Being Nice Makes Good Business Sense

Several years ago I was getting ready to interview with a law firm in New York. It was my first interview ever as a law student and I was pretty nervous. I was trying to get on an elevator as the door was closing and I saw a woman rushing towards it. I reached quickly for the button to open the elevator and was able to get the door to re-open at the last second. The woman got on and told me which floor to push, and I did this for her as well. The woman was very heavy and was not particularly well-dressed. We were going to a very high floor and there were several stops along the way.

At one of the stops, I started looking over my hair because I could see my reflection in the glass in the elevator. I looked up and saw the woman looking directly at me, and she smirked as if to say I looked ridiculous primping in the elevator.

At that point in my life I lifted weights frequently and spent a lot of time at the gym. I taught myself it was important to stick up for myself at all costs. Normally, what I would have done was turn around and tell the woman to mind her own business. On that occasion, however, my nervousness must have gotten the best of me. I turned around and looked directly at the woman.

”Do I look ok? I am going to an interview and I am a little nervous. I want to do a good job.”

The woman looked absolutely stunned. The way she looked at me had invited me to strike out and attack. Instead, I had done the opposite.

”Yes, you do. Just pull your tie up a little. I am sure you’ll do fine.”

This woman ended up being in charge of the hiring committee at the law firm. She was reputed to be extremely difficult as an interviewer and did not like anyone. In my interview, she was very nice to me. I ended up getting the job at the firm and working in this same law firm over the summer. The woman was nice to me during the summer as well and stood up for me. In fact, she was one of the nicest people in the law firm I can remember.

There is really something to being nice. When you are nice to people, you invite them to be nice in return. However, most often we are less interested in being nice than we are in being thought of as important, powerful, or right.

Given the incredible number of experiences I have had over and over again in my life, I am confident there are various forms of energy we simply do not understand. I firmly believe when you send out negative energy, it comes right back to you. I also believe when you send out positive energy, it comes back to you as well.

One of my favorite books of all time is The Richest Man in Babylon. One of the rules in this book is that when you make money you are supposed to give away 10 percent of it to charity or some other good cause. The idea is when you give away 10 percent of your income, you will realize how much abundance there is and you will become less attached to money.

While the book makes this point, and I believe there is truth to it, there is another important point about giving away money as well. When you help and give to others you create positive energy which is directed back at you. There is nothing more important than having positive energy directed back at you. The more positive energy you have directed at you, the better your life and everything in it is going to be.

The word ”appreciation” is, to me, one of the more interesting words in the English language. What appreciation means essentially is positive energy directed towards something. For example, when a stock appreciates it means people are excited about it and its value rises. When you are appreciated it means people like you and the value you bring them. Anything that appreciates takes on more value than it originally had. Things typically take on more value when others are excited about them for one reason or another.

You want to be appreciated. You need to be appreciated. Being appreciated means others are seeing and recognizing your value. When people see your value, you get more opportunities and your career and your life can only improve.

Think about things you appreciate in your life and the people who appreciate you. You appreciate these people and things because of how they make you feel. When we are babies, the only things we think about are our needs and taking care of those needs, specifically our need for food and comfort. We do not yet have the capacity to appreciate the needs of others. As we grow older we learn how our actions affect others positively or negatively. We learn we can make others happy or sad. We begin to learn how our ability to make others happy has an effect on our own happiness.

The world exists as exchanges of energy. If negative energy goes out then negative energy comes back. If someone robs a liquor store, the police come after the person and incarcerate him or her. If someone makes a large financial donation to a good cause, the newspapers write about this person’s generosity for all to know. There is a constant interplay between positive and negative energy in the world, and you want to be on the receiving end of positive energy. This is really the only decent place to be. When positive energy comes to us, we feel better and the world is a better place to us. This simple rule is so easy to follow.

We exist in a consumer-driven society where so many of our desires are shaped by things outside of us. For example, many people evaluate their happiness based on their material possessions. People strive to earn the money to purchase the best house and car they can. They want nice furniture and watches. They want to travel to the best places. Many people evaluate their own self worth based on their ability to accumulate these possessions. This is the way of the Western world. What this sort of consumer culture does, however, is focus almost exclusively on the act of accumulating various things. It does not emphasize the act of putting out positive energy and instead bases everything on taking in energy. This constant taking in often violates laws of the universe which demand equal exchanges between opposite forms of energy. Instead of being focused on taking things in, we need to be focused on putting out positive energy.

This brings me back to the act of being nice. Several years ago, I was listening to Deepak Chopra speak and he was making a similar point. He said whenever he visits someone’s home, he always brings them a flower. In bringing people a flower, he is trying to set up a dynamic of being nice and sending out positive energy. Sending out positive energy is something that comes back to you every single time.

There is a best selling career book called Nice Girls Don’t Get the Corner Office. The message of this book is if you worry about offending others, are forthright when explaining information, and make sure your decisions are popular, you will never get ahead. The idea behind the book is that in being nice to others you will not be successful. I believe the opposite is true. When you are nice to others you send out the sort of energy which gets you ahead.

Some years ago I was at a seminar and met a woman who had been a partner at a large and important law firm, but had quit after a year. She was now a real estate agent and I got the sense she was struggling a little. She told me about how she had been working with the law firm and did not become partner until she demanded it and turned mean. She told me people had walked all over her in her job until she became mean. When I asked her to give me some examples, she did not have any. She simply said they did not make her partner.

I think the woman ended up getting fired from her job within a year of making partner. She had worked for the firm for almost 10 years, and within a year of deciding the best thing for her to do was to become ”a bitch,” she had lost her job. Being mean simply does not work.

I have seen this happen in my own life and with people who have worked for me as well. Recently, I had someone working for me who was extremely competent in all respects. The person was working very close with me and I was extremely impressed. For some reason, however, this person could not get along with others outside my office. One day, she called and screamed at a co-worker for no apparent reason. She also refused to follow instructions. Somehow, she’d come to believe it was good to be mean to others, to attack others savagely, and to not follow orders. The person was quickly let go despite her competence in other areas.

Who knows how this person rationalized losing her job to herself? If she had just been nice to others she would still be happily employed. Instead, this person ended up losing her job and poisoning the people around her who were working for her in the process. When someone sends out negative energy, it does a lot of damage.

You need to be nice to others. This is the most important thing you can do in your job. Let the negative energy of others flow right through you and be nice in response. The way to get ahead is to be liked, not feared and hated.

We want to work with people who are nice. Companies need people who are nice. It is important to be nice. I want to be very clear that by being nice I am not talking about being a doormat. When you are nice and place the needs of others on the same level as your own, you are simply being smart. Being nice is the smartest thing you can possibly do in your career.

Consistency is More Important than Brilliance

There once was a speedy hare who bragged about how fast he could run. Tired of hearing him boast, Slow and Steady, the tortoise, challenged him to a race. All the animals in the forest gathered to watch. Speedy ran down the road for a while and then paused to rest. He looked back at Slow and Steady and cried out, ”How do you expect to win this race when you are walking along at your slow, slow pace?”

Speedy stretched himself out alongside the road and fell asleep, thinking that there was plenty of time to relax.

Slow and Steady walked and walked. He never, ever stopped until he came to the finish line.

The animals who were watching cheered so loudly for the tortoise that they woke up Speedy.

Speedy stretched and yawned and began to run again, but it was too late because the tortoise had crossed the finish line.

After that, Speedy always reminded himself, ”Don’t brag about your lightning pace, for Slow and Steady won the race!”

-From Aesop’s Fables

A few years ago I was moving from one house to another. I drove to the local U-Haul and picked up a van.

I am not sure how it is in other cities, but around Los Angeles there are usually about 25 guys who stand in front of U-Hauls on the street waiting to help people move. It’s the same with Home Depot and other stores. I have not seen this in other parts of the world, like Michigan, where I am from. Most of the people who stand in front of the stores are from Mexico. I have never seen an American. To me this says a lot about the work ethic of people from other countries. It seems they are the only ones doing this work. I wonder what makes Americans think they are above doing this sort of work? It makes me a little angry.

If I had grown up in California I’ll bet I would have been the only American standing in front of Home Depots and U-Hauls happily offering to help people paint, do yard work, or move furniture. You need to work to get ahead! You need to find opportunities where others see obstacles. This is what I want for you.

I gathered three guys to help me. It was the day before Christmas. One of the guys helping me was from an Eastern European country and the other two were both from Mexico. After years of picking people up from Home Depots and other places to do work, this was the first time I’d ever picked up one who was not of Hispanic origin. In fact, it was the first time I ever remember seeing one. The Eastern European guy was acting like a maniac. He was being obsessive about how the furniture was covered and moved. He was moving as fast as possible without damaging things, herding the men he was working with from room to room, and barking orders, although I had not asked him to do so. A few times he pulled me aside and told me the other guys were not as hard working as he was and he was ”looking out for me.”

On one occasion, the man started screaming at the men in the truck while they were moving something because they were about to scratch something. I think this was more of a show, however. The men continued what they were doing and started laughing at him.

”He’s crazy!” one of the men said to me. That man’s name was Hillario. He was working with his friend David, who kept his head down and walked by.

At the end of the day, I ended up paying the Eastern European guy a lot more money than either David or Hillario. Mind you, the Eastern European guy argued with me that he deserved more because he had done such a great job. I think I paid him probably close to $40 an hour for the work he had done. This was way too much and I might have made a serious mistake. I have always had a place in my heart for people who make their living doing honest work on the street and I wanted to help him. I respected his work ethic and how hard he had worked. Despite paying him so much money, I did not feel good at the end of the day because he actually made me feel I should have paid him more.

That evening I had a wonderful time. My wife and I had just started dating at the time and she brought over a beautiful plant for the new house. We went out for a nice dinner in the Ritz Carleton and listened to music. It was only our third or fourth date and it was one of the more memorable and fun nights I had ever had. We drank a lot of champagne and I remember we danced to an orchestra. We got home quite late and fell asleep on the couch that had been set up in one of the rooms of the house.

The next morning, Christmas morning, my doorbell rang at around 7:15 a.m. I looked outside and, incredibly, there was the Eastern European man. He was wearing a suit. I could not possibly imagine what was wrong.

I opened the door and let him in.

”Hello,” he said. ”I hope you are enjoying your new home. It must be nice to have your own home like you do. Since I did such a good job yesterday, I would like to ask you to pay me some more money today since it is Christmas. I would very much appreciate your generosity.”

I was very disappointed. The man was not offering to do more work. He was not offering anything except a dose of guilt and a request for more money. His attitude got my day off to a poor start. I was not impressed with his request for more money and it made me feel badly. I had felt very good about helping him the day before.

There is an interesting moral to this story, however. Two of the guys I picked up that day over six years ago are still working for me and my companies today. Along the way one of them got a green card. This made it possible for me to pay him legally to work for one of my companies. The other guy has helped me out with small tasks such as raking leaves and so forth from time to time. I also got them jobs with a contractor I know. Neither of these guys have particularly super work ethics, but they are steady workers and they do what they say they are going to do. This is the most important thing. They do predictable work and do not play any games. They have also stayed employed in one form or another for six years.

I went by the U-Haul several times over the years and saw the Eastern European man standing on the street waiting for work. He was always standing apart from the other workers, or even across the street, because the other workers did not want to stand next to him. I am sure this made it much harder for him to get work. In addition, I also noticed that late in the afternoon he was often there after the other workers had been picked up. He was a pariah of sorts.

