THE SALARY YOU DO NOT FIND IN YOUR PAY ENVELOPE
The quality which you put into your work will determine the quality of
your life. The habit of insisting upon the best of which you are
capable, of always demanding of yourself the highest, never accepting
the lowest or second best, no matter how small your remuneration, will
make all the difference to you between failure and success.
"If the laborer gets no more than the wages his employer offers him, he
is cheated; he cheats himself."
A boy or a man who works simply for his salary, and is actuated by no
higher motive, is dishonest, and the one whom he most defrauds is
himself. He is cheating himself, in the quality of his daily work, of
that which all the after years, try as he may, can never give him back.
If I were allowed but one utterance on this subject, so vital to every
young man starting on the journey of life, I would say: "Don't think
too much of the amount of salary your employer gives you at the start.
Think, rather, of the possible salary you can give yourself, in
increasing your skill, in expanding your experience, in enlarging and
ennobling yourself." A man's or a boy's work is material with which to
build character and manhood. It is life's school for practical
training of the faculties, stretching the mind, and strengthening and
developing the intellect, not a mere mill for grinding out a salary of
dollars and cents.
Bismarck was said to have really founded the German Empire when working
for a small salary as secretary to the German legation in Russia; for
in that position he absorbed the secrets of strategy and diplomacy
which later were used so effectively for his country. He worked so
assiduously, so efficiently, that Germany prized his services more than
those of the ambassador himself. If Bismarck had earned only his
salary, he might have remained a perpetual clerk, and Germany a tangle
of petty states.
I have never known an employee to rise rapidly, or even to get beyond
mediocrity, whose pay envelope was his goal, who could not see
infinitely more in his work than what he found in the envelope on
Saturday night. That is necessity; but the larger part of the real pay
of a real man's work is outside of the pay envelope.
One part of this outside salary is the opportunity of the employee to
absorb the secrets of his employer's success, and to learn from his
mistakes, while he is being paid for learning his trade or profession.
The other part, and the best of all, is the opportunity for growth, for
development, for mental expansion; the opportunity to become a larger,
broader, more efficient man.
The opportunity for growth in a disciplinary institution, where the
practical faculties, the executive faculties, are brought into
systematic, vigorous exercise at a definite time and for a definite
number of hours, is an advantage beyond computation. There is no
estimating the value of such training. It is the opportunity, my
employee friend, that will help you to make a large man of yourself,
which, perhaps, you could not possibly do without being employed in
some kind of an institution which has the motive, the machinery, the
patronage to give you the disciplining and training you need to bring
out your strongest qualities. And instead of paying for the
opportunity of unfolding and developing from a green, ignorant boy into
a strong, level-headed, efficient man, you are paid!
The youth who is always haggling over the question of how many dollars
and cents he will sell his services for, little realizes how he is
cheating himself by not looking at the larger salary he can pay himself
in increasing his skill, in expanding his experience, and in making
himself a better, stronger, more useful man.
The few dollars he finds in his pay envelope are to this larger salary
as the chips which fly from the sculptor's chisel are to the angel
which he is trying to call out of the marble.
You can draw from the faithfulness of your work, from the grand spirit
which you bring to it, the high purpose which emanates from you in its
performance, a recompense so munificent that what your employer pays
you will seem insignificant beside it. He pays you in dollars; you pay
yourself in valuable experience, in fine training, in increased
efficiency, in splendid discipline, in self-expression, in character
building.
Then, too, the ideal employer gives those who work for him a great deal
that is not found in the pay envelope. He gives them encouragement,
sympathy. He inspires them with the possibility of doing something
higher, better.
How small and narrow and really blind to his own interests must be the
youth who can weigh a question of salary against all those privileges
he receives in exchange for the meager services he is able to render
his employer.
Do not fear that your employer will not recognize your merit and
advance you as rapidly as you deserve. It he is looking for efficient
employees,--and what employer is not?--it will be to his own interest
to do so,--just as soon as it is profitable. W. Bourke Cockran,
himself a remarkable example of success, says: "The man who brings to
his occupation a loyal desire to do his best is certain to succeed. By
doing the thing at hand surpassingly well, he shows that it would be
profitable to employ him in some higher form of occupation, and, when
there is profit in his promotion, he is pretty sure to secure it."
