When you cut a melon, your friends will come with eager mouths and sit
under your shade tree and help you eat it. Few of these friends would
respond to your call for help when you were working in the hot sun
raising that melon.
Many people accept the dividends and benefits of friendship but give
you a cold shoulder when called upon for assessments of friendship.
The world is full of young men whose objective is snaps. They are
looking all the time for what they can get and not what they can give.
To forge ahead, you must give value received. You can't draw out all
the time.
The employe must do what he is paid to do and "then some," for it is
this "then some" or plus that gets your salary raised.
The employer and employe must realize that each must make profit. It is
because there are so many ingrates and so many four flushers that so
few succeed.
This book will be welcomed by those who are square, ambitious and
patient. It is not theory. It is not preaching. These chapters will be
old friends to you, and you may read a few minutes or a few hours. You
may read and re-read as often as you wish, for you will always find
some new truth impressed on you every time you read.
Keep this book, carry it with you, and you will be benefitted.
Worry and fear will fade and peace and courage will grow within you the
more you study these pages.
The writer has "been at it" for 32 years. He has had successes,
failures, joys, sorrows, and experienced the passions, the problems,
the difficulties you have experienced.
Since the age of ten years he has been upon his own resources and the
32 years since then have been years of study, working and playing, all
blended into a happy life.
The jolts, set backs, sorrows, worries, fears and discouragements are
the things which made him strong. They were experiences.
Smooth sailing doesn't bring out the stuff one is made of. It takes
shadows to make sunlight appreciated.
It takes reverses to make success. It takes hard knocks to polish you.
This is a book of experiences, not one of theories.
There is no attempt to make this a literary effort. All the writer
hopes for or cares to do is to truthfully state facts and experiences
in plain language. Study the thought rather than the expression.
It is Sense the writer wants to express rather than nonsense.
The writer is happy to say that the previous editions sold rapidly and
his friends not only read, but pass the word along.
The way to get happiness is to make others happy and the present of one
of these books to a friend or employe is a quick way to get happiness.
Let us go along together and consider some of the problems which we all
have to face in our business as well as our social life. A volume could
be written on each chapter. But volumes are tiresome and herein you
will find net values which are the result of boiling down.
So now we have the groundwork of this book. We understand each other.
Simply take these truths for their evident worth. You won't agree with
the writer in all things, of course not. If, however, you get one truth
that will help you, then you have been repaid for reading this book and
the writer has been repaid for writing it.
Learn to Say No.
Look over the history of the thousands who have failed in business, and
you will find in nearly every instance the failure was due to an
inability to say No.
People come to us under various guises and ask us to do things which in
our better judgment we had rather not do, and too many have not the
backbone to say No.
We are led to invest in mining stocks and to embark in precarious
enterprises because we cannot say No.
We endorse notes and go security for our friends, not because we want
to but because we cannot say No.
There is a class of "good fellows" who are after us to join them in
physical pleasures, the foregoing of which would be better for us
physically, financially and mentally. Too many join them because they
cannot say No.
It is rarely a man goes off deliberately and gets drunk. The lone drunk
is usually the result of sorrow, sudden financial blow or a hard jolt
of some sort.
The man who gets drunk generally does so because he cannot say No when
bibulous friends press him to take a drink.
The ability to say No, to refrain from going with the crowd, to decline
to go down stream is, more than any other one thing in this life, the
mark of a strong character.
The one who can say No is going to succeed. Temporarily he may feel
ashamed; he may find it hard to withstand the jibes and jeers and
criticism of his friends for refusing to join them in things he should
not do.
Our old friend--the law of compensation--comes in here, for in
proportion as a man has the ability to say No, who has the courage of
his convictions, whose duty is to his body and his family before the
temptations that surround him, so in proportion as there are few such
individuals these individuals stand out as marked successes.
The manager of one of the biggest breweries in the United States has
not tasted liquor of any kind in the last twenty years. Surely this man
shows his courage, for his action in face of his occupation is a
supreme test of backbone and ability to say No.
The embezzler does not start out to do wrong. Some friends want to
borrow money or someone needs financial aid temporarily, and, either at
the request of friends or because the individual has something he
wishes to purchase and has not the patience to wait, he borrows from
the firm by means of "the ticket in the drawer" plan. He repeats the
operation frequently until his conscience is dulled, and he gets the
habit. Some day he wakes up to find he has several tickets in the
drawer, and resorts to extreme measures, trying to beat the races, or
to win money by gambling on stocks or grain.
One day he finds he is in a dickens of a fix. He sees no way out of it.
He takes more money and skips out, only to be caught later on and made
to suffer, and all this because he could not say No to temptation.
Learn to say No. Set your jaws firmly and say No. The friends who go
back on you and criticize you for saying No to the things that are
hurtful to you are unworthy of the name of friends, and you can very
well get along without them.
Friends who ask you to do the things you should not do are the very
ones who are of no service to you in time of need.
The individual who says No regardless of the flings and taunts that are
cast at him is the one who eventually makes a success.
Character counts above all things in the business world. The banker
extends credit on character oftener than we imagine. The banker knows
how to say No.
A man's credit and character are most important factors in business,
and many a man without security has attained magnificent success
through untiring energy, ability, character and courage enough to say
No.
In proportion as you grow strong and unhesitating in saying No, the
temptations and opportunities to say Yes will lessen in number.
Exercise your back bone and your jaw bone, so you can say No and stick
to it.