resolve to keep at it every day?
Some people lack politeness because of absorption in their business, absent-mindedness, thoughtless- ness. They are really kind at heart, but they haven't been made to stop and think how necessary it is to show it.
Are you of that kind?
If you are, just stop and see if you haven't been overlooking something and if it won't pay you to
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POLITENESS
take some time to make an effort to show your good- will more clearly and habitually.
Will you settle that point right now?
But perhaps you are so busy you can't possibly take the time to be polite to everybody. Is that your case? Do you feel that is a good excuse for snubbing a good many people?
Stop. If you haven't time to be polite yourself, hire somebody to be polite for you. Anybody so busy that he can't stop to be polite can certainly afford to hire a secretary who will make a business of being kind, considerate, and polite to everyone who comes to see his superior.
Have you instructed your secretary carefully not to copy your manners but to be a great deal more polite to all the poor people who come to your office than you have time to be?
If you haven't given such instructions, you are yourself deficient in politeness.
This is a hard subject to be honest about. Have you been strictly honest with yourself in checking yourself up on it?
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INITIATIVE
"I spent fifteen million dollars experimenting with one process which had been turned down by every other steel company in the United States," Charles M. Schwab, creator of America's super- Krupps, once told me by way of illustrating the part which daring and initiative had played in his career.
Initiative is in business what radium is among metals — the rarest and most valuable.
America has been blessed beyond all other modern nations in industrial, in transportation and in manu- facturing initiative.
What gave America a transportation system com- pared with which the systems of the rest of the world are miniature playthings? The initiative, the courage and the determination of such pioneers as Huntington, Hill, Cassatt, Harriman, not to omit McAdoo of Hudson Tunnel fame.
What gave America world's mastery of the photo- graphic industry and of film manufacture? The initiative, mainly, of George Eastman, first in pro- ducing superior dry-plates, next in evolving un- equaled cameras, and lastly, in bringing about the first workable process for the making of films suitable for Edison's moving-picture invention.
What has enabled America to supply the world with cash registers? The ceaseless initiative of John H. Patterson, later the "Savior of Dayton."
What gave and gives America leadership in man-
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INITIATIVE
ufacturing typewriters for the civilized world? The initiative and enterprise of our Remingtons, our Underwoods, and other progressive men of business.
What has knit the world together by telegraph and by telephone? The initiative of Morse and Field and Bell and Vail, American citizens all. ' Is not the greatest lay-figure of the two hemi- spheres to-day our revered Edison, the personifica- tion of initiative?
High-speed railway travel was made safe by another American only a little less entitled to fame, George Westinghouse, whose initiative blazed the trail in applying air to powerful brakes.
Very silently progress is being made in rail- joining the two American continents through the initiative of a modest, retiring native of Brooklyn, Minor C. Keith, whose achievements will one day be more honored than they are by us, his contempo- raries.
America, in the eyes of the world, typifies above all else this quality of initiative.
America, indeed, owes its very birth to initiative, for if ever mortal man displayed initiative and re- fused to forswear it that mortal was Christopher Columbus.
The greatest successes are nearly all the fruit of initiative.
The opposite, the antithesis of initiative, is imitation — and in what derision and contempt are imitators held! "Copy Cats" they are sneeringly dubbed by the populace.
Why do we hold in such high esteem the achieve- ments of the Wright brothers? Because they were illustrious examples of initiative and tenacity.
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Henry Ford's place and popularity are due in no small measure to his initiative in his chosen field.
In this world war the cry has been, "Give us men of initiative!" Said a notable General con- fronting the German trenches on the Western front: "I don't know what Napoleon would have done to overcome trenches, but I know he would have discovered some means.99
Modern war is largely a contest of initiative, of inventing new weapons of destruction and of in- venting antidotes therefor.
The world has imitators a-plenty.
The demand is for initiators, not imitators — for leaders, not followers.
"Where there is no vision, the people perish," says the Sacred Book. Christ Himself was the greatest exponent of initiative the earth has ever known.
Ideas are the most valuable commodity in the world to-day.
And ideas are born of initiative, the children of men and women of initiative.
The concern headed by a man of initiative is always one jump ahead of its competitor headed by an imitator.
Advancement is applied initiative.
Most qualities can be acquired; some, it would almost appear, have to be born in a person.
Initiative is one quality hard to develop unless the original brain-soil be favorable.
Present-day conditions, however, have stirred initiative as never before. A thousand and one new problems in manufacturing, in transportation, in management are arising daily for solution. These problems cannot be overcome by the adoption of
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old rules, old formulas, old devices. They call for original thinking, for resourcefulness, for initiative.
"My competitors are all wondering how I can get goods from the Orient to New York," said a live- wire young importer. "The railroad embargo and other obstacles have proved too much for them. Of course, I am not telling them how it's done." But he told me — and it was nothing but an example of brilliant initiative born of knowledge of every phase of his business.
That's really the main secret of initiative — knowl- edge, mastery of your business, plus dogged deter- mination to ponder every difficulty until the brain evolves a remedy.
Nations and corporations are to-day setting an unprecedented premium upon initiative, upon the power to originate new, workable devices or schemes, upon the power to readjust successfully the old order to the new, upon the power to evolve order out of the chaos caused by the world war.
The occasion begets the man, 'tis said. This is the occasion par excellence for begetting initiative.
But this quality, this power of initiative, will not descend from the clouds and alight upon individuals by chance : it will come and will function only where prepa- ration has been made to attract and to receive it.
Expressed differently, initiative is not wholly a heaven-sent gift, but is largely the fruit of study, of the exercise of imagination, of a spirit of daring, of clear thinking — in short, of knowing how.
The war is re-shuffling the whole deck of cards. Rather, it would be a better simile to say that the war is winnowing the human wheat from the human chaff in every land. Old reputations are tumbling daily and new reputations are arising.
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The supreme test in the higher reaches is: Has he initiative? Can he think up a better way to do it than it has ever been done before? Can he invent some new, effective method? Can he outthink the enemy — that is, competitors?