While this example involves day laborers, it is no different at all for the highest paid workers in other industries and the same sort of logic applies. Just being really good at something is not enough. You also need to be consistent. Being consistent is one of the most important aspects of your work ethic. The people who are consistent are the ones who have the best careers in the long run. Being consistent is something that is important not just for you but also for those around you.

Despite speaking good English, despite dressing well, despite being the best worker, I am confident the Eastern European man probably worked less and ultimately earned less money than most of the other men who got work from the street in front of the U-Haul.

In my younger days there was a family that lived by my house that never had any money. They often came over and my mother would loan the mother money for food and to buy basic necessities (when she had the money). The father of this family was a plumber, and in the 1970s in Detroit most plumbers did very well. The father never seemed to be able to hold on to a job very long. He also had a difficult time with unions. He simply refused to join one. He thought he was smarter than all the other plumbers. Despite this guy’s brilliance, his family never had the money to eat. If he could have just held a job and done things in a consistent manner, everything would have been fine.

So many people are under the misconception the most important thing in their job is being brilliant and outstanding, but they’re really missing the point. Being consistently good at something, and doing the job day after day is much more important.

There is a certain type of person I have seen in the world of work over and over again. This person comes to the interview unbelievably enthusiastic about work and being part of the company. He shows up for work and his work product is much better than that of others around him. He may even get a quick raise or two. People around him start to notice and the level of insight he puts into his job is incredible.

-If the person is in sales he is the highest performing salesperson

-If the person does a manual job he works harder and faster than others

-If the person is in writing he writes more material that is more insightful than others

In whatever this person is involved, he puts an incredible level of insight into it and does the very best he can with it.

However, the problem I’ve seen countless times is that when someone performs at such a high level in the beginning, it almost always leads to troubling and often bizarre behavior later.

I once worked with a man who started out being extremely enthusiastic. Then he stopped working every day and made strange excuses for missing work. Then the man started disappearing for hours at a time during the day.

The better and more extreme someone’s performance is, the less likely they are to maintain it over time. Things like always showing up for work, always doing the job, cooperating with peers, and more are important characteristics. These are the people who contribute to companies and allow them to continue over time. These are the people companies want on their team. These are the sorts of people you need to emulate, who hold on to their jobs and continue their long and prosperous careers.

A one-shot performance is in no one’s best interest. Companies and organizations need people who are consistent and are consistently ”good enough.”

I’ve spent most of my career in the legal recruiting field. I have seen something occur in legal recruiting so many times it is incredible. Because it’s been quite destructive for our companies and something I have learned to recognize, I would like to share this pattern with you.

When we are looking for legal recruiters, it is often important the person have an outstanding educational pedigree. For that reason, we love people who went to places like Harvard Law School or Yale Law School and who have worked at the very best American law firms. People with experience working for the best American law firms are also typically the most motivated people. Most of the resumes we see from people who have these outstanding backgrounds involve short, one- to two-year stints working in a law firm. Several years ago I would never have questioned this, but now I do.

When someone with this sort of background starts at our recruiting firm, one of the first things we notice is how the person will work very hard at first. However, they often ignore the rules others in the organization are following. Instead, the person decides they can start making up their own rules. In one case I remember one of our Harvard Law School recruiters deciding that instead of following the rules she was going to spend all of her energy concentrating on moving a large group of attorneys over to another firm in one big swoop. She worked for months on this and our company loaned her tens of thousands of dollars. When this did not work out she did not earn any income. Instead of following the rules, she was trying to be brilliant.

Another recruiter (also from Harvard Law School) believed she did not have to work the same hours as other recruiters as long as she pulled a few nights a week. Though this might have worked to get her very good grades, it missed the boat because it didn’t allow her to interact with people looking for jobs during the day.

Over and over again, I have seen people who feel like they do not need to play by the rules in the companies where they work, and, instead, can do whatever they choose. They feel like they can play by their own rules and that a single performance trumps consistency. Consistency is the most important thing. Sustained effort over time is what really matters.

One of the best metaphors for consistency is the Grand Canyon. The Grand Canyon has stood for millions of years and it started out as just a stream. The power of this stream cut through the rock and over millions of years has created a giant swath through the earth. This is the power of consistency. Consistency over time will change the world.

The other day I was interviewing a very nice girl for a position unrelated to practicing law. Her resume was filled with nothing but one public interest job after another. It looked to me like her entire life had been devoted to helping other people. She was also an attorney and had the sort of pedigree I felt meant she could be a very highly paid attorney. In interviewing her, though, I quickly realized the last thing she was interested in doing was making money. Deep down she really wanted to help people.

When I asked her why she wanted to help people she recounted how her father had never held a job for very long and because of this the family had grown up quite poor. She said growing up poor made her realize how many people suffer in the world. She told me she wanted to help the people who were suffering. The more I thought about this, the more I realized she would not have suffered like this had her father simply been able to be consistent. Being consistent is the most important thing in a job.

The benefit of consistency is that it constantly involves the application of measured pressure to a task. Over time, like with the Grand Canyon, measured pressure can break down barriers and make everything go forward. You need to consistently apply measured pressure in your work.

I am not trying to be critical of brilliance and hard work. The point I am trying to make, however, is that life responds better to work that is done in a consistent manner over time. Concentrate your efforts on what you can accomplish over time. This is the path to success. Nothing happens overnight.

Try as Hard as You Can

Many people want and demand a lot out of life. They want the happiest family, the best material goods and vacations, the best homes, and the best cars. They demand the best in everything. They also want the best jobs and the most advancement. Often, these same people feel very angry and upset if life does not provide them the things they want.

A lot of people are very upset with the world. They are angry about jobs they have lost. They are angry about advancements and breaks they have not received. In fact, these people believe the world owes them a lot. Most often, when people are angrily telling you how much the world owes them they are sitting around not doing much of anything. They may be talking to someone else in a bar. They may be talking on their cell phone during the day when they are supposed to be working. There are many who believe they are owed something.

I want to tell you one of the more inspiring stories I’ve heard. Several years ago I was practicing law, and a man in the office next to me worked extremely hard. He had a history of high achievement. He’d been the valedictorian at the University of Iowa Law School. He’d come over to this firm from another law firm. He wanted to be a partner. Most law firms require you work at the firm a certain number of years before they will make you a partner, and this law firm was no different. I believe at that time the firm had a charter which said people needed to work there for three full years before they could be considered for a partnership position.

At the end of this man’s second year, after billing over 3,000 hours each year, he was not made partner. The reaction of most attorneys would have been to accept the fact they are not being made partner due to the fact the charter required them to work there for three years. This man was different, however. He was someone who was interested in always trying his hardest, and sometimes trying your hardest means ignoring the rules of how things are working around you.

In the month of January, after not making partner, this man billed over 400 hours. Since there are only 720 hours in the average month, this essentially meant he was working very long days seven days a week and sleeping very little.

He did the same thing in February.

He did the same thing again in March.

After seeing the incredible amount of hours he had been working, in early April the firm decided to call a special meeting, amend their charter, and make him a partner. The firm simply felt it had no choice. They had to make him partner or else the man might have ended up killing himself from too much work. This is an example of really trying your hardest. This is the sort of reaction to a perceived setback very few attorneys would ever have. This man was different, however, and is an example of someone who simply did not give up.

The only excuse for not having the job you want, the life you want, and everything you want out of life is you did your best and did not get it. I have a secret for you, however, and I think it is something you may have failed to realize your entire life: you have never done your best with anything you have attempted. You have never really given 100 percent at anything. Imagine what is going to happen for you when you start trying to give 100 percent. I am very excited to see what happens when you start trying to hit 100 percent.

When you think about the example of this attorney it may not seem that significant until you really think it through. In order to work this hard you need to push your body beyond exhaustion. You need to push your mind well beyond exhaustion. You need to get other attorneys to give you the work that will allow you to bill this much. You need to give everything you can even when the rules appear to be against you. You need to do everything in your power to achieve what you want to do.

Have you ever run a marathon? I have not and wish I had. A marathon is something that teaches people to give their all. The distance they have to run is taxing on their bodies. They need to use their minds to overcome the resistance in their bodies. They need to keep pushing even when they feel they cannot go on.

You can likely point to many instances in your life where you may have come close to giving 100 percent and believe you made a major effort. Perhaps this was trying to get a job, working for a promotion, or related to a personal matter. My belief is you never really gave the full 100 percent, though. In fact, you probably have never given 100 percent at anything you have ever done.

I would like to propose to you a way of life and a way of being in the world where you start giving close to 100 percent and doing your best in every possible thing you can. This means in every single thing you do in the future you need to make a major effort and do your best to succeed. Before I do that, though, I would like to tell you another quick story.

When I played football in high school, I always noticed my grades were better during the season. When you think about this, it does not make a lot of sense. After all, I would be out practicing for several hours a day and even traveling sometimes to play. I was not alone in this. Most football players get better grades during the football season. That’s because when they do sit down to study they are more careful with their time and know it is important to be very focused during this time. Another reason for this, I think, is that they are in better shape. Their minds work better because their bodies are in better shape. They are “at their best,” so to speak.

There is a lot you can do in terms of trying your best. You can discipline your mind to enable you to push yourself harder. You can read and research about how to do better at what you are doing. You can practice. You can pray. You can interview and learn from people who are the best at what you are doing. You can always push yourself to do better in everything that you do.

One of the disciplines I practice is Kundalini yoga. I enjoy this form of yoga not just because it is relaxing but because, at its highest level, what it does through various actions is force your mind and your body to their absolute limits. When you push your mind, you also push your body, and when you go through the various exercises you become a completely different person. You go past what you thought was possible. A Kundalini exercise, for example, may involve holding your arms outstretched, keeping them straight, and flapping them each up and down six inches. An exercise like this can be easily done for a minute or so, but when you keep doing it for, say, seven minutes, it becomes next to impossible. You need to condition your mind to give it your all. Your arms, and your shoulders start hurting tremendously. At some point, however, the pain stops. When you break through the pain you are able to live your life on the other side.

Kundalini yoga is very effective because it can teach people how to give life their all.

Trying your hardest is about coming up against your limits, pushing through, and doing this time and again. You need to continually push through every possible limit you have. If you are going to do the best you can in anything, you need to use your mind and your body. You need to learn from others. You need to become fixated on doing everything possible to succeed. This is how you achieve your dreams and this is how you live the life you want. The people who succeed in life and reach their full potential are the people who push all the way through their limits.

In the book Think and Grow Rich, there is a very inspiring story:

One of the most common causes of failure is the habit of quitting when one is overtaken by temporary defeat. Every person is guilty of this mistake at one time or another. An uncle of R. U. Darby caught the “gold fever” in the gold-rush days, and went west to dig and grow rich. He had never heard that more gold has been mined from the brains of men than has ever been taken from the earth. He staked a claim and went to work with pick and shovel. The going was hard, but his lust for gold was definite.

After weeks of labor, he was rewarded by the discovery of the shining ore. He needed machinery to bring the ore to the surface. Quietly, he covered up the mine, and retraced his footsteps to his home in Williamsburg, Maryland. He then told his relatives and a few neighbors of the “strike.” They got together money for the needed machinery, and had it shipped. The uncle and Darby went back to work the mine.

The first car of ore was mined and shipped to a smelter. The returns proved they had one of the richest mines in Colorado! A few more cars of that ore would clear the debts. Then came the big killing in profits.

Down went the drills! Up went the hopes of Darby and uncle! Then something happened! The vein of gold ore disappeared! They had come to the end of the rainbow, and the pot of gold was no longer there! They drilled on, desperately trying to pick up the vein again – all to no avail.

