past is part of my experience, and therefore of me. I have formed
certain conclusions from what I have observed, but the data on which I
have formed them are constantly changing. The moment that I cease to be
able to accept and pass into my own experience new factors which my past
would reject as unpleasant or untrue I have become stereotyped in
prejudice and the truth of actuality is no longer in me, and when touch
with the world is lost the only alternative is retirement or disaster."
The more quickly youth breaks away from the prejudices of its
surroundings, the more rapid will be its success. The harder that age
fights against prepossessions, born of the past, which gather round to
obstruct the free operation of its mind, the longer will be the period
of a happy, successful, and active life.
Prejudice is a mixture of pride and egotism, and no prejudiced man,
therefore, will be happy.
XIV
CALM
The last two essays have dealt with the more depressing sides of
practical life--the sudden tempest which sweeps down on the business
man, or the long period of depression which is the necessary prelude to
the times in which optimism is justified. But it is on the note of
optimism, and not of pessimism, that I would conclude, and after the
storm comes the calm. What is calm to the man of experience in affairs?
It is the end to which turbulent and ambitious youth should devote
itself in order that it may attain to happiness in that period of
middle-age which still gives to assured success its real flavour. Youth
is the time of hope; old age is the time for looking back on the
pleasures and achievements of the past--when success or failure may seem
matters of comparative unimportance. Successful middle-age stands
between the two. Its calm is not the result either of senility or
failure. It represents that solid success which enables a man to
adventure into fresh spheres without any perturbation. New fields call
to him--Art, or Letters, or Public Service. Success is already his, and
it will be his own fault if he does not achieve happiness as well.
Successful middle-age appears to me to be the ideal of practical men. I
have tried to indicate the method by which it can be attained by any
young man who is sufficiently resolute in his purpose. Finance,
Commerce, and Industry are, under modern conditions, spheres open to the
talent of any individual. The lack of education in the formal sense is
no bar to advancement. Every young man has his chance. But will he
practise industry, economy, and moderation, avoid arrogance and panic,
and know how to face depression with a stout heart? Even if he is a
genius, will he know how not to soar with duly restrained wings?
The secret of power is the method by which the fire of youth is
translated into the knowledge of experience. In these essays I have
suggested a short cut to that knowledge. I once had youth, and now I
have experience, and I believe that youth can do anything if its desire
for success is sufficiently strong to curb all other desires. I also
believe that a few words of experience can teach youth how to avoid the
pitfalls of finance which wait for the most audacious spirits. I write
out of the conviction of my own experience.
But, above all, stands the attainment of happiness as the final form of
struggle. Happiness can only be attained as the result of a prolonged
effort. It is the result of material surroundings and yet a state of the
inner mind. It is, therefore, in some form or another at once the
consequence of achievement and a sense of calm. The flavour is
achievement, but the fruit should be the assured sense of happiness.
"One or another
In money or guns may surpass his brother.
But whoever shall know,
As the long days go.
That to live is happy, has found his heaven."
It is in ignoring this doctrine of the poet that so many men go wrong.
They practise the doctrines of success: they attain it, and then they
lose happiness because they cannot stop. The flower is brilliant, but
the fruit has a sour taste. The final crown in the career of success is
to know when to retire.
"Call no man happy," says the ancient sage, "until he is dead," drawing
his moral from the cruel death of a great King. I would say, call no man
successful until he has left business with enough money to live the kind
of life that pleases him. The man who holds on beyond this limit is
laying up trouble for himself and disappointment for others.
Success in the financial world is the prerogative of young men. A man
who has not succeeded in the field before middle-age comes upon him,
will never succeed in the fundamental sense of the term. An honourable
and prosperous career may, indeed, lie before him, but he will never
reach the heights. He will just go on from year to year, making rather
more or rather less money, by a toil to which only death or old age will
put a term. And I have not written this book for the middle-aged, but
for the young. To them my advice would be, "Succeed young, and retire
as young as you can."
The fate of the successful who hold on long after they have amassed a
great, or at least an adequate, fortune, is written broad across the
face of financial history. The young man who has arrived has formed the
habit and acquired the technique of business. The habit has become part
of his being. How hard it is to give it up! His technique has become
almost universally successful. If he has made £50,000 by it, why not go
on and make half a million; if he has made a million, why not go on and
make three? All that you have to do, says the subtle tempter, is to
reproduce the process of success indefinitely. The riches and the powers
of the world are to be had in increasing abundance by the mere exercise
of qualities which, though they have been painfully acquired, have now
become the very habit of pleasure. How dull life would seem if the
process of making money was abandoned; how impossible for a man of ripe
experience to fail where the mere stripling had succeeded? The
temptation is subtle, but the logic is wrong. Success is not a process
which can reproduce itself indefinitely in the same field. The dominant
mind loses its elasticity: it fails to appreciate real values under
changed conditions. Victory has become to it not so much a struggle as a
habit. Then follows the decline. The judgment begins to waver or go
astray out of a kind of self-worship, which makes the satisfaction of
self, and not the realisation of what is possible, the dominant object
in every transaction. There will be plenty of money to back this
delusion for a time, and plenty of flatterers and sycophants to play up
to and encourage the delusion. The history of Napoleon has not been
written in vain. Here we see a first-class intellect going through this
process of mental corruption, which leads from overwhelming success in
early youth, to absolute disaster in middle-age. The only hope for the
Napoleon of Finance is to retire before his delusions overtake him.
But what is the man who retires early from business to do? Some form of
activity must fill the void. The answer to the question is to be found
in a change of occupation. To some, recreation, and the pursuit of some
art or science or study may bring satisfaction, but these will be the
exceptions. Some kind of public service will beckon to the majority. And
it is natural that this should be the case. Politics, journalism, the
management of Commissions or charitable organisations, all require much
the same kind of aptitudes and draw on the same kind of experiences
which are acquired by the successful man of affairs. The difference is
that they are not so arduous, because they are rarely a matter of life
and death to any man--and certainly can never be so to a man with an
assured income.
On the other hand, from the point of view of society, it is a great
advantage to a nation that it should have at its disposal the services
of men of this kind of capacity and experience. What public life needs
above all things is the presence in it of men who have a knowledge of
reality. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the landowning
classes supplied this kind of direction to the State as the fruit of
their leisure, and, despite some narrowness and selfishness, they
undoubtedly did their work well. But they were disappearing as a class
before the war, and the war has practically destroyed them. Nor are the
world-wide industrial, commercial, and economic problems of the
twentieth century particularly suitable to their form of intellect. The
policy of Great Britain of to-day ought to be founded on a knowledge
both of markets and production. It is here that the retired man of
affairs can help. Simply to go on making money after all personal need
for it has passed is, therefore, a form of selfishness, and, in
consequence, will not bring happiness, and in the ultimate calculation
that life can hardly be called successful which is not happy.
My final message is one of hope to youth. Dare all, yet keep a sense of
proportion. Deny yourself all, and yet do not be a prig. Hope all,
without arrogance, and you will achieve all without losing the capacity
for moderation. Then the Temple of Success will assuredly be open to
you, and you will pass from it into the inner shrine of happiness.
_Printed by Hazell, Watson & Viney, Ld., London and Aylesbury._
End of Project Gutenberg's Success (Second Edition), by Max Aitken Beaverbrook