General Goethals, builder of the Panama Canal and later appointed Quartermaster of America's entire army, a job bristling with novel problems which called for prompt solution, thus admonishes those who lack initiative: "When do you expect to do the wonderful things you are dreaming about? Why don't you begin? What are you waiting for? Where is your courage? Haven't you any dare in your nature? Why don't you start? Are you waiting for a good thing to come to you, waiting for influence, for pull, for someone to help you? My friend, you never will get anywhere unless you launch out, take chances, unless you are willing to run the risk of failure. If procrastination runs in your blood; if you have formed the habit of putting off, of deliberating, waiting for better conditions, you will never get anywhere in the world. The first thing is to begin. The world is full of people who are either failures or who are plodding along in mediocrity because they didn't care to begin, to launch out. Didn't dare to begin would make a fitting epitaph for millions of nobodies, millions of failures."
Said the wise Elbert Hubbard: "The world bestows its big prizes, both in money and honors, for but one thing. And that is initiative."
Immelman won imperishable glory as an aviator largely because he originated new tricks which con- founded his opponents of the air.
Sir Eric Geddes, the man placed in charge of Brit- ain's whole navy, was little known before the war;
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but he had ideas and he insisted upon bringing them to the notice of the Government, and it finally gave him a subordinate post. He displayed such initia- tive that he rose step by step until he won the highest place in the greatest navy in the world.
America has produced relatively few instances of obscure men rising to dazzling heights at Washington since we entered the war, but this is at least partly due to the bureaucratic methods, the red-tapeism, the wooden officialdom which have prevailed. Even so, tasks of no mean order have been accomplished by business men — and more will follow now that organizers are being given a free hand.
Promotions never have been so rapid either in military or business life as during the last year. The demand is for fellows who can think for themselves, who can grapple with new conditions, who can initiate new methods or processes, who can blaze new trails.
Throw off the shackles of precedent; cast loose from the chains of custom. Say to yourself: "Everything is changing. How can I become a leader and a master of the new order, instead of letting the new order master me? "
The rivers of business and of life are swiftly chang- ing their courses. Are you simply to float with them, to be stranded you know not where?
Or are you to address yourself with all your might — first, to taking your bearings afresh, then striking out for some prized goal?
Don't be a lazy floater.
Be a strong swimmer.
Don't be a follower.
Be a leader.
Don't imitate.
Initiate.
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How You Can Test Your Power of Initiative
Initiative is probably worth more money to the man who has it backed up by other qualities than any other one factor. The first man in the field skims the cream, and the second man who copies him and plays second fiddle must be content to grub for just a fair margin of profit. Occasionally the second man takes the initiative away from the first, but that is because in reality he has more in- itiative in detail than the original inventor. The first man in the field ought to make a big fortune, and very often does. That is about the only way really big fortunes are legitimately made.
Initiative is a compound of several qualities — primarily, judgment, ideals, and courage. If you haven't these three, you can't possibly have in- itiative. But if you do have them, initiative is something more — it is judgment and courage applied practically to the realization of a big or little ideal that is of some practical use to someone, and it never fails to support these with any other personal quality that may be required, such as persistence, enthusiasm, honesty, will-power, teamwork, or what- ever it may be.
Initiative begins with little things, never with big. The initiative that leads to a fortune is in- variably but an accumulation of scores or hundreds of smaller independent original efforts. The new office-boy sees a chair out of place, a hat fallen on the floor, an inkwell that is empty, a pen that is broken: he immediately attends to the matter with- out being told, and his boss says "That boy has initiative." If he waits to be told, he lacks in-
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itiative. The stenographer who sees a word in a letter she is writing which does not make sense to her and has the good judgment and courage not to change it at a guess but to inquire whether it ought not to be changed before she writes it down has initiative; but the stenographer who writes the word down and then says, "I thought that's what you said," is lacking both judgment and self-re- liance or courage. If you are an employee, high or low, do you wait to be told, or do you proceed to do what you know ought to be done or to find out about it if you are in doubt?
Initiative in business has a fund for experiments and is willing to lose a good deal of money and do a good deal of hard work which comes to nothing to find some way at last of serving customers more efficiently than any one else on earth can serve them. Initiative says, "I want a monopoly — I want to be first in my class, not the second — I want to have a pleasanter smile for my customers than any one else (without being sickishly sweet), I want to be a few hours ahead of every one else in deliveries, I want to have the cheapest goods in the market or I want to have the highest quality (Both the cheapest department store on State Street in Chicago and the store with the highest quality of goods even up to dinner plates at $100 each make big money, but the store with the highest quality makes most). Go over your business detail by detail and see if you are first or second. If you find any point where you know you are inferior, strike out for yourself and see how you can beat every one else. You will have to think, you'll have to work, you'll have to stick to it — but in the end you will prove you have initiative.
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Write down these points one by one according to your best judgment. Then go out to realize your ideals with all the will-power you can muster.
If this course is of any use to you, here is the chance to prove it — one little point at a time. Will you do it?
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HONESTY
Honesty is the cornerstone of character.
If a man be not honest, he is nothing.
Yet this homely virtue, as old as history, is being re-discovered and re-enthroned.
Honesty used to be disregarded in business, in politics, in diplomacy.
Twenty-five years ago corporations and their creators did things they would not dream of doing to-day, because our standards of honesty have risen.
Political huggermuggering that was sanctioned a generation ago would not be tolerated now and would, if attempted, lead to defeat, disgrace and prison.
Even diplomacy is now called upon to come into the open, to be honest, straightforward, ethical.
Honesty no longer means simply keeping within the law, keeping out of jail, keeping out of trouble.
To-day's standard of honesty is higher than that.
The honest man or woman now seeks not merely to avoid criminal or illegal acts, but to be scrupu- lously fair, upright, fearless in both action and expression.
Since starting this homily on a subject almost as ancient as the hills, I opened a book containing a definition of honesty, and found that honesty means more than can be expressed in two or three
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words. Here are the meanings it gives of "Honest" and "Honesty":
"Honest. — Honorable, fair, straightforward, equitable, open, free from fraud, faithful to contract, according to agreement, just as represented.
Upright, virtuous, conscientious, just, true, fair, reliable, trusty, trustworthy, observant of obligations, that stand by one's word, as good as one's word.