Finally, they decided to quit. They sold the machinery to a junk man for a few hundred dollars, and took the train back home. Some “junk” men are dumb, but not this one! He called in a mining engineer to look at the mine and do a little calculating. The engineer advised the project had failed because the owners were not familiar with “fault lines.” His calculations showed the vein would be found just three feet from where the Darbys had stopped drilling! That is exactly where they found it!

Most people miss the gold in their life because they do not try their hardest. In this story, the Darbys trying their hardest would have simply involved continuing to drill and researching exactly what needed to be done. The world is composed of so many parts and so many variables. You can always find a variable to push through and will always succeed when you do.

When I was about 10 years old the most important assignment we had in grade school that year was to spend three months writing a report about a country. I was assigned Russia. Over the next three months I made writing about Russia an important goal. I found every book in the elementary school library and even had my father take me to the downtown Detroit library on Saturday to check out as many books as I could possibly find. When the day came for putting my report together I had to put the chapters in multiple rooms because there were so many of them. It took three large binders to fit the entire report together and when all was said and done the report was over 400 pages.

Why would I write a report like this? Why would any 10 year old do something like this? Personally, I did it because I learned somewhere along the line the best thing you can do is try as hard as you can, and that you do not always get the opportunity to shine and do your best. Most people never try as hard as they can or do their best. Who knows why this is? A culture of sorts exists that actually seems to be against people doing their best.

Develop the habit of pushing yourself and always doing your best. I look back on my time in elementary school and know – as ridiculous as this sounds – that I always did my best. People who always do their best are sought out by others, and everyone wants these people to work with them, and for them.

When I was practicing law some of my first clients were people who knew me when I was a very young man. They found out I was an attorney and sought me out from all over the United States. They did this because they knew whatever issues they had I would fight like hell for them and do my best. While kids may have made fun of me when I was in elementary school for working so hard, they practically lined up to talk to me once they knew I could go to work for them.

For years after I stopped practicing law, I used to get calls from former co-workers who were starting their own firms. They wanted me to give up recruiting and come to work with them practicing law. They called me because they knew I would do my best.

People want to work with people who do their absolute best. The rewards from doing your best far eclipse what waits for people who make a mediocre effort. Try your hardest in every single thing that you ever do, and make the most of your life.

The rewards for not trying your best are few and far between. You can choose to live an average life and have average results if you choose. You will not inspire others around you if you do. People will not seek you out to do work. You will not respect yourself as much.

Nothing makes me angrier than someone not trying his best. You have been gifted with a life and this life is your chance to make the most of everything. Try your hardest and never give up. Always do the absolute best you can with everything. This is what you are entitled to, and deserve.

Love Your Work And The People Who Give It To You

From the time I was 19 until I was about 27, I spent a good portion of my summers doing asphalt work around Detroit. That included asphalt sealing, hot tar crack filling, and asphalt patching. It was seasonal work and most people in Michigan only seal their asphalt once a year.

”Around Detroit” is a blanket term because I was working in three counties and in an area ecnompassing hundreds of miles. Essentially, I would travel to areas where people could afford to maintain asphalt. Seven days a week, I would get up as early as I could and go out to start the day at one of my jobs. Sometimes my drive was about an hour. Sometimes it was 15 minutes. Most of the time, I drove about 30 minutes.

I made this drive each day because I had work to do. Every day I had work to do was an extremely exciting day for me. Once I got to a work site, I would count on the people around the area – neighbors, other businesses, and passing traffic – to see the work I was doing. I would stop cars and tell them I was in the neighborhood and willing to work. If I was in a residential area, I would knock on doors and tell them I could do work for them. I would do everything within my power to get work, and I always got business. I worked seven days a week. I worked so hard some of my employees would quit the job from exhaustion only after a few days. There were, however, people who lasted.

In addition, while doing this work I maintained a profound respect for the people for whom I was working. I did everything in my power to do the work to the absolute best of my ability. I took the work incredibly seriously. I loved my job.

The worst thing that could happen to me was not getting work. I knew if I did not do a good job one year, the next year I would not get the work again. I knew people talked, and the better I did in one area, the more work I got. I remember one year I showed up at a house in a certain neighborhood where I’d worked for several years, and a widow answered the door. She told me her husband had died and she could no longer afford the service. Although it was a nice house in an expensive neighborhood (where I normally could have earned a good amount of money), I really liked her husband a great deal and wanted to help her. I did her driveway for free that year and the next year as well. I wanted to work.

I simply would not take no for an answer. I remember a very nice man who owned a Chevy dealership in Warren, Michigan. He also owned a rundown mall in addition to the dealership. I really wanted to resurface his dealership, but he didn’t have the money either. I told him I thought things would one day pick up for him. I offered to do work for him at his rundown mall on days I did not have any work, doing hot tar crack filling for the cost of the goods. He let me do this and, over a couple of months, I worked there for seven or eight days when I did not have any work. I never ended up resurfacing his dealership, but I was glad for the work he had given me. He did not take advantage of me and was a very nice person.

Why would someone work for free? Because you need to fall in love with your job. You need to love what you do. And work attracts work. There is absolutely nothing wrong with doing something good for people. The right people out there will never take advantage of you.

Having work is a privilege. Work deserves to be cherished and held in the highest possible esteem. Work is your lifeblood. Without work, everything stops.

When I was younger I needed to get up each day and drive to go do my work and to find new work. I needed to impress each person I met each day, or else I knew they might not let me work for them the next year. For me, having work was extremely important in all respects. With work I was able to support myself during the summers and school year. In addition, work provided me the knowledge I would always have something to do no matter what happened in the world.

The best opportunity you can ever have is when someone gives you work, because this work can lead to more work.

One of the stupidest mistakes people can make is being suspicious of those who give us work. There are people who measure every single hour of their day and make sure they never under any circumstances give their employer too much of their time. There are people who cheat their employers. There are people who disrespect their customers and clients. There are people who resent being given more work. There are people who feel they have too much work.

Work is what supports your family. The people that give you work to do are the people who are giving that support. You need to respect them and you need to get work at all costs.

The only way to advance is by doing a good job with your work and exceed expectations. The more incredible your work is the more people want to work with you. The more work you are given and the more you do, the more you are seen as someone who is promotable, someone who is an expert. The best supervisors are the people who have done the work they are supervising.

In law firms where I have worked, when someone stopped getting work it meant they were not doing good work. If someone is not doing good work, they are generally in trouble. What bad attorneys do is move around from firm to firm for a while until eventually people stop giving them work and they cannot get a job.

Most attorneys exist almost day to day. They are entirely dependent upon people continually giving them work. If clients do not like an attorney’s work, they will stop giving the attorney work. If lots of clients stop liking the attorney, the attorney will be left with nothing whatsoever to do. Once the attorney has nothing to do, his or her career is over. This happens to more people than you may think.

I have given a lot of thought to the concept of doing ”good work” over the years because I think it is so crucial and important to our lives. When you do not care about the work you are doing, there is no reason for the person paying you to have you do it. When you do not care, whoever is paying you can always find someone who does. It is very easy to find someone who cares about the job he or she is doing.

You need to make each day at work the most important. You need to respect the work you are getting and you need to fall in love with it. Work itself is a wonderful thing.

If you have ever been without work for even a short time you know how hard this can be. It is never good to be without work. Being without work means your skills and value do not currently have a place. People without work are depressed and wallow. You need to make sure that you always have work.

I want to tell you a couple of stories that you may think are sad; however, they are also about two people whom I respect immensely.

I sometimes spend a good portion of my day reviewing the resumes of people who are applying to various jobs being recruited for by BCG Attorney Search, one of our recruiting firms. I have seen some pretty dramatic things happen to attorneys. In a down market even attorneys are at risk of losing their jobs. Conditions can become very, very brutal. When attorneys making $200,000+ a year lose their jobs, they often have a very hard time finding another one. In the middle-class world, from where I hail, there is a belief you should never accept a job that pays less than your last job. The idea is once someone has paid you a certain amount to do a job, that is your worth forever, and you should never take a job that pays less.

This particular belief is so prevalent that all over the United States there are people sitting on their rear ends all day doing nothing because they are waiting for a job to come along that pays as much as their last one. I cannot tell you how many careers have gone down the drain due to this philosophy, which is incredibly short-sighted.

One day I reviewed the resume of an attorney who had lost his job after about 10 years with a major American law firm. I am confident the job he lost paid more than $200,000 a year. He’d lost his job about six months earlier and, instead of doing nothing, he’d taken an entry-level job in a customer service call center. During this time, he’d actually won some awards. He was doing the best he could. When I reviewed his resume I could see he was someone who refused to give up when the going got tough. I respected him. I could see his optimism. He knew the importance of work and did not give up.

For the past couple of years, about once a week on average, I’ve gotten a massage from an older woman who comes to our home to do this. When the economy began to slow I stopped getting regular massages because work was so busy due to the number of people losing their jobs. When the woman did come by, I asked her how the economy had been treating her. It used to be you needed to schedule her at least a week in advance because she was so incredibly busy. One day things were different. She showed up with some information about a spiritual topic she knew I was interested in. She’d never brought me anything like that before. In addition, during the massage she wanted to make sure I was going to get a massage again the following week, and I could sense the desperation in her voice. I started asking her about her business and she told me it had really slowed down. She told me she was going to start doing more marketing. I asked her what she meant and she told me the following:

”I like to go and sit out in front of fancy restaurants with a sign and my massage table. People come up to me and ask me for my card.”

This is how this particular woman was finding work in a recession. Is this pathetic? No. This is someone who was staying busy and doing the very best she could in a tough market. The same goes for the attorney. He was also doing the very best he could.

I am in the career business and I see people take jobs that are beneath them every day. I have seen first-rate attorneys end up on the street after losing jobs, addicted to crystal meth and walking around barefoot. I have seen shocking things happen to people who did not have any work. Work is the absolute most important thing you can have.

My hope for you is that you will make the most of whatever job you have and give it your all. If it does not work out, give your next job your all, whatever it is. You need to put your heart and soul into everything you do. You are a special person and the world will realize this, but you need to keep moving. Never slow down. Keep working. The harder you work, the higher you will climb.

Do Not Get Involved in the Social Side of the Office

Several years ago we had an employee at one of our companies who was extremely intelligent. This person was older and had worked at several jobs before coming to our company. Although he’d never excelled at any of these jobs, he’d done well enough. He was hired as a writer to assist with various tasks for our companies. His abilities were not bad, and had he simply kept his head down and done his job I am confident he would still be here. Instead, this person was our company’s worst nightmare and still is to this day. The characteristics this person exhibited hurts more companies and careers than I can count. There are people like this person in every company and you need to know what to look for and how to stay away from them in order to be successful in your career.

Before this person ever took a job at our company, he was very angry at, and critical of the world. While he didn’t make his criticisms known directly to management of our company, they ended up finding their way back. Most of the criticisms were things that really undermined the company and the people in it. This person seriously disrupted his superiors, the company, and others. It was as if this person’s greatest skill was undermining the company and those around him. For that reason, I refer to this particular employee as “the Underminer.” There are underminers in most companies. I am sure you know one where you are working now, or have known one in the past.