Do you think that kings of business like Andrew Carnegie, John
Wanamaker, Robert C. Ogden, and other lesser powers in the commercial
world would have attained their present commanding success had they
hesitated and haggled about a dollar or two of salary when they began
their life-work? If they had, they would now probably be working on
comparatively small salaries for other people. It was not salary, but
opportunity, that each wanted,--a chance to show what was in him, to
absorb the secrets of the business. They were satisfied with a dollar
or two apiece a week, hardly enough to live on, while they were
learning the lessons that made them what they are to-day. No, the boys
who rise in the world are not those who, at the start, split hairs
about salaries.
Often we see bright boys who have worked, perhaps for years, on small
salaries, suddenly jumping, as if by magic, into high and responsible
positions. Why? Simply because, while their employers were paying
them but a few dollars a week, they were paying themselves vastly more
in the fine quality of their work, in the enthusiasm, determination,
and high purpose they brought to their tasks, and in increased insight
into business methods.
Colonel Robert C. Clowry, president of the Western Union Telegraph
Company, worked without pay as a messenger boy for months for
experience, which he regarded as worth infinitely more than salary--and
scores of our most successful men have cheerfully done the same thing.
A millionaire merchant of New York told me the story of his rise. "I
walked from my home in New England to New York," he said, "where I
secured a place to sweep out a store for three dollars and a half a
week. At the end of a year, I accepted an offer from the firm to
remain for five years at a salary of seven dollars and a half a week.
Long before this time had expired, however, I had a proposition from
another large concern in New York to act as its foreign representative
at a salary of three thousand dollars a year. I told the manager that
I was then under contract, but that, when my time should be completed,
I should be glad to talk with him in regard to his proposition." When
his contract was nearly up, he was called into the office of the head
of the house, and a new contract with him for a term of years at three
thousand dollars a year was proposed. The young man told his employers
that the manager of another house had offered him that amount a year or
more before, but that he did not accept it because he wouldn't break
his contract. They told him they would think the matter over and see
what they could do for him. Incredible as it may seem, they notified
him, a little later, that they were prepared to enter into a ten-year
contract with him at ten thousand dollars a year, and the contract was
closed. He told me that he and his wife lived on eight dollars a week
in New York, during a large part of this time, and that, by saving and
investments, they laid up $117,000. At the end of his contract, he was
taken into the firm as a partner, and became a millionaire.
Suppose that this boy had listened to his associates, who probably said
to him, many times: "What a fool you are, George, to work here overtime
to do the things which others neglect! Why should you stay here nights
and help pack goods, and all that sort of thing, when it is not
expected of you?" Would he then have risen above them, leaving them in
the ranks of perpetual employees? No, but the boy who walked one
hundred miles to New York to get a job saw in every opportunity a great
occasion, for he could not tell when fate might be taking his measure
for a larger place. The very first time he swept out the store, he
felt within him the ability to become a great merchant, and he
determined that he would be. He felt that the opportunity was the
salary. The chance actually to do with his own hands the thing which
he wanted to learn; to see the way in which princely merchants do
business; to watch their methods; to absorb their processes; to make
their secrets his own,--this was his salary, compared with which the
three dollars and fifty cents looked contemptible. He put himself into
training, always looking out for the main chance. He never allowed
anything of importance to escape his attention. When he was not
working, he was watching others, studying methods, and asking questions
of everybody he came in contact with in the store, so eager was he to
learn how everything was done. He told me that he did not go out of
New York City for twelve years; that he preferred to study the store,
and to absorb every bit of knowledge that he could, for he was bound
some day to be a partner or to have a store of his own.
It is not difficult to see a proprietor in the boy who sweeps the store
or waits on customers--if the qualities that make a proprietor are in
him--by watching him work for a single day. You can tell by the spirit
which he brings to his task whether there is in him the capacity for
growth, expansion, enlargement; an ambition to rise, to be somebody, or
an inclination to shirk, to do as little as possible for the largest
amount of salary.