Genuine, free from shams, thorough, faithful. Reputable, respectable, creditable, suitable, proper.
Decent, chaste, virtuous. Sincere, candid, frank, unreserved, ingenuous. Honesty. — Integrity, probity, uprightness, fair- ness, justice, equity, trustiness, fidelity, faith- fulness, honor, freedom from fraud.
Truthfulness, truth, veracity, observance of one's word.
Genuineness, thoroughness. Honor, chastity, virtue. Sincerity, candor, frankness, ingenuousness, truth, truthfulness, openness, unreserve, plain dealing." Can you measure up to that full-length defi- nition of what honesty means?
The other day I was in a great banking house. Visitor after visitor was told that a certain partner was not in. From where I sat I could see him at his desk.
A boy who applied for a situation years ago had the duties enumerated to him by the employer. Among other things, he was told he would have to lie. "How much salary do you want?" finally asked the boss.
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"Ten thousand dollars a year," promptly replied the lad, rising.
"What? What d'ye mean?" asked the astounded employer.
"I mean that you couldn't pay me to become a liar for you," retorted the plucky boy as he shook the dust of the office from his feet.
Happily, the demand for liars is falling off. Fewer employers are now dishonest — and the honest employer does not engage dishonest em- ployees.
The best market to-day is for honest men.
Dishonesty used to be recognized as a poor policy only in copybooks. To-day it is being recognized as a poor policy throughout the whole world of affairs.
E. H. Gary aroused derision among some of the Steel Trust's old-school directors when he first let them understand that the whole business, in all its relations with the public, legislatures, labor, com- petitors and customers, would be conducted with scrupulous above boardness and honesty. And when he discovered that certain directors sneaked out of the board room to speculate in the corpora- tion's stocks as soon as the quarterly statement of earnings was handed them, Gary boldly changed the hour of the meeting to insure that the Stock Exchange would be closed before the figures were placed in the hands of the directors. In this way the newspapers and the public received the informa- tion many hours before it could be acted on in the stock market.
That action called for a rare brand of honesty — for something more than honesty, indeed; it called for a high degree of courage.
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Honesty comes easy to those who — well, to those who are honest.
Dishonesty most often springs from avarice and cowardice.
"Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive," is true.
Inordinate greed usually begets some form of dis- honesty, and then dishonesty breeds cowardice, for "the guilty fleeth when no man pursueth."
It is seldom hard to be brave when you have nothing to hide.
You rarely have to lie when you have been scrupu- lously honest in the widest sense of the term.
The person who can preserve unimpeachable honesty in every walk and phase of life will be immune from half the temptations and sins of life. The person who falls from honesty finds that one false step leads to another and then another.
Napoleon's thefts of Europe's richest treasures of art brought him almost as much opprobrium as all his inhuman butcheries.
The ire of the world has been aroused in these latter days by the rapacious looting perpetrated by the "flower" of Germany's military aristocrats.
No name in American industry is more despised than that of Horace Havemeyer of Sugar Trust infamy. And, fittingly, his dishonesty led to an ignominious end — by his own hand, it was privately whispered.
Looting of railroads, traction companies or in- dustrial corporations by financial freebooters is no longer in vogue. The Moores, the Reids, the Kyans, the Yoakums are not types held in high esteem under the present-day code of ethics.
Having — either voluntarily or involuntarily,
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though mostly voluntarily — turned honest them- selves, powerful directorates now want nothing but honest executives and honest employees.
Employers have learned that employees who will act dishonestly for them will, when opportunity arises, act dishonestly by them. The employee who will cheat a customer will as readily cheat a boss, for dishonesty and disloyalty go hand-in-hand.
The young man who aspires to succeed must first recognize and realize that he must pursue a rigidly honest course, that he cannot do the right thing for an employer by doing the wrong thing for himself.
It is not enough that he refrain from stealing, that he eschew cheating, that he does not "beat the clock."
He must let it sink into his heart and soul that it is dishonest for him to so spend an evening that he is not capable next day of rendering the very best service that is in him.
He must feel that, to be one hundred per cent, honest with his employer, he must utilize a reason- able portion of his own time to fit him to discharge his duties better day by day and month by month.
He must imbibe the idea that he cannot do his best by his employer unless he does the best possible by himself — by self-education, by self-discipline, by taking rational recreation, by thinking stimulat- ing thoughts, by keeping his eye on the ball whether at work or at play.
To mistreat oneself is dishonest both to self and to employer.
Only you can tell whether you are in all things honest.
Said the veteran E. P. Ripley, president and
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upbuilder of the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway, when I spoke to him on this subject:
"While theoretically an employee is judged solely by his record when on duty and no systematic effort is made to keep tab on his habits when off duty, yet if he is given to late hours of dissipation his appearance and his work are apt to show it, and naturally the employee's chief will not feel inclined to promote a young man of bad habits."
Yes, honesty means more than the dictionary or any book of synonyms expresses.
What passed for honesty in the business world even a few years ago would not stand the test of to-day. Says A. C. Bedford, head of the Standard Oil Company: "Unless business is conducted in a fair and honorable manner it will close in the long run. I would urge a young man going into business to cultivate, first a fine sentiment of honor, that is, a principle of action in conformity with the highest standards of duty and obligation set by the social sentiment of any time and place. But remember that conditions change. Matters which were considered permissible twenty years ago would be condemned to-day. This is due to an advance- ment of the moral thought and a better general conception of the higher ideals. The Bible is the best possible guide for conduct."
Christian Girl, asked the qualities he sought in choosing aides, replied: "I want honesty, enthusiasm and genuine intelligence." You will note that hon- esty was put first.
"Absolute honesty and integrity'' Robert Dollar lays down as the foundation on which every genu- inely successful career must be built.
Honesty now must be four-square.
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It must embrace activities of the mind as well as the hand.
It must not merely measure up to the outward civil law, but to the inward moral law.
"I don't want smart Alecks; I want only plain, hard-working honest fellows," Frank A. Vanderlip told me in describing the kind of men he picks to fill $25,000-a-year jobs.
Smartness used to be at a premium and un- compromising honesty at a discount.