The Underminer would tell other employees things such as:

• They were not being paid enough
• They should be working for a larger company
• The company was poorly managed
• People had been screwed over by the company

His list of criticisms could fill several pages. What was most alarming about this particular person was the pattern we started to notice. The Underminer would often attempt to become friendly with our best employees. If any of them became friendly with this person, in a very short time, formerly enthusiastic employees would change right before our eyes. They would no longer be as enthusiastic about their work, stop completing assignments on time, get a “depressed” look and feel about them, and stop consistently showing up on time for work. If these employees were not fired, they would often quickly quit and leave the company. Sometimes the Underminer would affect the employee so negatively the person would quit and leave the company without having secured another job.

In less than one year I noticed this pattern negatively affect the careers of at least 10 people. People who otherwise could have had excellent careers with our company left or were negatively influenced by this individual. This individual eventually was let go from our company and, incredibly, to this day is still trying to undermine our company and the people in it by spreading negative information. Am I upset by this? Am I hurt? Of course I am. However, you need to understand in every organization you will find people who try to undermine the company.

The most alarming thing about the Underminer is the people this person approached and influenced are still floundering years later in their careers. They have moved from job to job and many are unemployed. Before learning to think negatively about work and the company, these people had been incredibly enthusiastic and talented. It was as if the Underminer had planted so much negativity in their impressionable young minds they were permanently affected.

Over the years I have noticed patterns like this one repeat themselves in our company. Looking back, I’ve even seen this pattern repeat itself in law firms and other companies in which I have worked. It is often not just one person negatively influencing others, but several. What I am about to share with you could be some of the more important career advice you ever receive.

You need to stay away from negative people inside companies. There is something called “guilt by association” that is easy to pick up and that can negatively affect you. If you are spending your time with people who are known as troublemakers or who are hostile towards the company, the implication is you may share these sorts of opinions as well. Once a company picks up on this and associates you with this behavior, you will be marked as someone who is not a friend of the company and is, instead, an enemy.

When I was practicing law I saw many careers stalled and/or ruined in law firms because of the associations people made inside the office. When you associate with the wrong people a firm will view you as someone who is unlikely to be looking out for the firm and, consequently, will avoid promoting you, advancing you, or protecting you. Choosing to associate with the wrong people in the office will create huge problems for you.

You are at work to make a living. Your job at work is to go there, be professional, and leave. You are not expected to go there to make friends or be a participant in various forms of gossip. You can choose to get involved in the social side of the office and watch your career stall, or you can choose to be removed from it.

Not all social activity in companies is bad. In fact, a lot of it is good. However, you want to be removed from the social side of the office because you cannot be viewed as a supervisor by people with whom you’re friends. The further away you are from people in the office socially, the closer you are to being their manager. In addition, the closer you are to colleagues in the office, the more you are going to be affected by their negative behavior.

None of this is to say you can’t be friendly with your co-workers. You need to be friendly with everyone in your company. However, you cannot become too chummy and you do not want to participate in the social network of the office too much.

When I was in high school, one of my best friends got into serious trouble. He was on his way to lacrosse practice and was eating a giant bag of candy while sitting in the passenger seat of a car. He asked a couple of kids walking by if they wanted some of his candy because he noticed they were looking at him. The kids screamed and ran. My friend thought the whole thing was very strange (although he realized they may have misinterpreted this as a kidnapping attempt) until a SWAT team began fanning out on the practice field where we were playing lacrosse and threw his face in the dirt and arrested him.

The entire thing had been a giant misunderstanding; however, the misunderstanding was serious enough he was suspended from school for three months. He would have been kicked out if his father was not an extremely influential person in Detroit who donated a lot of money to the school. During my last year of high school I asked my math teacher to write a recommendation for me for colleges and he agreed to do so. This math teacher had been very close to the parents of the children who had mistakenly believed they were about to be kidnapped.

There were two sides to my friend’s scandal. One side thought the arrest was ridiculous because the offer of candy was genuine and there had been no kidnapping attempt at all. There had been other passengers in the car and they all testified the candy offer was legitimate. The other side thought the mere words were evil and my friend should be expelled.

A few months after my teacher wrote the recommendations for me I was interviewing at a college, and the interviewer said to me, “What’s the problem with this math teacher? Why did he write such a horrible recommendation for you? It is so bad and there is so little substance to it we were actually going to call your school about it.”

I think the math teacher may have gotten in trouble for the recommendation. He sought me out and apologized and one of the deans of the school took me into a meeting and told me the reason he had written the recommendation the way he did was because I had been friends with the kid who was suspended. The teacher actually withdrew his previous recommendation and wrote another. It was a strange episode. In fact, I do not think I ever spoke to my parents or anyone about it. Now that I am thinking about this I am wondering if this had an impact on the colleges I did and did not get into. The more I think about this the more I believe that it probably did.

You need to realize guilt by association can hurt you with companies and other organizations. You also need to realize it is incredibly important you keep your distance from people in the workplace if you want to be considered for supervisory and other such roles. The social side of the office can be a great deal of fun and can also be entertaining. More often than not, however, the social side of the office will cause you far more problems than it is worth.

You Must Produce and Do Quality Work

At Toyota’s headquarters in Tokyo, one of the most striking things you see when you first enter is a collection of three pictures. The first is of Toyota’s founder, the second is of Toyota’s chairman, and the third, which is much larger than the other two is of W. Edwards Deming. The company believes Deming is the man whose teachings and philosophies made the company what it is today.

Deming taught the Japanese about quality and how to continuously improve quality. In fact, the success of modern Japan after World War II as an economic and industrial power is largely based on the Japanese march towards continuously improving their quality, versus the typical focus of American corporations:

1. Short-term profits
2. Mobility of management
3. Running a company on visible figures alone
4. Relying on technology to solve problems

Japanese goods used to be the laughing stock of the world in terms of their quality. Today, they are considered among the best, and the phrase “Made in Japan” is considered synonymous with quality. As the quality of Japan’s goods has increased, so too has its standard of living and status in the world. The drive towards quality has served to elevate the country of Japan and its people. If quality can do this for a country, imagine what it can do for your career.

Incredible quality does not just change nations, it can change your life as well. The more you stress quality in your job, the better you will do in everything you attempt. You cannot avoid doing quality work and bringing improvement to your life. This is the lesson Deming brings to the way companies and countries are run, and your life.

The better you perform your job and the better the quality of your work, the more you will be valued by your employer. In addition, the more you concentrate on doing quality work, the more you will continuously improve. It is rare for people who produce the very best work and demand perfection to ever be out of a job or ever have a hard time finding a job. They get exceptional references from their previous employers, and current employers try to hold on to them, even in the worst economies. Producing quality work is something very rare and, because it is so rare, it is something that’s valued in every marketplace all over the world.

We seek out and value the people who are the best at their jobs. The best employers want the people who produce the highest quality results to do work for them. When you produce quality work, you typically do not have to worry about job security, raises, or what other people are doing.

When I started practicing law with my first firm, I found myself working 15+ hours per day, seven days a week. I was not working this hard because I thought it necessary. In fact, many of the people I was working with at the firm had the same amount of work I did. I was working so hard because I knew the work I was doing could always be better. I knew I could make the same point in fewer words in a document I was writing. I knew I could make a more persuasive argument by finding better support for it. I knew I could stay a little bit longer and make something the best it possibly could be. I gave my all. The great thing about my continuous quest for quality is, the better I did, the more the most important attorneys at my firm started having me do all their work. In addition, I continued to get better and better at what I did.

I will never forget when I quit working at my first firm and decided to go to work for another. For several hours the most important partners in the firm, one after another, came into my office and tried to convince me to stay. At the time I did not know they rarely, if ever, did this when someone was leaving the firm. After the third day of this, I asked one of the younger partners why they were trying so hard to get me to stay.

“We want you to stay because you do really good work and you care about what you are doing,” he told me. “You also continue to get better and better and show incredible promise as a litigator.”

I was young at the time and those words sort of went in one ear and out the other; however, I remembered them years later when I started to employ people and observe their work ethic. I realized the effort I had been putting in was something quite rare. It is one thing to simply work hard at what you are doing and another to make your job your passion and set out to continuously improve.

A year or so later, when I wanted to come back to that firm, I asked the head of the firm if I could return to work. He said “yes” right away. For various reasons, this did not work out, but the fact is the good work I had done made an impression on the head of this firm and on the people in it.

In your job the most important thing you can do is make an incredible effort and do the best possible quality of work. When you do the best work you can, you are behaving like a professional, like someone who makes a difference in your company or firm. Your co-workers will also respect you more. You have employment security and, even if the firm you are working for goes away, your employer and co-workers will always recommend you to others. It is a wonderful thing to be known for the quality of your work.

Following World War II, the Japanese Union of Scientists and Engineers invited Deming to come to Japan and give a series of lectures on how management could improve quality. The Japanese told Deming they would follow his instructions. Deming predicted within five years Japan would be competitive economically, and consumers all over the world would be demanding the products the Japanese produced. The Japanese followed Deming’s suggestions and, within eighteen months of Deming’s first lecture, saw huge strides in both the quality of their goods and productivity.

I predict if you start doing everything you can to improve the quality of your work, in less than a year you will start getting promoted and find yourself in a different place than you are today. People who do good work are management, CEO or high-earner material. All you need to do in order to really advance your career and life is improve the quality of your work. Once you do this, everything else quickly falls into place.

When Deming initially arrived in Japan after World War II, Japan’s goods were considered shoddy and cheap throughout the world. They were made from the cheapest of materials. They were among the worst products in the world. Today, their goods are considered the envy of the world, whether the products are electronics, cameras, automobiles, or computers.

For American and European firms that used to control the world in these fields, the transformation brought about by Deming’s philosophies has been nothing short of catastrophic. In the electronics industry, for example, nearly all components – such as computer chips, transistors, and semiconductor chips – were American inventions. The Japanese advanced so quickly in this field by the 1980s most American television and radio manufacturers were gone, and they rushed to Washington begging for help. The same thing happened with the American automobile industry; as the Japanese gained market share, American companies rushed to Washington and elsewhere asking for help.

In my studies of Deming, one of the things that stands out for me is a video of him made shortly before he died in 1993. In the video he offers the words, “It’s all about the quality.” Everything is about the quality. Think about how much different America would be today if we had the same quality of goods the Japanese produced. We do not make the same quality of goods because our emphasis is on other things, such as short-term profits. If our emphasis was on quality, everything else would be falling into place.

Deming’s philosophies are quite simple. He believed organizations must create ever improving products and services. The more the product or service improves, the more loyal the customers of the business become. Loyal customers will brag to others about the product or service they are receiving and create new customers. Profits from a sale to a loyal customer are often six to eight times the profits from another customer. The company with the most loyal customers typically has much higher profits than the average company.

The results of ever-improving quality are profound. For example, if you are an attorney, you make your writing better and more persuasive. If you are a manufacturer, you make your product better. You never stop questioning and improving to make your product as good as it can be. According to a famous account of Deming’s work:

Dr. Deming’s teachings and philosophy can be seen through the results they produced when they were adopted by the Japanese, as the following example shows: Ford Motor Company was simultaneously manufacturing a car model with transmissions made in Japan and the United States. Soon after the car model was on the market, Ford customers were requesting the model with the Japanese transmission over the USA-made transmission, and they were willing to wait for the Japanese model. As both transmissions were made to the same specifications, Ford engineers could not understand the customer preference for the model with the Japanese transmission. It delivered smoother performance with a lower defect rate. Finally, Ford engineers decided to take apart the two different transmissions. The American-made car parts were all within specified tolerance levels. On the other hand, the Japanese car parts had much closer tolerances than the USA-made parts-i.e., if a part was supposed to be one foot long, plus or minus 1/8 of an inch, then the Japanese parts were within 1/16 of an inch. This made the Japanese cars run more smoothly and customers experienced fewer problems. (From Dr. Deming by Rafael Aguayo, pages 40 & 41.)