When you get a job, just think of yourself as actually starting out in
business for yourself, as really working for yourself. Get as much
salary as you can, but remember that that is a very small part of the
consideration. You have actually gotten an opportunity to get right
into the very heart of the great activities of a large concern, to get
close to men who do things; an opportunity to absorb knowledge and
valuable secrets on every hand; an opportunity to drink in, through
your eyes and your ears, knowledge wherever you go in the
establishment, knowledge that will be invaluable to you in the future.
Every hint and every suggestion which you can pick up, every bit of
knowledge you can absorb, you should regard as a part of your future
capital which will be worth more than money capital when you start out
for yourself.
Just make up your mind that you are going to be a sponge in that
institution and absorb every particle of information and knowledge
possible.
Resolve that you will call upon all of your resourcefulness, your
inventiveness, your ingenuity, to devise new and better ways of doing
things; that you will be progressive, up-to-date; that you will enter
into your work with a spirit of enthusiasm and a zest which know no
bounds, and you will be surprised to see how quickly you will attract
the attention of those above you.
This striving for excellence will make you grow. It will call out your
resources, call out the best thing in you. The constant stretching of
the mind over problems which interest you, which are to mean everything
to you in the future, will help you expand into a broader, larger, more
effective man.
If you work with this spirit, you will form a like habit of accuracy,
of close observation; a habit of reading human nature; a habit of
adjusting means to ends; a habit of thoroughness, of system; _a habit
of putting your best into everything you do_, which means the ultimate
attainment of your maximum efficiency. In other words, if you give
your best to your employer, the best possible comes back to you in
skill, training, shrewdness, acumen, and power.
Your employer may pinch you on salary, but he can not close your eyes
and ears; he can not shut off your perceptive faculties; he can not
keep you from absorbing the secrets of his business which may have been
purchased by him at an enormous cost of toil and sacrifice and even of
several failures.
On the other hand, it is impossible for you to rob your employer by
clipping your hours, shirking your work, by carelessness or
indifference, without robbing yourself of infinitely more, of capital
which is worth vastly more than money capital--the chance to make a man
of yourself, the chance to have a clean record behind you instead of a
smirched one.
If you think you are being kept back, if you are working for too small
a salary, if favoritism puts some one into a position above you which
you have justly earned, never mind, no one can rob you of your greatest
reward, the skill, the efficiency, the power you have gained, the
consciousness of doing your level best, of giving the best thing in you
to your employer, all of which advantages you will carry with you to
your next position, whatever it may be.
Don't say to yourself, "I am not paid for doing this extra work; I do
not get enough salary, anyway, and it is perfectly right for me to
shirk when my employer is not in sight or to clip my hours when I can,"
for this means a loss of self-respect. You will never again have the
same confidence in your ability to succeed; you will always be
conscious that you have done a little, mean thing, and no amount of
juggling with yourself can induce that inward monitor which says
"right" to the well-done thing and "wrong" to the botched work, to
alter its verdict in your favor. There is something within you that
you cannot bribe; a divine sense of justice and right that can not be
blindfolded. Nothing will ever compensate you for the loss of faith in
yourself. You may still succeed when others have lost confidence in
you, but never when you have lost confidence in yourself. If you do
not respect yourself; if you do not believe in yourself, your career is
at an end so far as its upward tendency is concerned.
Then again, an employee's reputation is his capital. In the absence of
money capital, his reputation means everything. It not only follows
him around from one employer to another, but it also follows him when
he goes into business for himself, and is always either helping or
hindering him, according to its nature.
Contrast the condition of a young man starting out for himself who has
looked upon his position as a sacred trust, a great opportunity,
backed, buttressed, and supported by a splendid past, an untarnished
reputation--a reputation for being a dead-in-earnest hard worker,
square, loyal, and true to his employer's interests--with that of
another young man of equal ability starting out for himself, who has
done just as little work for his salary as possible, and who has gone
on the principle that the more he could get out of an employer--the
more salary he could get with less effort--the shrewder, smarter man he
was.
The very reputation of the first young man is splendid credit. He is
backed up by the good opinion of everybody that knows him. People are
afraid of the other: they can not trust him. He beat his employer, why
should not he beat others? Everybody knows that he has not been honest
at heart with his employer, not loyal or true. He must work all the
harder to overcome the handicap of a bad reputation, a smirched record.