To-day smartness is at a discount and honesty at a premium.
To be able to sell your services at a premium you now must be first, last and all the time honest.
No employer — nor any one else — has any regard in his inmost heart for the person who is dishonest.
And, most important of all, the dishonest person, when indulging in reflection in the still, quiet hours of a wakeful night, has no regard for himself.
Honesty pays dividends both in dollars and in peace of mind.
Dishonesty is the very worst policy.
IIS
How You Can Develop Essential Business Honesty
The attitude of service carries with it complete personal honesty, though we naturally think of service as applying to customers in our business, while we think of honesty as applying to our various personal relations, particularly towards the people from whom we buy and whom we must pay in money. For convenience we will treat this lesson as a ques- tion of your attitude as a customer, as a buyer, or as an employee of a business concern.
We all of us assume various obligations. Some of these obligations we assume voluntarily and with full intention to pay value for what we receive. Other obligations we slip into weakly, we are over- persuaded, or we assume them without realizing just what they involve; or conditions change. It is a natural human tendency to want to escape paying the natural penalty for all our little mistakes and weaknesses, and that is where our honesty is tried. Very few embezzlers deliberately plan to take money from their employers. In order to become an em- bezzler a person has to get into difficulties of one sort or another through weakness. When he finds himself sewed up so tight on several different sides that he can't see any other way out, he takes money. The powder train was laid in the first weak indi- gencies, and a very great many of us are incipient embezzlers, we have allowed ourselves to slip a little here and a little there, feeling sure we shall never go over the line. Let us take stock of our- selves and see just where we do stand, just how hon- est we actually are. As a matter of fact, there are
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no degrees of personal integrity — we are either all sound or the rot that has started will soon eat us up.
The great point about honesty is that it is a purely personal affair. Many people think that if nobody knows, and especially if nobody cares, there is no great harm in what we do. But we know, and when we begin to let ourselves waver we are gone, we have got tuberculosis of the soul and it will take heroic treatment to save ourselves. If that is your condition, the quicker you take this lesson to heart the better.
Take a sheet of paper and write down truthful answers to these questions:
Have you ever accepted presents of any sort from anybody who wanted to sell goods to your employer? If you have you are guilty of accepting bribes, no matter how many other people do it, no matter how openly it is done, no matter how harmless you per- suade yourself it is.
Do you systematically delay paying your bills when you have the money, so as to have a little longer use of the money at the expense of the other fellow? Well-to-do people often do that, and they persuade themselves it is carelessness on their part and the neglect has come simply because they haven't time to bother; but just the same it takes that which belongs to someone else, and it is an honest duty to take the time to bother to pay one's bills as promptly as possible.
If you are working on a salary and suddenly find yourself alone and entirely unwatched, and know that no one is going to check your work up, do you have a queer feeling of freedom, a feeling that you don't have to work and can knock off for a little smoke, or something of that sort? Any employee
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who does not have the same sense of responsibility to his work at all times is at least subject to tempta- tion to dishonesty and ought to take himself in hand without delay.
These are merely suggestive questions. You must write up your own particular record in your own way.
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HEALTH
Good health is as necessary for the winning of the war as good guns, good shells, good airplanes.
But we must have good health at home as well as in the trenches, for our second line of defense is the productivity of those who remain at home — yea, our first line of defense, on the battlefront, could not be maintained were this other line to give way.
Poor health threatens to hasten the collapse of Germany and her vassal allies, for all reports record semi-starvation and rampant disease in Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Turkey.
So far, the health of enemy armies has been main- tained— at the expense of the civilian populations; but there are multiplying symptoms that the health as well as the morale of the Teutonic soldiers is now giving way. A sick army cannot fight. ' One of the finest tributes paid America is the uni- versal testimony that the physique and the health of our soldiers are superior to those of any other army in Europe.
Wars are won, in the final analysis, by whichever side can longest maintain in the field an adequate, thoroughly-equipped army of able-bodied, healthy men.
The health of our soldiers is being safeguarded as the health of no other army in history was ever safeguarded.
But what of all those of us who stay behind? Do
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we realize the importance of maintaining our health and the sinfulness of contracting avoidable sick- ness?
Now as never before one's health is not merely a personal matter. It is not merely a religious matter. It is not merely a duty to one's employer. It is not merely a duty to one's offspring.
Our health is now of vital military concern.
How? Why?
First: Only healthy persons can produce the things necessary for the equipment and sustenance of our armed forces on the battlefields.
Second: Every case of sickness at home absorbs the time and attention of doctors and nurses who are thereby prevented from devoting their services to military purposes.
Ill-health saps the vitality alike of the individual and of the nation.
Sound health is an essential asset when a nation is consecrating all its strength to a life-or-death struggle with an enemy of tremendous power.
At one stage grave alarm was felt in Britain over the serious falling-off in the output of direly-needed war materials. Investigation revealed that abnor- mally long hours and seven-day working weeks were impairing the vitality, the efficiency, and the health of the nation's workers, and in order to reinvigorate the population shorter hours and less onerous work- ing conditions were decreed by the Government. Had the health of Britain been irreparably under- mined, the war might have been lost before ever America had struck a blow.
The real wealth, as well as the real power, of a nation, in war or peace, consists less in its material possessions than in its population of healthy citi-
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zens — its sturdy manhood, its robust womanhood, its happy, healthy children.
Only strong, healthy men, clear of eye, steady of nerve, can lie by the hour in trenches and pick off enemy soldiers with all the consummate skill of the trained sharpshooter. Only such physically fit men can man and aim giant guns with the most delicate precision, as called for by modern warfare con- ditions. Only such men can successfully meet trained enemies in flying machines, in tanks or in hand-to-hand encounters.
Every sick soldier is a drain upon an army. Every sick civilian is a drain upon a country.
The sick consume and do not produce. They consume not only food and medical supplies; but they consume the time and the services of physicians and nurses and servants.
To become sick when ordinary prudence could have avoided it is, in this time of war, unpatriotic. It is a crime against the State. It helps the enemy.
Seneca, one of the wisest of the ancients, aptly declared: "Men do not die; they kill themselves."
The New York Bureau of Public Health recently exhorted: "Keep well; don't have to get well."