According to Deming, as quality is increased, costs decrease. This sets in motion the following reaction:

1. Better quality leads to higher productivity and lower costs
2. The firm with lower costs can pass along the savings to consumers in the form of lower prices
3. When a firm has lower prices and better quality, customers are happier
4. The firm captures market share and hires more people
5. The firm stays in business and grows its market share

Under Deming’s philosophy, when you improve the quality of what you are doing, everything simply gets better and this happens rapidly. What does this mean for you?

I believe one of the most fundamental and important lessons in the development of a country and an economic power come from the experience of Japan. I believe the philosophies of Deming are profound and can make a major and important difference in your life and career. The more you work on the quality of what you are doing, the better you, too, will get and the better your career will get.

When looking at employers, you should also concentrate on working for those whose quality is getting better and better. Employers who strive to create outstanding quality are the same ones likely to be around tomorrow. The better the quality of the product the business is producing, the more opportunities they are likely to have in the future for you. The better the quality of your work, the more opportunities you are also likely to have in the future. Make quality your first priority.

The Most Important Thing You Can Have Is Faith

Several years ago I was practicing law, and over Christmas I went home to Michigan from Los Angeles for a one week vacation. At the time, I was also a law professor and I had brought a stack of papers to grade with me. For several days I read paper after paper. After about a day, it occurred to me I was unhappy with my life. I was unhappy with my job. I did not like where my life was headed and what my career was like. At the time I was making a very good living and doing everything I thought I should be doing. But I was not happy.

For the next few nights I had a lot of difficulty sleeping. Then I made a decision. What was making me unhappy was not just my job but the practice of law. I did not want to be an attorney anymore. I simply did not want to do this.

I had gotten married just a few months before. I had also bought a house around the same time with a pretty decent-sized mortgage. By all appearances, my life was on the right track for someone in his late 20s. I had done everything I thought was right up until that point in my life. But my job did not make me happy. I did not like the constant confrontation. I did not like where I worked at the time. I did not feel my talents were being utilized as much as they could be. I knew this was simply something I did not want to do any longer.

I went back to work on January 3rd and gave my two weeks notice. I knew this was not what I wanted and I simply needed to have faith that everything would work out. I had no savings to speak of and my wife was not earning very much money. I needed to trust that everything would work out – although at the time I had no idea what was going to happen. I knew deep down, however, that if I was happy I would do much better in my life than if I wasn’t.

Your ultimate resource in your job search and in your life is faith. Faith is the most important thing in the world. Faith is what enables you to move forward and find a new job, to get into a new relationship, to move to a new city, to start a new life, and to take chances. Similarly, a lack of faith causes people to feel trapped in bad relationships and never leave them, work in jobs they hate, and stay in circumstances which do not make them happy. The most important and forward-looking thing you can do is have faith.

Similarly, the worst thing you can do is spend time around people who shake the faith you have in yourself. When we are driving, we have faith the cars across the median will not cross over and hit us. We have faith when we are walking down the street we will not get shot. We have faith when we get home at night, our spouse will still be there. We have faith our children will always love us. When you get on an airplane, you generally have faith the plane will take off and land safely. You should. Statistically, you are 10 times more likely to get hit by lightning than die in an airplane crash. Nevertheless, after September 11 numerous people became afraid of flying. The goal of the terrorists was to shake our faith in our daily lives and, for many, it worked. Is there anyone around you who shakes your faith?

Faith gives people the will to live even when it looks like there is no reason to go on. I remember when I was a young boy my stepfather had to undergo a surgery that lasted almost 36 hours to remove all sorts of cancer from his body. The surgeons said before they took him there was a 99 percent chance he would die in surgery. Before he went into surgery, he told my mother he would be fine and not to worry. When he came out of surgery, the surgeons said the only thing that kept him alive was his faith and without it he never would have survived. I have heard others tell stories about faith like this before. Faith is something that is real and makes a giant difference in peoples lives. It can change your life, too.

Faith is the key that opens the doors of possibility. If you had faith that you could do anything, what would you do? Would you walk right up and talk to your dream mate? Would you embark on a new career? What would you do if you knew you could not fail? If you knew you could not fail, you could do anything in the world. I once saw the most ridiculous thing and it stuck with me. For years I used to go by a certain man’s house in Detroit to seal his asphalt. The man was a printer who did the same job day after day, and he did not seem particularly enthusiastic about it. After six or so years of working for him, I went by his doorway and saw him wearing a Hawaiian shirt and sunglasses – not the sort of blue-collar outfit he usually wore.

“What are you doing?” I asked him.

“I sold my printing business, sold my house, and bought a deli in the Bahamas. I’m leaving tomorrow,” he told me.

Now that’s faith – taking control of your life, following your heart, and doing what you want to do.

It is far better to make mistakes and fail than it is to not try something. You are almost always better off taking steps in the direction of the life you want than not taking any steps at all. You will always be better off from having learned lessons and exercised your faith.

The most important characteristic of any leader is faith, specifically faith that they can bring the people they are leading the result they are seeking. The greatest business minds have mastered the art of having faith. For example, when Bill Gates was at Harvard, he decided he no longer wanted to go to school. He was more interested in computers. Having faith and nothing more, he dropped out of school, found someone who had invented a computer but had no operating system for it, and purchased the rights to the DOS program. He knew making a computer work would create profound results, and he had faith in the future. He ended up becoming one of the richest men in the world and changing the world through his contributions.

When Sam Walton opened his first Wal-Mart, it was a disaster. One of the first days he was open, he had a watermelon sale and stacked hundreds of watermelons in front of the store. It was so hot, however, that all of the watermelons were exploding, and when people pulled up to the store it looked like there had been a mass murder. Nonetheless, Walton had faith in his idea and pursued it.

It is not just businesses which require faith, however. It is you. You need to have faith in who you can become. You need to have faith that you will get the job you want and live the life you want. You need to have faith in your future. There is something remarkable about the power of faith: the power of faith changes everything. Faith is not logical. You cannot live your life with logic alone. Faith is what drives people to do things when they have no idea what the end result will be. When you have faith you act because you know the universe will take care of you. You do not act because you are certain of the result.

There are lots of people who live their lives certain of the results they will achieve. Not much ever happens with these sorts of people. They never even come close to reaching their full potential. You can live your life with certainty but, if you do, you will never know how fulfilled you can possibly be and how much you can achieve.

The present is not the future. Faith is what gives us a future that is different from the present we have today. Step into the future and decide what you want from it. Once you have decided what you want from the future, it is important you have faith and set about going after your dreams. You need to put yourself on the line. You need to see a better tomorrow.

After quitting my job, I still did not know what I was going to do. My law firm told me to stick around for three months and look for another job because they did not think it sounded rational for me to just leave. So this is what I did. I went out and interviewed with other law firms, but I did not take any jobs because I was not interested in practicing law. I spoke with recruiters while I was looking for a job, and the more I spoke with them, the more their jobs looked interesting to me. What ended up happening, of course, was that I chose to start recruiting.

I remember about three months after I began recruiting a few of my wife’s friends were at the house. At the time, my wife had started to think I was insane. I had left a job paying over $150,000 a year and was now running a recruiting business out of our family room. The problem was the business was not doing all that well. In fact, I had scarcely gotten any candidates interviews and had been at it for three months. In addition, I had hardly any money left. I had taken out a home equity loan during my final weeks of practicing law and this money was almost gone. I had long ago maxed out my credit cards. My wife’s family used to call her and she would walk out to the front lawn to talk on the phone. We had only been married a few months at that point, and I think she thought she must have made a real mistake. In all fairness, she had signed up to be married to a lawyer, and that was not what was going on at the moment.

In a manner that implied some concern, a couple of my wife’s friends walked up to my desk and asked me how I was doing. I started telling them about how I had recently gotten a new candidate and how wonderful the candidate was. I told them I was in the middle of putting together a long letter about the candidate and the more I learned about the candidate, the more impressed I was. The funniest thing happened after I told them about the candidate. I was sitting there with probably 10 Diet Coke cans spread across my desk and piles of paper on the floor. I had not shaved in a couple of days, and I was very involved in the work I was doing. I remember I looked away for a second and, when I looked back, one of my wife’s friends was looking at the other friend with his finger pointed at his head moving it around in circles like I was crazy. I must have looked crazy. Everyone thought I was crazy for pursuing my dream like this. But I had faith.

The entire basis of Christianity, Islam, and most major religions of the world is faith. The greatest accomplishments in the world are achieved when people have faith. When you have faith in yourself and faith in an idea, anything at all is possible.

One of the most exciting places in the world is Disneyland. There is an institute there where employees can take classes and learn about the founding of the company. The story of the founding of Disneyland is one of the greatest stories of the power of faith there is. According to one account:

With Disneyland, Walt Disney envisioned a place where parents and children could go to enjoy themselves and see fantasy become real. Disappointed with the quality of amusement parks he visited with his children, Disney wanted his park to be clean, well-organized, and family-friendly. He first planned to build the park on a lot in Burbank, but he soon realized that he needed more space, so he bought an orange grove in Anaheim, California.

No one thought his idea would work. He was advised by other amusement park officers the park was doomed to failure. He could not convince financiers to invest in the park because his dreams offered “too little collateral.” Even his brother, who handled the studio’s finances, refused to spend company funds on the project.

In spite of the opposition, Disney refused to give up. He cashed in his life insurance policy and sold his family home to raise the $11 million required for the park’s construction. When more money was needed, he signed a contract with the American Broadcasting Company to air a weekly show in exchange for ABC’s investment in the park. He bet every penny on the success of the park and remained determined to make it a reality. Driven by his zeal, construction of the park began July 21, 1954, and it opened almost exactly a year later, on July 17, 1955.

It appeared the doomsayers had been right. Opening day was a disaster. Worse, there was national TV coverage. Tickets were counterfeited, resulting in 28,000 guests instead of the 11,000 invited. Rides broke under the stress of operation. Plumbers were on strike, so bathrooms and drinking fountains were not working. The asphalt roads, having been poured the night before, were still soft and trapped ladies’ high-heeled shoes.

Disney was not swayed by the park’s disastrous opening. He fixed the problems and continued to plan and build better attractions. He continuously found new ideas that kept people coming back for more. After 10 years, more than 50 million people had visited Disneyland, and today it remains a national attraction. More than that, as historian Larry Schweikart has observed, “Disneyland set the standard by which future parks were judged.” Against all odds, Walt Disney had built an amusement park that had become an amazing success. (Source: http://www.mackinac.org/article.aspx?ID=7164)

When you have faith in yourself the impossible can happen. Disney, for example, has left behind a huge and lasting legacy with Disneyland and his company. He put his faith and mind behind the power of an idea and stuck with it. Faith is what changes the world, and faith can change your life as well. The more you believe in something and the more faith you have in it, the more your mind will attract similar thoughts. These similar thoughts will build upon each other, get stronger and stronger, and get you closer to what you are seeking. This is the power of faith.

Your life and your future begin with thoughts. Faith is the most important thing you can have. When you have faith you can do absolutely anything. Regardless of what is going on in your career, or your life, you need to have faith.

After four months of recruiting, I still had not made a single placement. My credit cards were maxed out, my home equity loan was maxed out, and my wife was beyond freaked out. One Monday morning, I answered the phone and it was a law firm. They told me they were making an offer to one of my candidates. The next day the same thing happened and on Thursday and Friday it happened again.