In other words, he is starting out in life with a heavy handicap,
which, if it does not drag him down to failure, will make his burden
infinitely greater, and success, even a purely commercial success, so
much the harder to attain.
There is nothing like a good, solid, substantial reputation, a clean
record, an untarnished past. It sticks to us through life, and is
always helping us. We find it waiting at the bank when we try to
borrow money, or at the jobber's when we ask for credit. It is always
backing us up and helping us in all sorts of ways.
Young men are sometimes surprised at their rapid advancement. They can
not understand it, because they do not realize the tremendous power of
a clean name, of a good reputation which is backing them.
I know a young man who came to New York, got a position in a publishing
house at fifteen dollars a week, and worked five years before he
received thirty-five dollars a week.
The other employees and his friends called him a fool for staying at
the office after hours and taking work home nights and holidays, for
such a small salary; but he told them that the opportunity was what he
was after, not the salary.
His work attracted the attention of a publisher who offered him sixty
dollars a week, and very soon advanced him to seventy-five; but he
carried with him to the new position the same habits of painstaking,
hard work, never thinking of the salary, but _regarding the opportunity
as everything_.
Employees sometimes think that they get no credit for trying to do more
than they are paid for; but here is an instance of a young man who
attracted the attention of others even outside of the firm he worked
for, just because he was trying to earn a great deal more than he was
paid for doing.
The result was, that in less than two years from the time he was
receiving sixty dollars a week, he went to a third large publishing
house at ten thousand dollars a year, and also with an interest in the
business.
The salary is of very little importance to you in comparison with the
reputation for integrity and efficiency you have left behind you and
the experience you have gained while earning the salary. These are the
great things.
In olden times boys had to give years of their time in order to learn a
trade, and often would pay their employer for the opportunity. English
boys used to think it was a great opportunity to be able to get into a
good concern, with a chance to work without salary for years in order
to learn their business or trade. Now the boy is paid for learning his
trade.
Many employees may not think it is so very bad to clip their hours, to
shirk at every opportunity, to sneak away and hide during business
hours, to loiter when out on business for their employer, to go to
their work in the morning all used up from dissipation; but often when
they try to get another place their reputation has gone before them,
and they are not wanted.
Others excuse themselves for poor work on the ground that their
employer does not appreciate their services and is mean to them. A
youth might just as well excuse himself for his boorish manners and
ungentlemanly conduct on the ground that other people were mean and
ungentlemanly to him.
My young friends, you have nothing to do with your employer's character
or his method of doing things. You may not be able to make him do what
is right, but you can do right yourself. You may not be able to make
him a gentleman, but you can be one yourself; and you can not afford to
ruin yourself and your whole future just because your employer is not
what he ought to be. No matter how mean and stingy he may be, your
opportunity for the time is with him, and it rests with you whether you
will use it or abuse it, whether you will make of it a stepping-stone
or a stumbling-block.
The fact is that your present position, your way of doing your work, is
the key that will unlock the door above you. Slighted work, botched
work, will never make a key to unlock the door to anything but failure
and disgrace.
There is nothing else so valuable to you as an opportunity to build a
name for yourself. Your reputation is the foundation for your future
success, and if you slip rotten hours, and slighted, botched work into
the foundation, your superstructure will topple. The foundation must
be clean, solid, and firm.
The quality which you put into your work will determine the quality of
your life. The habit of insisting upon the best of which you are
capable, of always demanding of yourself the highest, never accepting
the lowest or second best, no matter how small your remuneration, will
make all the difference to you between mediocrity or failure, and
success. If you bring to your work the spirit of an artist instead of
an artisan, a burning zeal, an absorbing enthusiasm, these will take
the drudgery out of it and make it a delight.
Take no chances of marring your reputation by the picayune and unworthy
endeavor "to get square" with a stingy or mean employer. Never mind
what kind of a man he is, resolve that you will approach your task in
the spirit of a master, that whether he is a man of high ideals or not,
you will be one. Remember that you are a sculptor and that every act
is a chisel blow upon life's marble block. You can not afford to
strike false blows which may mar the angel that sleeps in the stone.