Man consists of body and mind (or soul). The body is the instrument given us for carrying out the dictates, the mandates, the orders of the mind.
But if our instruments are out of gear, if we have allowed them to fall into disrepair, they cannot ful- fil the commands of the mind.
Says the poet:
Nor love nor honor, wealth nor power Can give the heart a cheerful hour When health is lost. Be timely wise; With health all taste of pleasure flies.
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Health means efficiency.
Sickness means inefficiency.
Health means optimism, cheerfulness, happiness, the joy of living.
Sickness means pessimism, depression, pain, grouchiness.
Health begets courage and daring and achievement.
Sickness begets nervousness and fear and failure.
Health vitalizes and energizes.
Sickness saps and debilitates.
The person who is sick is too much engrossed in his or her own aches and ailments to think much or do much for others.
What Gorgas did at Panama is ranked by many as more important for mankind than what Goethals did. Goethals demonstrated to the world that a canal could be built there; Gorgas demonstrated that science could make a fever-soaked, disease-rid- den country healthful and habitable.
Without health neither nation nor individual can reach the highest heights.
Health is our most-precious but least-cherished, most-abused possession.
Probably three-fourths of all sickness is self- imposed, brought on by some form of unwise, indis- creet or thoughtless action of our own, aggravated in certain cases by inherited weaknesses due to the sins of our fathers "even to the third and fourth genera- tions."
"To lengthen thy life, lessen thy meals," exhorted Benjamin Franklin, and there is truth in his quip.
Again to quote New York City's Health Depart- ment: "Public health is purchasable. Within nat- ural limitations, a community can determine its own death-rate."
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No subject of equal importance has been so shame- fully neglected in the past by nations, by corpora- tions, by individuals.
Three million persons in the United States are seriously ill at all times, costing the country, it is computed, $6,000,000,000, or more than all the actual money — gold, silver and bills — in circulation!
But a tocsin has been sounded. War has been declared against all the forces which bring on ill- health. The medical examination of the millions of men of draft age has opened the nation's eyes to the need for preventive measures throughout the whole land.
The supreme value of sound health and strong physique has been driven home as never before.
Health, we have all suddenly learned, is not merely the highest form of wealth the individual can possess, but is the basis of our power to resist foreign foes, the basis of our national security and safety, the basis of our place among the peoples of the earth.
How many of us conserve our health with the same care that we conserve our capital? Yet what is the dissipation of money compared with the dissi- pation of our vitality, our health, our life?
We insist upon keeping our automobile in proper working order. We see to it that our piano is kept in tune. We take pains to have a proper edge put upon our razor.
Are we equally careful to see that our bodies are kept in proper working order, our health in perfect tune, our mentality keen as a razor edge?
Yet the one great aim of every Government and every individual is or should be to attain what an early sage termed, "A sound mind in a sound body."
Without a sound body there is little likelihood of
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preserving a sound mind, for we all know from stern experience that if we abuse our bodies, if we become, over-fatigued, if we feel out of sorts physically, our minds will not act with spontaneity, with vigor, with relish, but become lackadaisical, indifferent, lazy, inefficient.
Just as the army is rejecting men who are not in prime health, so employers are now rejecting workers who are not physically fit.
The practice of subjecting every applicant for work to a thorough medical examination is being adopted by large employers all over the country, and the results are so valuable that in time this custom will become universal. Annual or semi-annual physical examinations of all employees are also being instituted by progressive organizations, with excellent consequences morally as well as physically and financially. How can one best husband health?
"Good morals mean good health," it has been well said.
Here are ten simple "Health Commandments " :
Good habits.
Good food.
Plenty of sleep.
Fresh air — and breathe it deeply.
Plenty of exercise.
Lots of water — outside and in.
Sensible clothing.
Right thoughts.
Work.
Don't worry.
And it is well to remember, as Herbert Spencer expressed it,*-that "To be a good animal is the first requisite to success in life."
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How You May Develop Robust Health
Of course some of us are born with a strong con- stitution and some with a weak vitality. It is too late to avoid that, but each of us can make the best of what he has, and there is no question in the world that the poorest wreck can, with skill and care, be made quite a respectable body. The great majority of us are in fairly good natural condition if we only make the most of what we have. Our trouble is the development of bad habits that we do not seem able to break, or bad conditions which we do not seem able to break away from.
Do you really know — have you ever thought — ■ what the facts actually are about your physical condition? Most people never do think until some great illness compels them to take a personal inventory, and then it is often too late to make much out of the bodies that have long been sadly abused. Isn't it foolish for you to wait till that time comes? Won't you check up your physical condition now with me — or with the help of an expert medical man if you feel you need one?
How are your muscles? Can you run a mile at a dog trot, and pull up your weight as you hook your fingers over the top of the door lintel, or lie flat on your back and sit up ten times in fairly quick succession? If you can, your muscles are in pretty good shape. If you cannot you need systematic muscular exercise, taking one set of muscles and going over your body. Fifteen minutes every morning, or an equivalent amount in the right sort of varied sport every week, will make you all right.
How is your digestion? Free, healthy, and
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regular, weight normal and not going down? Or do you suffer from gas, constipation, loss of weight, or anything of that sort? Do you take digestion medicine? Any one who takes medicine is in a bad way. The one and only cure for digestive trouble, the complete and the surest cure, is proper food — simple, moderate in amount, with a good share of fruit and greenstuffs rich in vitamines, a good amount of roughage, such as bran and coarse cereals, and much less meat than most Americans eat, and much less sugar than most young people like.
How are your lungs? Do you have colds in winter? It's your own fault if you have colds, and colds lead to pneumonia and tuberculosis, the two greatest scourges in America to-day. First see if your chest expansion is three or four inches as it ought to be. Then sleep out of doors, and sit during the day in your office in a regular current of air (you will doubtless have to learn to do this by de- grees, but you can do it with a little practice).
How are your nerves? Do you sleep well? Do you worry? What you need is nerve rest, relaxa- tion, recreation, social pleasures — anything that will regularly and systematically let up the constant and steady tension of the nervous strain, with a normal amount of sleep (not too little or too much). You can get all of these if you make a business of going after them, and still not make any radical change in your mode of life.