In less than one week I had made four placements and the business was up and running. It was one of the most wonderful weeks of my life and really taught me the power of faith. When you believe in yourself and what you can do, anything is possible. You need to start believing in what you can do right now.

Increasing Efficiency is Your Best Route to Employment Security

The cheapening of any article in common use almost immediately results in a largely increased demand for that article. Take the case of shoes, for instance. The introduction of machinery for doing every element of the work which was formerly done by hand has resulted in making shoes at a fraction of their former labor cost. Now almost every man, woman, and child in the working classes buys one or two pairs of shoes per year, and they wear shoes all the time. Formerly, each workman bought perhaps one pair of shoes every five years, and went barefoot most of the time, wearing shoes only as a luxury or as a matter of the sternest necessity. In spite of the enormously increased output of shoes per workman, which has come with shoe machinery, the demand for shoes has so increased that there are relatively more men working in the shoe industry now than ever before.

The workmen in almost every trade have before them an object lesson of this kind, and yet, because they are ignorant of the history of their own trade, they still firmly believe, as their fathers did before them, that it is against their best interests for each man to turn out each day as much work as possible.

Under this fallacious idea, a large proportion of workmen deliberately work slowly so as to curtail their output. Almost every labor union has made, or is contemplating making, rules which have for their object curtailing the output of their members. Those men who have the greatest influence with the working people, the labor leaders, as well as many people with philanthropic feelings who are helping them, are daily spreading this fallacy and at the same time telling them that they are overworked.

-Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (1911)

From the time I was 18 until I was about 27, I spent most of my summers working as an asphalt sealant and maintenance contractor around Detroit, Michigan. One of the main jobs I did involved putting an asphalt sealant on parking lots and driveways. At the beginning of my first summer doing this work, I used to purchase the sealant in five-gallon pails. Then I starting purchasing the sealant in 55-gallon drums and installing a pipe on the drums to drain the sealant out. After a few years, I did so much asphalt sealing work I had a trailer custom made to hold 550 gallons of the sealant.

From the beginning of my second summer through my third, I had two people working for me whose job was to assist me in putting down the sealant. Their names were Larry and Jake. Larry was Jake’s father. Jake was mentally disabled but not overly so. He understood what was going on and followed instructions. He never really said much, however.

Neither Larry nor Jake cared much for the work they were doing. While they had decent work ethics and put up with me literally walking into their homes and getting them up for work each day, they were not extremely concerned with the quality of the work they were doing. They frequently cut corners and I needed to watch them pretty carefully. Larry was a guy I remember and respect a great deal because I think deep down he was a really good person. On Sundays, I used to have to wait in front of his house until he got back from church with his wife and children. Larry was a smart man who had made some mistakes throughout his life but worked when he could. He was hungover every day, and I bought him Gatorade after Gatorade at convenience shops to keep him going.

We would fill up five-gallon pails from the barrels and then walk the sealant over to an area of the asphalt we wanted to seal. Then, we would spread it around on the asphalt with either squeegees or a large brush. Without going into a lot of detail, this was excruciatingly difficult work because the sealant gets on your skin and burns. You are also outside, and the sun burns you because you are on black asphalt all day, and the sealant is a very heavy tar liquid that you need to pull off your skin at the end of each day. It often takes layers of your skin off when you remove it and needs to be removed with gasoline and a steel wool-like material.

As this business grew, I started getting better and better equipment for it. I will never forget the moment I purchased and installed a pumping system and sprayer on the tank. With this new pumping system I was able to pull up to any parking lot or house and, after blowing all the debris off the driveway or parking lot, turn on this spray machine and complete sealing the asphalt without hardly getting dirty at all. Best of all, I did not need to fill up the five-gallon buckets. I simply needed to turn on my sprayer and walk up and down the driveway.

One day I pulled up to a driveway that Jake and Larry were working on around 5:30 in the afternoon and turned on the sprayer. They were in the middle of working on the driveway and, by the looks of it, would be working for at least another 35 to 40 minutes. I told them to stop. Then, wearing khaki pants and a fresh shirt from the dry cleaner, I completed the entire job in less than five minutes.

I could see they both looked somewhat astonished. They also looked frightened because I think they believed this new sprayer was going to put them out of a job.

“This thing does not give as good of a coat as doing it by hand,” Jake said. This was the first time I had ever heard Jake say anything about the quality of the work we were doing.

“Yeah, it does not look as good,” said Larry.

The strangest thing happened over the next few weeks. Weird things started going wrong with the pump and we never made it through a full day. Belts would suddenly fail. Start switches would break off and disappear. I began to suspect after a week or so of this Larry and Jake were sabotaging the pump because they knew it could put them out of a job. After a few weeks of this I insisted I be the only one allowed to operate the machine, and I made sure I was. While I still have no proof of it to this day, I think Larry and Jake were sabotaging the machine.

Change is something that creeps into every single business, and the objective of every business is to lower costs because lower costs mean more profits. This means they are always looking for ways to eliminate your job. That’s right. Your very job is a threat to your company and its profits.

When I started in the Internet business in the year 1999, the world was a far different place. One of the most interesting things I witnessed involved computer programmers. In the late 1990s through 2001, computer programmers were like gods to companies in the United States. They could demand six-figure salaries and jumped around between companies at an alarming rate. Everyone wanted to hire them because there were so many Internet companies and businesses believed the Internet was the next great frontier.

At our small company we practically needed to beg programmers to work for us. We would offer them pizza and other incentives when they were not on other projects. In some cases, we would pay them as much as $100 an hour to do the work, and then they would stop working after four or five hours because they thought the work was “boring.” Some of the programmers I interviewed even requested stock options just to show up for work. I was baffled by the programmers I worked with and my inability to get the programmers to do any work really held me back.

Due to the difficulty surrounding this issue, we started building an office in India. We had no problem getting people to do the work there. In fact, people were enthusiastic about getting the work and wanted more of it. While there were lower costs associated with the work, the real reason for getting the work done abroad was that people were enthusiastic about doing the work. All we wanted was to get the work done.

After the dot com crash and the events of September 11, 2001, all of a sudden those American programmers were out of work. Tens of thousands of American programmers were let go in a very short time, and Internet companies dropped like flies.

I remember putting an ad out in late 2001 for an in-house programmer and getting overwhelmed with applications. I received so many applications, literally, one every few seconds, that I had to make changes to the settings in my Microsoft Outlook. I ended up hiring one person to work in our Los Angeles office who had just received a PhD from Caltech. I practically could have hired anyone I wanted in the world. There was simply no work for programmers. It had all dried up.

The economy did eventually recover. However, I still did not grow our base of programmers in the United States. I had such a bad experience the first time and, in the interim, had built a large group of programmers in our company in India. This was all I needed. I cannot imagine how many jobs went to India due to this.

Our company is not alone. Many companies do all their programming in other countries now. It simply makes more sense for them from a financial standpoint. They are not interested in doing work in the United States anymore due to the cost, hassles, and the fact the people are not as enthusiastic about doing the work.

There are tons of jobs in the United States and around the world right now that are under fire and are likely to disappear in the near future. There are many reasons jobs disappear, but the main one is because they can be done cheaper elsewhere. Every company and organization is constantly striving for greater efficiency. If your employers can do your job cheaply elsewhere, then they will.

There is no reason for them not to. The more cheaply they can produce a product or service, the more they can potentially sell of that product or service. The more of the product or service that’s sold, the more the company will grow and expand.

What does this mean for you and your job? It means the best use of your time and skill is finding jobs and employers where your role is one of increasing the efficiency of the company’s work. You always need to embrace efficiency and increase the output of the company at the lowest cost possible. If you fight efficiency, you will be seen as an enemy of the company and its growth. If this happens, you will most likely be looking for a new job shortly.

In the past there have been a number of phenomena I’ve watched with great interest:

-The emergence of China as a major economic power
-The massive decline of the American automobile industry
-The rise and massive success of various American companies like Intel, eBay, and Oracle
-The huge rise of jobs in places like India

China emerged as a force to be reckoned with because they can produce goods more cheaply. People will work for less money in China, and this makes it cheaper to produce products there. Incredibly, it is still cheaper to produce products in China even after accounting for shipping the products on boats all the way to the United States. All over the United States, hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs have disappeared due to the emergence of China as an economic power. If you are someone working in a factory in the present economy, you need to realize your job could be replaced very, very easily.

The American automobile industry has experienced a long and steady decline. Cars can be produced more cheaply elsewhere. American unions have set wages and benefits higher for American workers than for competitors. This has given competitors a huge advantage and also given American automobile companies less money to invest in improving their products. The products have continually gotten worse and worse. The companies able to produce the product at the lowest cost are winning.

The companies that have done the best in the United States over the past several decades are the companies that are increasing efficiency. While I could go into considerable detail about this, companies like Oracle, for example, creates database software which allows companies to save money by operating more efficiently. The efficient operation of these companies creates huge value. A company like eBay creates efficiencies by allowing people to trade goods without having to travel or do extensive research. This, too, creates efficiency. Companies like Intel make microchips that have not only aided the rapid spread of personal computers, but have also enabled companies to use computers which allow them to operate more efficiently.

India has been absorbing many American jobs for decades. They have call centers, programmers, and even legal work is being done there. The country has a lot more people than the United States and a corresponding level of talent. There is another advantage: people are willing to work more cheaply there for most jobs. It only makes sense for American companies to hire people there.

These are all examples of efficiency in action. You need to understand the world and your job are constantly being pushed to be more efficient. When you take a job at any company, you are entering an environment where you are at war. You are at war with the fact your employers are doing everything within their power to make their businesses more efficient. That means they want to save money on you and your work to the maximum extent they can.

The smartest thing you can do in your career is find companies that are increasing efficiency in the market and go to work for them, or find a company where you can increase the efficiency of what is being done. You need to embrace efficiency. If you fight efficiency, you will ultimately lose your job. We are not secure in our jobs and cannot be secure if we don’t embrace efficiency. The war for and against efficiency is something that is going on in every company and every organization. The employees and people who win this war are the ones who fight to make things more efficient.

An Iron Will

Orison Swett Marden’s ‘An Iron Will’ is an inspiring book which states that the primary difference between successful people and failures is whether or not they have will power. However, if misdirected, even a strong sense of will power is meaningless and can work against you. You must read this book if you wish to achieve success in your life and your career.

–Harrison

An Iron Will

By Orison Swett Marden

Chapter I

Training The Will

“The education of the will is the object of our existence,” says Emerson.

Nor is this putting it too strongly, if we take into account the human will in its relations to the divine. This accords with the saying of J. Stuart Mill, that “a character is a completely fashioned will.”

In respect to mere mundane relations, the development and discipline of one’s will-power is of supreme moment in relation to success in life. No man can ever estimate the power of will. It is a part of the divine nature, all of a piece with the power of creation. We speak of God’s fiat “_Fiat lux_, Let light be.” Man has his fiat. The achievements of history have been the choices, the determinations, the creations, of the human will. It was the will, quiet or pugnacious, gentle or grim, of men like Wilberforce and Garrison, Goodyear and Cyrus Field, Bismarck and Grant, that made them indomitable. They simply would do what they planned. Such men can no more be stopped than the sun can be, or the tide. Most men fail, not through lack of education or agreeable personal qualities, but from lack of dogged determination, from lack of dauntless will.