Whether it is beautiful or hideous, divine or brutal, the image you
evolve from the block must stand as an expression of yourself, of your
ideals. Those who do not care how they do their work, if they can only
get through with it and get their salary for it, pay very dearly for
their trifling; they cut very sorry figures in life. Regard your work
as a great life school for the broadening, deepening, rounding into
symmetry, harmony, beauty, of your God-given faculties, which are uncut
diamonds sacredly intrusted to you for the polishing and bringing out
of their hidden wealth and beauty. Look upon it as a man-builder, a
character-builder, and not as a mere living-getter. Regard the
living-getting, money-making part of your career as a mere incidental
as compared with the man-making part of it.
The smallest people in the world are those who work for salary alone.
The little money you get in your pay envelope is a pretty small, low
motive for which to work. It may be necessary to secure your bread and
butter, but you have something infinitely higher to satisfy than that;
that is, your sense of the right; the demand in you to do your level
best, to be a man, to do the square thing, the fair thing. These
should speak so loud in you that the mere bread-and-butter question
will be insignificant in comparison.
Many young employees, just because they do not get quite as much salary
as they think they should, deliberately throw away all of the other,
larger, grander remuneration possible for them outside of their pay
envelope, for the sake of "getting square" with their employer. They
deliberately adopt a shirking, do-as-little-as-possible policy, and
instead of getting this larger, more important salary, which they can
pay themselves, they prefer the consequent arrested development, and
become small, narrow, inefficient, rutty men and women, with nothing
large or magnanimous, nothing broad, noble, progressive in their
nature. Their leadership faculties, their initiative, their planning
ability, their ingenuity and resourcefulness, inventiveness, and all
the qualities which make the leader, the large, full, complete man,
remain undeveloped. While trying to "get square" with their employer,
by giving him pinched service, they blight their own growth, strangle
their own prospects, and go through life half men instead of full
men--small, narrow, weak men, instead of the strong, grand, complete
men they might be.
I have known employees actually to work harder in scheming, shirking,
trying to keep from working hard in the performance of their duties,
than they would have worked if they had tried to do their best, and had
given the largest, the most liberal service possible to their
employers. The hardest work in the world is that which is grudgingly
done.
Start out with a tacit understanding with yourself that you will be a
man, that you will express in your work the highest thing in you, the
best thing in you. You can not afford to debase or demoralize yourself
by bringing out your mean side, the lowest and most despicable thing in
you.
Never mind whether your employer appreciates the high quality of your
work or not, or thinks more of you for your conscientiousness, you will
certainly think more of yourself after getting the approval of that
still small voice within you which says "right" to the noble act. The
effort always to do your best will enlarge your capacity for doing
things, and will encourage you to push ahead toward larger triumphs.
Everywhere we see people who are haunted by the ghosts of half-finished
jobs, the dishonest work done away back in their youth. These
covered-up defects are always coming back to humiliate them later, to
trip them up, and to bar their progress. The great failure army is
full of people who have tried to get square with their employers for
the small salary and lack of appreciation.
No one can respect himself or have that sublime faith in himself which
makes for high achievement while he puts half-hearted, mean service
into his work. The man who has not learned to fling his whole soul
into his task, who has not learned the secret of taking the drudgery
out of his work by putting the best of himself into it, has not learned
the first principles of success or happiness. Let other people do the
poor jobs, the botched work, if they will. Keep your standard up. It
is a lofty ideal that redeems the life from the curse of commonness and
imparts a touch of nobility to the personality.
No matter how small your salary, or how unappreciative your employer,
bring the entire man to your task; be all there; fling your life into
it with all the energy and enthusiasm you can muster. _Poor work
injures your employer a little, but it may ruin you_. Be proud of your
work and go to it every morning superbly equipped; go to it in the
spirit of a master, of a conqueror. Determine to do your level best
and never to demoralize yourself by doing your second best.
Conduct yourself in such a way that you can always look yourself in the
face without wincing; then you will have a courage born of conviction,
of personal nobility and integrity which have never been tarnished.
What your employer thinks of you, what the world thinks of you, is not
half as important as what you think of yourself. Others are with you
comparatively little through life. _You have to live with yourself day
and night through your whole existence, and you can not afford to tie
that divine thing in you to a scoundrel_.