Many a person says he hasn't time for exercise (three hours a week of the right kind of exercise will keep him in good shape, and you mean to say one can't spend three hours a week?); he can't control his diet — he has to eat what the boarding- house furnishes (but that person hasn't initiative);
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he can't stand cold fresh air, and doesn't know how- to relax his nerves (though if he went out and dug a ditch till he sweated his nerves would be relaxed all right). Are you of that nambypamby kind? You won't admit it! Then it is up to you if you are weak under any one of those four great heads to reform to-day — this minute.
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LANGUAGE
Your tongue is your rudder.
It steers your course through life.
Your tongue is also the index to your mentality.
It tells whether you are educated or uneducated, vulgar or refined, careful or careless, painstaking or slipshod.
The Bible calls it an "unruly member," so hard is it to control.
Yet without control of the tongue no one can hope to rise to permanent success.
To gain mastery of the tongue and of speech is essential to growth and advancement.
Learn when you open your mouth not to "put your foot in it."
Put your whole self, your best self, in it.
Our tongue is our daily and hourly advertisement.
By our tongue we constantly proclaim what we are, what we have to offer.
If we are loud and empty as a drum our tongue reveals the fact.
If we are uncultured, inwardly uncouth, our speech betrays us.
If we are mentally lazy, lackadaisical and untidy, lo! the "unruly member" proclaims so.
On the other hand, if we are keen, alert, precise; if our heads are stocked with knowledge and our minds are fountains of wisdom, our speech will prove a faithful interpreter.
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LANGUAGE
The art of conversation is the most important and most neglected of all arts.
It is also allied with the art of written expression.
And these two arts — speaking and writing — form a very large part of the whole of human activi- ties, business as well as social.
Many a youth has won advancement because of his correct speech or his ability as a letter writer.
Many a man and woman have risen in society because of the charm of their conversation.
In public life the art of oratory is essential to the highest success.
Why, therefore, is so little attention paid to culti- vating proper lingual habits?
Chiefly because the importance of correct speaking is not generally recognized.
A person will sit and chew the end of a pen for five minutes, thinking how to write a simple sentence; yet the same person will rattle off a dozen verbal sentences in thirty seconds.
The explanation is that the importance of writing grammatically is understood, but the importance of speaking grammatically is not understood.
Also many people are too lazy to take the trouble to form correct sentences when talking. They pour . out whatever words come rushing to the tip of the tongue, utterly regardless of the suitability of the words to express the meaning intended.
Illiterate persons usually have a few stock phrases which they use over and over again no matter how inapt the phrases often may be. They simply can't be bothered trying to think which words ought to be used.
But even educated persons, young and old, are
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often guilty of interlarding their speech with hack- neyed, inappropriate slang phrases.
"Cheese it!" "You betcha!" "Believe me." "You said something." "I ain't." "Search me." "Ain't that the limit?" "Forget it." "You're dippy." "You're talking through your hat." ' ' Listen ! " " Your trolley's twisted" — these are sam- ples of frequently-used expressions which one should avoid.
Many persons adopt one or two superlative adjectives or exclamations and misuse them every hour of the day. Girls are more prone than boys to fall into this slovenly, senseless, unattractive habit.
What is the basic reason for neglecting to cultivate correct speech?
Laziness.
Young people often think it is a sign of superior smartness to ejaculate slang every time they open their mouths. Others become users of slang chiefly because of thoughtlessness; they don't stop to con- sider the impression they thus make upon others.
Grammatical expression and at least a moderately pleasing voice can be cultivated by any normal person — yes, the tone of the voice can be either rasping or pleasing, shrill or sweet.
The importance of devoting care to one's speech was recognized at the dawn of civilization.
"A wholesome tongue is a tree of life," says the Book of Wisdom. Also "Let your speech be always with grace," "The tongue of the wise is health," "Excellent speech become th not a fool," "Death and life are in the power of the tongue," "The tongue of the just is as choice silver."
If excellent speechis not compatible with foolish-
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ness, so faulty speech and wisdom do not go well together.
Since we all aspire — or ought to aspire — to be regarded as possessing a fair measure of sense, it is clearly our duty to acquire creditable speaking habits.
No employer, other things being equal, would think of choosing a young man or woman flagrantly addicted to slang in preference to one whose choice of words reflected thought and care and whose voice was pitched in an agreeable key.
I have often noted how scrupulously correct is the speech of notably successful financiers and cap- tains of industry, who never had even a primary school education. They wisely realized that if they were to mix with educated people and were to make a favorable impression they must not use the language of ignoramuses.
I recall only two nationally known multi-million- aires whose "speech betrayeth them." One is a Southerner, who has never overcome a weakness for typical negro phrases and pronunciation; the other is a New York State ex-farmer boy, who had more schooling than most of our self-made business leaders.
John D. Rockefeller picks his words as carefully as he formerly picked oil properties.
Andrew Carnegie, although he had extremely little schooling when a boy, became a fairly good public speaker. He also wrote several books.
William L. Douglas, the shoe manufacturer, never had even an elementary education, yet he became governor of Massachusetts.
Captain Robert Dollar, the steamship and lum- ber leader, could not write when a youth, but he now
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speaks correctly and writes unusually well. His "Memoirs" are extremely interesting.
Of all the business men I've ever talked with I like best, I think, to listen to Charles E. Mitchell, president of the National City Company of New York. Every sentence is direct, incisive, inspiring, full of "punch." He radiates enthusiasm. He arouses aggression. After talking with him you want to go out and tackle the hardest problem on your calendar. Mr. Mitchell happens to be highly edu- cated, but his vigor and energy of speech and action cannot be ascribed to this alone.
The best way to become a good talker is to learn to have something to say.
Sound thinking must precede sound talking.
An empty mind yields empty talk.
Studying how to talk well will, however, improve the mind, and once attention is concentrated on the subject of self -improvement, remarkable progress will become possible along various lines. Indeed, the person who directs diligent attention to improv- ing his or her speech will, almost unconsciously, gravitate into other valuable forms of self-improve- ment.