“It is impossible,” says Sharman, “to look into the conditions under which the battle of life is being fought, without perceiving how much really depends upon the extent to which the will-power is cultivated, strengthened, and made operative in right directions.” Young people need to go into training for it. We live in an age of athletic meets. Those who are determined to have athletic will-power must take for it the kind of exercise they need.

This is well illustrated by a report I have seen of the long race from Marathon in the recent Olympian games, which was won by the young Greek peasant, Sotirios Loues.

A STRUGGLE IN THE RACE OF LIFE.

There had been no great parade about the training of this champion runner. From his work at the plough he quietly betook himself to the task of making Greece victorious before the assembled strangers from every land. He was known to be a good runner, and without fuss or bustle he entered himself as a competitor. But it was not his speed alone, out-distancing every rival, that made the young Greek stand out from among his fellows that day. When he left his cottage home at Amarusi, his father said to him, “Sotiri, you must only return a victor!” The light of a firm resolve shone in the young man’s eye. The old father was sure that his boy would win, and so he made his way to the station, there to wait till Sotiri should come in ahead of all the rest. No one knew the old man and his three daughters as they elbowed their way through the crowd. When at last the excitement of the assembled multitude told that the critical moment had arrived, that the racers were nearing the goal, the old father looked up through eyes that were a little dim as he realized that truly Sotiri was leading the way. He _was_ “returning a victor.” How the crowd surged about the young peasant when the race was fairly won! Wild with excitement, they knew not how to shower upon him sufficient praise. Ladies overwhelmed him with flowers and rings; some even gave him their watches, and one American lady bestowed upon him her jewelled smelling-bottle. The princes embraced him, and the king himself saluted him in military fashion. But the young Sotirios was seeking for other praise than theirs. Past the ranks of royalty and fair maidenhood, past the outstretched hands of his own countrymen, past the applauding crowd of foreigners, his gaze wandered till it fell upon an old man trembling with eagerness, who resolutely pushed his way through the excited, satisfied throng. Then the young face lighted, and as old Loues advanced to the innermost circle with arms outstretched to embrace his boy, the young victor said, simply: “You see, father, I have obeyed.”

MENTAL DISCIPLINE.

The athlete trains for his race; and the mind must be put into training if one will win life’s race.

“It is,” says Professor Mathews, “only by continued, strenuous efforts, repeated again and again, day after day, week after week, and month after month, that the ability can be acquired to fasten the mind to one subject, however abstract or knotty, to the exclusion of everything else. The process of obtaining this self-mastery–this complete command of one’s mental powers–is a gradual one, its length varying with the mental constitution of each person; but its acquisition is worth infinitely more than the utmost labor it ever costs.”

“Perhaps the most valuable result of all education,” it was said by Professor Huxley, “is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not; it is the first lesson which ought to be learned, and, however early a man’s training begins, it is probably the last lesson which he learns thoroughly.”

DOING THINGS ONCE.

When Henry Ward Beecher was asked how it was that he could accomplish so much more than other men, he replied:

“I don’t do more, but less, than other people. They do all their work three times over: once in anticipation, once in actuality, once in rumination. I do mine in actuality alone, doing it once instead of three times.”

This was by the intelligent exercise of Mr. Beecher’s will-power in concentrating his mind upon what he was doing at a given moment, and then turning to something else. Any one who has observed business men closely, has noticed this characteristic. One of the secrets of a successful life is to be able to hold all of our energies upon one point, to focus all of the scattered rays of the mind upon one place or thing.

CENTRALIZING FORCE.

The mental reservoir of most people is like a leaky dam which we sometimes see in the country, where the greater part of the water flows out without going over the wheel and doing the work of the mill. The habit of mind-wandering, of worrying about this and that,

“Genius, that power which dazzles mortal eyes,
Is oft but Perseverance in disguise.”

Many a man would have been a success had he connected his fragmentary efforts. Spasmodic, disconnected attempts, without concentration, uncontrolled by any fixed idea, will never bring success. It is continuity of purpose alone that achieves results.

LEARNING TO SWIM.

The way to learn to run is to run, the way to learn to swim is to swim. The way to learn to develop will-power is by the actual exercise of will-power in the business of life. “The man that exercises his will,” says an English essayist, “makes it a stronger and more effective force in proportion to the extent to which such exercise is intelligently and perseveringly maintained.” The forth-putting of will-power is a means of strengthening will-power. The will becomes strong by exercise. To stick to a thing till you are master, is a test of intellectual discipline and power.

DR. CUYLER.

“It is astonishing,” says Dr. Theodore Cuyler, “how many men lack this power of ‘holding on’ until they reach the goal. They can make a sudden dash, but they lack grit. They are easily discouraged. They get on as long as everything goes smoothly, but when there is friction they lose heart. They depend on stronger personalities for their spirit and strength. They lack independence or originality. They only dare to do what others do. They do not step boldly from the crowd and act fearlessly.”

THE BIG TREES.

What is needed by him who would succeed in the highest degree possible is careful planning. He is to accumulate reserved power, that he may be equal to all emergencies. Thomas Starr King said that the great trees of California gave him his first impression of the power of reserve. “It was the thought of the reserve energies that had been compacted into them,” he said, “that stirred me. The mountains had given them their iron and rich stimulants, the hills had given them their soil, the clouds had given their rain and snow, and a thousand summers and winters had poured forth their treasures about their vast roots.”

No young man can hope to do anything above the commonplace who has not made his life a reservoir of power on which he can constantly draw, which will never fail him in any emergency. Be sure that you have stored away, in your power-house, the energy, the knowledge that will be equal to the great occasion when it comes. “If I were twenty, and had but ten years to live,” said a great scholar and writer, “I would spend the first nine years accumulating knowledge and getting ready for the tenth.”

“I WILL.”

“There are no two words in the English language which stand out in bolder relief, like kings upon a checker-board, to so great an extent as the words ‘I will.’ There is strength, depth and solidity, decision, confidence and power, determination, vigor and individuality, in the round, ringing tone which characterizes its delivery. It talks to you of triumph over difficulties, of victory in the face of discouragement, of will to promise and strength to perform, of lofty and daring enterprise, of unfettered aspirations, and of the thousand and one solid impulses by which man masters impediments in the way of progression.”

As one has well said: “He who is silent is forgotten; he who does not advance falls back; he who stops is overwhelmed, distanced, crushed; he who ceases to become greater, becomes smaller; he who leaves off gives up; the stationary is the beginning of the end–it precedes death; to live is to achieve, to will without ceasing.”

Be thou a hero; let thy might

Tramp on eternal snows its way,

And through the ebon walls of night,

Hew down a passage unto day.

Park Benjamin.

Chapter II

The Rulers Of Destiny

There is no chance, no destiny, no fate,

Can circumvent, or hinder, or control

The firm resolve of a determined soul.

Gifts count for nothing; will alone is great;

All things give way before it soon or late.

What obstacle can stay the mighty force

Of the sea-seeking river in its course,

Or cause the ascending orb of day to wait?

Each well-born soul must win what it deserves.

Let the fool prate of luck. The fortunate

Is he whose earnest purpose never swerves,

Whose slightest action or inaction serves

The one great aim.

Ella Wheeler Wilcox.

There is always room for a man of force.–Emerson.

The king is the man who can.–Carlyle.

A strong, defiant purpose is many-handed, and lays hold of whatever is near that can serve it; it has a magnetic power that draws to itself whatever is kindred.–T.T. Munger.

What is will-power, looked at in a large way, but energy of character? Energy of will, self-originating force, is the soul of every great character. Where it is, there is life; where it is not, there is faintness, helplessness, and despondency. “Let it be your first study to teach the world that you are not wood and straw; that there is some iron in you.” Men who have left their mark upon the world have been men of great and prompt decision. The achievements of will-power are almost beyond computation. Scarcely anything seems impossible to the man who can will strongly enough and long enough. One talent with a will behind it will accomplish more than ten without it, as a thimbleful of powder in a rifle, the bore of whose barrel will give it direction, will do greater execution than a carload burned in the open air.

“THE WILLS, THE WON’TS, AND THE CAN’TS.”

“There are three kinds of people in the world,” says a recent writer, “the wills, the won’ts, and the can’ts. The first accomplish everything; the second oppose everything; the third fail in everything.”

The shores of fortune, as Foster says, are covered with the stranded wrecks of men of brilliant ability, but who have wanted courage, faith, and decision, and have therefore perished in sight of more resolute but less capable adventurers, who succeeded in making port.

Were I called upon to express in a word the secret of so many failures among those who started out with high hopes, I should say they lacked will-power. They could not half will: and what is a man without a will? He is like an engine without steam. Genius unexecuted is no more genius than a bushel of acorns is a forest of oaks.

Will has been called the spinal column of personality. “The will in its relation to life,” says an English writer, “may be compared at once to the rudder and to the steam engine of a vessel, on the confined and related action of which it depends entirely for the direction of its course and the vigor of its movement.”

Strength of will is the test of a young man’s possibilities. Can he will strong enough, and hold whatever he undertakes with an iron grip? It is the iron grip that takes and holds. What chance is there in this crowding, pushing, selfish, greedy world, where everything is pusher or pushed, for a young man with no will, no grip on life? The man who would forge to the front in this competitive age must be a man of prompt and determined decision.

A TAILOR’S NEEDLE.

It is in one of Ben Jonson’s old plays: “When I once take the humor of a thing, I am like your tailor’s needle–I go through with it.”

This is not different from Richelieu, who said: “When I have once taken a resolution, I go straight to my aim; I overthrow all, I cut down all.”

And in business affairs the counsel of Rothschild is to the same effect: “Do without fail that which you determine to do.”

Gladstone’s children were taught to accomplish _to the end_ whatever they might begin, no matter how insignificant the undertaking might be.

WHAT IS WORSE THAN RASHNESS

It is irresolution that is worse than rashness. “He that shoots,” says Feltham, “may sometimes hit the mark; but he that shoots not at all can never hit it. Irresolution is like an ague; it shakes not this nor that limb, but all the body is at once in a fit.”

The man who is forever twisting and turning, backing and filling, hesitating and dawdling, shuffling and parleying, weighing and balancing, splitting hairs over non-essentials, listening to every new motive which presents itself, will never accomplish anything. But the positive man, the decided man, is a power in the world, and stands for something; you can measure him, and estimate the work that his energy will accomplish.

Opportunity is coy, is swift, is gone, before the slow, the unobservant, the indolent, or the careless can seize her. “Vigilance in watching opportunity,” said Phelps, “tact and daring in seizing upon opportunity; force and persistence in crowding opportunity to its utmost of possible achievement–these are the martial virtues which must command success.” “The best men,” remarked Chapin, “are not those who have waited for chances, but who have taken them; besieged the chance; conquered the chance; and made chance the servitor.”

Is it not possible to classify successes and failures by their various degrees of will-power? A man who can resolve vigorously upon a course of action, and turns neither to the right nor to the left, though a paradise tempt him, who keeps his eyes upon the goal, whatever distracts him, is sure of success.

“Not every vessel that sails from Tarshish will bring back the gold of Ophir. But shall it therefore rot in the harbor? No! Give its sails to the wind!”

CONSCIOUS POWER.

“Conscious power,” says Melles, “exists within the mind of every one. Sometimes its existence is unrealized, but it is there. It is there to be developed and brought forth, like the culture of that obstinate but beautiful flower, the orchid. To allow it to remain dormant is to place one’s self in obscurity, to trample on one’s ambition, to smother one’s faculties. To develop it is to individualize all that is best within you, and give it to the world. It is by an absolute knowledge of yourself, the proper estimate of your own value.”