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How to Develop Power of Language
Command of language has several different sides which must be studied separately.
Tone of voice and pronunciation;
Choice of words;
Knowledge of the technic of spelling, grammar, pronunciation, and the structure of sentences, para- graphs, and entire compositions.
Have you a sweet, smooth voice? Just listen to yourself talk for a few minutes and see if your tones come "like music on the ear." Do they? Pick up a book and read a paragraph aloud. If your voice is high and rasping, it has been strained in school or at some time by effort to speak louder. Lower the voice until you can read the passage from your book in pure, smooth tones. Then strengthen the voice by practice on the vowels — a-a-a-a-a-a, ah-ah-ah-ah-ah, e-e-e-e-e-e, o-o-o-o-o-o. (I and U are compound sounds and are not used for such an exercise.) After a few minutes' practice daily, in a very short time you will get away from that high, rasping tone so many Americans suffer from.
Is your pronunciation defective? You yourself can't possibly tell. You have heard your own voice so long you think it is all right. But go to some educated person who has a smooth, pleasant voice and get him to read a few words from a book while you repeat them after him, then a few more or a whole sentence, which you repeat, and so on. Study his pronunciation of each word and compare your own, or let him correct you. In this manner you will at least get a good enunciation, and there is probably no other way in which you can get it.
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Choice of words depends on having a good vocabu- lary, and on using that vocabulary in an effective way. The one good way to develop a vocabulary is by reading good books attentively, noticing the words and how they are used. What most people need is not so much more words, for if they used them others would not understand them, but more ways of using the words they have, by figures of speech, emphasis, suggestion, etc. The great mas- ters of literature, especially the novelists, have used these effective methods all through their books, and the best way to learn them is to read their books for an hour every day. Do you have that habit of reading? When you read do you notice how the writers express themselves? When it comes to using words in writing, by far the most important element is the use of the imagination to see the per- son to whom you are writing as if sitting in the chair beside your desk, so you can write as you would talk to him face to face. Ideal letter writing is careful conversation on paper, and it is impossible unless you can imagine your customer so that you can look right into his eyes and talk to him through your pen. The conversational style is by far the most acceptable style to-day in all writing and public speaking. Lawyers are no longer "orators"; they merely talk right to the jury in a commonsense, business fashion. Ministers talk to their congregations in- stead of lecturing them. Letter-writing is the simplest form of conversation on paper, and it must be careful conversation. Dictating letters is therefore one of the best possible methods of developing the power of careful conversation. Have you the imagina- tion that sees your man sitting opposite you as you write? Will you begin to cultivate that habit to-day?
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Mastery of the technic of spelling, grammar, and punctuation is the chief sign of an educated man; in probably ninety-nine cases out of a hundred a man's actual education is judged by these. Your trouble is that you don't know how much or how little you know. The first thing you need to do is to test yourself to see whether you are on the level of the grammar school graduate, the high school graduate, 'the experienced stenographer, or the college gradu- ate (maximum). Would you write "all right" or "alright" (the second is always absolutely wrong); "between you and me", or "between you and I" (the second is wrong), "each of those boys and girls are working hard", or "each of those boys and girls is working hard" (the first is wrong)? Would you put a comma before "who" in the following: "The man who gave me this book is named Jackson" ? (No comma should be used.) " That big man who is standing just on top of the upper step is the president of the bank"? (There should be a comma before "who" and after "step".) These are five simple cases. If you feel in your own mind that you are instantly sure of the right form, you may suppose you are pretty good on the technic of language. If you are doubtful on all, you may be sure you are very deficient. If you are sure of two or three, but not of the rest, you need to take a training course. You can now get an excellent course in elementary Eng- lish by correspondence (self -correcting) . Few people who set out to study language really start at the bottom, where they ought to start.
ENTHUSIASM
Dirty ore wrought in white-heat enthusiasm can be transformed into shining steel.
Enthusiasm is the electric current which keeps the engine of life going at top speed.
The dull, indifferent mind never evolved a brilliant product.
Half-heartedness never attained whole success.
Enthusiasm is the very propeller of progress.
All great achievements have sprung from the fount of enthusiasm.
Mediocrity is the fruit of indifference.
Masterpieces spring from minds on fire.
"No profit grows where is no pleasure ta'en," wrote the all-wise Shakespeare.
Enthusiasm is the parent of enterprise.
Search and you will find that at the base and birth of every great business organization was an enthusiast, a man consumed with earnestness of purpose, with confidence in his powers, with faith in the worthwhileness of his endeavors.
Standard Oil, the greatest^industrial organization ever evolved by the mind of man, is the product of enthusiasm, of John D. Rockefeller.
The only * * Tob acco King ' ' the world has ever known, James B. Duke, said to himself when an impecunious, unknown youth : " What Rockefeller has done in oil, I will do in tobacco." And enthusiasm was the motive power that propelled him on towards success.
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Henry Ford was and is the quintessence of en- thusiasm— as all the world now knows. In the days of his difficulties and disappointments and discouragements, when he was wrestling with his balky motor engine — and wrestling likewise with poverty — only his inexhaustible enthusiasm saved him from defeat.
Such was the irresistible enthusiasm of Edward H. Harriman that he once declared: "All the op- portunity I want is to be one of fifteen men round a directors' table. I can do the rest." He told a Government prosecutor during a famous investiga- tion: "I would buy up every railroad in the country if you would let me." In twelve years he rose from obscurity to the most powerful railroad throne in the world — and, incidentally, made almost a million dollars a month during the last ten years of his life.
John Hays Hammond, the great mining engineer, told me: "I would sooner cross a desert or climb a mountain to see a new mine than cross the street to see a new play or a new opera any day or night."
It was Roosevelt, you will recall, who, when asked while he was in the White House how he contrived to get through so much work, replied: "I like my job."
What has brought "Billy" Sunday his inordinate fame as a preacher?
What carried Peary to the North Pole?
What sustains Edison during his herculean day- and-night labors?
Are they not all radiant examples of enthusiasm?
The Greeks described enthusiasm as a God within us.
Does not history show that, given enthusiasm, tasks apparently superhuman can be accomplished?
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Enthusiasm is as a dynamo generating power within us.
The enthusiast pushes ahead, needing no "pull." The sluggard lags behind.
Just as surely as indifference and ignorance spell Failure, enthusiasm and enlightenment spell Success.
Why do such progressive and aggressive concerns as the National Cash Register Co., the Ingersoll Watch Co., the Simmons Hardware Co., at great cost hold salesmen's conventions? Chiefly to arouse enthusiasm, to inspire redoubled effort, to kindle fresh ambition.
Employers to-day will not engage for any im- portant post men lacking in enthusiasm.
To be able to muster up enthusiasm you must believe in what you are doing, believe in its legitimacy, believe in its efficacy, believe in its benefit to so- ciety.
George W. Perkins at first turned down J. P. Morgan's offer of a partnership because, as he told me, "I believe in the worth whileness of life in- surance and was more enthusiastic about it than I was about mere moneymaking." And when, a year later, he did finally enter Morgan's firm it was only on the condition that he be allowed to continue his insurance activities.
A little-known Sculptor once said to me: "I would rather create something beautiful than receive a million dollars." He scarcely knew where his next month's rent was coming from — but one of his works has since received the highest honor within the gift of the French Government and will be given a place in the Louvre for all time.
Enthusiasm quickens, illumines, enures.
It can salt and season even unpalatable work.
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The man who loses his enthusiasm gives up the race.
The Elixir of Life is three parts enthusiasm.
Enthusiasm stirs the pulse, brightens the eye and quickens the step.
Indifference is twin brother of laziness.
And the Door of Success is too high up, too hard for the lazy to reach and open.
Only the enthusiast can hope to forge the right key and find the right combination to its lock.
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How You Can Develop Enthusiasm
Enthusiasm is the corner stone of business, particu- larly salesmanship and sales letter or advertisement writing. A sixteen-year-old boy walked into the office of the A. W. Shaw Co. some years ago and wanted a job as correspondent. He was put on at twelve dollars a week. This boy had left school at fourteen and had no education — something us- ually very necessary for a correspondent. But he did have a bubbling enthusiasm, and very soon that enthusiasm in his letters began to pull orders in remarkable quantity. When people read his letters they felt the contagion of enthusiasm so that they wanted to do something, and what could they do so easily as sign an order blank and send it in? Three years later that boy's salary had been advanced to $2,500, and when he threatened to leave to accept a better offer Mr. Shaw promised him a commission of two per cent, on the gross business brought in by his letters. That year the business amounted to just under four hundred thousand dollars and his commissions were of course eight thousand. That is what his enthusiasm earned him, and now he is said to be earning $25,000 a year as sales manager for the Royal Tailors.
How can you develop enthusiasm?
The first thing is to convince yourself that you have something worth being enthusiastic about. If you are in a business you don't believe in, you are a fool to stay. Get into a business you can believe in up to the hilt. Then SEE the immense importance of the service you can render to the public.
The next step is to get rid of any tendency of
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overmodesty or personal timidity. Some people feel as if it is egotistic to be enthusiastic about their own powers or their own goods or their own services — that good goods or good services ought to sell them- selves. But they don't. In America people are judged quite largely by what they think and say about themselves, and even these statements are discounted a little. Consider that the mental hide of the public is a trifle thick, and if you have goods or services they ought to want you are doing them a favor to tickle their tough hide so that they will not miss their chance of benefiting by what you can give them. The fact is, most big business men have had to develop enthusiasm in business by special effort — they have had to "pump up" enthusiasm.
There is no better way of working up enthusiasm than by writing out what you have to say, whether you are writing sales letters, or preparing a sales talk, or even getting ready to make application for an important position.
What have you that you have a right to be en- thusiastic about? Sit down and with pen in hand write out your arguments and proofs, and do your level best to pump enthusiasm into your choice of words, your tone, your whole manner.
Then go carefully over your work to see if it is only "hot air." "Hot air" is not real enthusiasm — it is the imitation of enthusiasm. You can be en- thusiastic only about real things, about things that deserve your enthusiasm.
Try once more, put a reality of conviction into your words, speak them over to yourself in a tone of conviction as well as of enthusiasm. Daily practice of this sort will undoubtedly develop your power of enthusiasm in an astonishing way.
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GOODWILL
Goodwill is an important asset for individual or corporation.
In the balance-sheet of some companies the value of "goodwill" is put at millions of dollars — the F. W. Wool worth Co. appraise this item at $50,000,000.
Makers of many articles — collars, for example — rate their goodwill as worth more than their entire plants.
Goodwill, in a business sense, really means repu- tation.
Goodwill of the right kind, the lasting kind, can- not be won simply by advertising, not even by the spending of millions of dollars in proclaiming the merits of an article or a company.
Goodwill has to be earned by merit, by genuine, honest worth, by giving full value.
A concern which loses the goodwill of its customers is doomed.
Goodwill, once lost, can seldom be regained no matter what efforts may be exerted, for, as the adage has it, " Give a dog a bad name and it sticks."
Goodwill is a more precious asset for the individual than for the corporation.
There are two species of goodwill, the goodwill within our own hearts, the goodwill that we feel towards others and extend to others, and, on the other hand, the goodwill others feel for us.
To gain goodwill, we must exude goodwill.
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We must sow goodwill before we can permanently reap goodwill.
If we harbor hate, if we harbor uncharitableness, if we harbor distrust, we inspire in others similar senti- ments towards us.
The world has been likened to a mirror; it has been likened to an echo; it has been likened to a bank. The world is largely a reflection of our own selves; it gives back the sounds we put into it; it repays, with interest, what we deposit in it.
In other words, we make our own world, we make our own heaven or our own hell. We make the bed on which we must lie.
Goodwill might truly be described as the source of all happiness.
Did not Christ Himself declare that His Mission was to bring "Peace on earth, goodwill toward men"?
Without "goodwill toward men" we cannot truly enjoy life.
Unless those about us have goodwill toward us we cannot feel entirely satisfied, we do not have complete contentment of mind.
Many powerful men, many men of inordinate wealth, many men who have won place and power and riches by means and methods which have stirred up the ill-will of their fellow-beings, have affected indifference to th