“There is hardly a reader,” says an experienced educator, “who will not be able to recall the early life of at least one young man whose childhood was spent in poverty, and who, in boyhood, expressed a firm desire to secure a higher education. If, a little later, that desire became a declared resolve, soon the avenues opened to that end. That desire and resolve created an atmosphere which attracted the forces necessary to the attainment of the purpose. Many of these young men will tell us that, as long as they were hoping and striving and longing, mountains of difficulty rose before them; but that when they fashioned their hopes into fixed purposes aid came unsought to help them on the way.”

DO YOU BELIEVE IN YOURSELF?

The man without self-reliance and an iron will is the plaything of chance, the puppet of his environment, the slave of circumstances. Are not doubts the greatest of enemies? If you would succeed up to the limit of your possibilities, must you not constantly hold to the belief that you are success-organized, and that you will be successful, no matter what opposes? You are never to allow a shadow of doubt to enter your mind that the Creator intended you to win in life’s battle. Regard every suggestion that your life may be a failure, that you are not made like those who succeed, and that success is not for you, as a traitor, and expel it from your mind as you would a thief from your house.

There is something sublime in the youth who possesses the spirit of boldness and fearlessness, who has proper confidence in his ability to do and dare.

The world takes us at our own valuation. It believes in the man who believes in himself, but it has little use for the timid man, the one who is never certain of himself; who cannot rely on his own judgment, who craves advice from others, and is afraid to go ahead on his own account.

It is the man with a positive nature, the man who believes that he is equal to the emergency, who believes he can do the thing he ttempts, who wins the confidence of his fellow-man. He is beloved because he is brave and self-sufficient.

Those who have accomplished great things in the world have been, as a rule, bold, aggressive, and self-confident. They dared to step out from the crowd, and act in an original way. They were not afraid to be generals.

There is little room in this crowding, competing age for the timid, vacillating youth. He who would succeed to-day must not only be brave, but must also dare to take chances. He who waits for certainty never wins.

“The law of the soul is eternal endeavor,

That bears the man onward and upward forever.”

“A man can be too confiding in others, but never too confident in himself.”

Never admit defeat or poverty. Stoutly assert your divine right to hold your head up and look the world in the face; step bravely to the front whatever opposes, and the world will make way for you. No one will insist upon your rights while you yourself doubt that you have any. Believe you were made for the place you fill. Put forth your whole energies. Be awake, electrify yourself; go forth to the task. A young man once said to his employer, “Don’t give me an easy job. I want to handle heavy boxes, shoulder great loads. I would like to lift a big mountain and throw it into the sea,”–and he stretched out two brawny arms, while his honest eyes danced and his whole being glowed with conscious strength.

The world in its heart admires the stern, determined doer. “The world turns aside to let any man pass who knows whither he is going.” “It is wonderful how even the apparent casualties of life seem to bow to a spirit that will not bow to them, and yield to assist a design, after having in vain attempted to frustrate it.”

“The man who succeeds,” says Prentice Mulford, “must always in mind or imagination live, move, think, and act as if he gained that success, or he never will gain it.”

“We go forth,” said Emerson, “austere, dedicated, believing in the iron links of Destiny, and will not turn on our heels to save our lives. A book, a bust, or only the sound of a name shoots a spark through the nerves, and we suddenly believe in will. We cannot hear of personal vigor of any kind, great power of performance, without fresh resolution.”

Chapter III

Force Of Will In Camp And Field

Oh, what miracles have been wrought by the self-confidence, the self-determination of an iron will! What impossible deeds have been performed by it! It was this that took Napoleon over the Alps in midwinter; it took Farragut and Dewey past the cannons, torpedoes, and mines of the enemy; it led Nelson and Grant to victory; it has been the great tonic in the world of discovery, invention, and art; it has helped to win the thousand triumphs in war and science which were deemed impossible.

The secret of Jeanne d’Arc’s success was not alone in rare decision of character, but in the seeing of visions which inspired her to self-confidence–confidence in her divine mission.

It was an iron will that gave Nelson command of the British fleet, a title, and a statue at Trafalgar Square It was the keynote of his character when he said, “When I don’t know whether to fight or not, I always fight.”

It was an iron will that was brought into play when Horatius with two companions held ninety thousand Tuscans at bay until the bridge across the Tiber had been destroyed–when Leonidas at Thermopylae checked the mighty march of Xerxes–when Themistocles off the coast of Greece shattered the Persian’s Armada–when Caesar finding his army hard pressed seized spear and buckler and snatched victory from defeat–when Winkelried gathered to his breast a sheaf of Austrian spears and opened a path for his comrades–when Wellington fought in many climes without ever being conquered–when Ney on a hundred fields changed apparent disaster into brilliant triumph–when Sheridan arrived from Winchester as the Union retreat was becoming a route and turned the tide–when Sherman signaled his men to hold the fort knowing that their leader was coming.

History furnishes thousands of examples of men who have seized occasions to accomplish results deemed impossible by those less resolute. Prompt decision and whole-souled action sweep the world before them. Who was the organizer of the modern German empire? Was he not the man of iron?

NAPOLEON AND GRANT.

“What would you do if you were besieged in a place entirely destitute of provisions?” asked the examiner, when Napoleon was a cadet.

“If there were anything to eat in the enemy’s camp, I should not be concerned.”

When Paris was in the hands of a mob, and the authorities were panic-stricken, in came a man who said, “I know a young officer who can quell this mob.”

“Send for him.” Napoleon was sent for; he came, he subjugated the mob, he subjugated the authorities, he ruled France, then conquered Europe.

May 10, 1796, Napoleon carried the bridge at Lodi, in the face of the Austrian batteries, trained upon the French end of the structure. Behind them were six thousand troops. Napoleon massed four thousand grenadiers at the head of the bridge, with a battalion of three hundred carbineers in front. At the tap of the drum the foremost assailants wheeled from the cover of the street wall under a terrible hail of grape and canister, and attempted to pass the gateway to the bridge. The front ranks went down like stalks of grain before a reaper; the column staggered and reeled backward, and the valiant grenadiers were appalled by the task before them. Without a word or a look of reproach, Napoleon placed himself at their head, and his aids and generals rushed to his side. Forward again over heaps of dead that choked the passage, and a quick run counted by seconds only carried the column across two hundred yards of clear space, scarcely a shot from the Austrians taking effect beyond the point where the platoons wheeled for the first leap. _The guns of the enemy were not aimed at the advance. The advance was too quick for the Austrian gunners_. So sudden and so miraculous was it all, that the Austrian artillerists abandoned their guns instantly, and their supports fled in a panic instead of rushing to the front and meeting the French onslaught. This Napoleon had counted on in making the bold attack.

What was Napoleon but the thunderbolt of war? He once journeyed from Spain to Paris at seventeen miles an hour in the saddle.

“Is it _possible_ to cross the path?” asked Napoleon of the engineers who had been sent to explore the dreaded pass of St. Bernard.

“Perhaps,” was the hesitating reply, “it is within the limits of possibility.”

“Forward, then.”

Yet Ulysses S. Grant, a young man unknown to fame, with neither money nor influence, with no patrons or friends, in six years fought more battles, gained more victories, captured more prisoners, took more spoils, commanded more men, than Napoleon did in twenty years. “The great thing about him,” said Lincoln, “is cool persistence.”

“DON’T SWEAR–FIGHT.”

When the Spanish fire on San Juan Hill became almost unbearable, some of the Rough Riders began to swear. Colonel Wood, with the wisdom of a good leader, called out, amid the whistle of the Mauser bullets: “Don’t swear–fight!”

In a skirmish at Salamanca, while the enemy’s guns were pouring shot into his regiment, Sir William Napier’s men became disobedient. He at once ordered a halt, and flogged four of the ringleaders under fire. The men yielded at once, and then marched three miles under a heavy cannonade as coolly as if it were a review.

When Pellisier, the Crimean chief of Zouaves, struck an officer with a whip, the man drew a pistol that missed fire. The chief replied: “Fellow, I order you a three days’ arrest for not having your arms in better order.”

The man of iron will is cool in the hour of danger.

“I HAD TO RUN LIKE A CYCLONE.”

This was what Roosevelt said about his pushing on up San Juan Hill ahead of his regiment: “I had to run like a cyclone to stay in front and keep from being run over.”

The personal heroism of Hobson, or of Cushing, who blew up the “Albemarle” forty years ago, was but the expression of a magnificent will power. It was this which was the basis of General Wheeler’s unparalleled military advancement: a second lieutenant at twenty-three, a colonel at twenty-four, a brigadier-general at twenty-five, a major-general at twenty-six, a corps commander at twenty-seven, and a lieutenant-general at twenty-eight.

General Wheeler had sixteen horses killed under him, and a great number wounded. His saddle equipments and clothes were frequently struck by the missiles of the enemy. He was three times wounded, once painfully. He had thirty-two staff officers, or acting staff officers, killed or wounded. In almost every case they were immediately by his side. No officer was ever more exposed to the missiles of death than Joseph Wheeler.

What is this imperial characteristic of manhood, an iron will, but that which underlies all magnificent achievement, whether by heroes of the “Light Brigade” or the heroic fire-fighters of our great cities?

Chapter IV

Will Power In Its Relation To Health And Disease

I.

There is no doubt that, as a rule, great decision of character is usually accompanied by great constitutional firmness. Men who have been noted for great firmness of character have usually been strong and robust. As a rule it is the strong physical man who carries weight and conviction. Take, as an example, William the Conqueror, as he is pictured by Green in his history:

“The very spirit of the sea-robbers from whom he sprang seemed embodied in his gigantic form, his enormous strength, his savage countenance, his desperate bravery. No other knight under heaven, his enemies confessed, was William’s peer. No other man could bend William’s bow. His mace crashed through a ring of English warriors to the foot of the standard. He rose to his greatest heights in moments when other men despaired. No other man who ever sat upon the throne of England was this man’s match.”

Or, take Webster. Sydney Smith said: “Webster is a living lie; because no man on earth can be as great as he looks.” Carlyle said of him: “One would incline at sight to back him against the world.” His very physique was eloquent. Men yielded their wills to his at sight.

The great prizes of life ever fall to the robust, the stalwart, the strong,–not to a huge muscle or powerful frame necessarily, but to a strong vitality, a great nervous energy. It is the Lord Broughams, working almost continuously one hundred and forty-four hours; it is the Napoleons, twenty hours in the saddle; it is the Franklins, camping out in the open air at seventy; it is the Gladstones, firmly grasping the helm of the ship of state at eighty-four, tramping miles every day, and chopping down huge trees at eighty-five,–who accomplish the great things of life.

To prosper you must improve your brain power; and nothing helps the brain more than a healthy body. The race of to-day is only to be won by those who will study to keep their bodies in such good condition that their minds are able and ready to sustain that high pressure on memory and mind, which our present fierce competition engenders. It is health rather than strength that is now wanted. Health is essentially the requirement of our time to enable us to succeed in life. In all modern occupations–from the nursery to the school, from the school to the shop or world beyond–the brain and nerve strain go on, continuous, augmenting, and intensifying.

As a rule physical vigor is the condition of a great career. Stonewall Jackson, early in life, determined to conquer every weakness he had, physical, mental, and moral. He held all of his powers with a firm hand. To his great self-discipline and self-mastery he owed his success. So determined was he to harden himself to the weather that he could not be induced to wear an overcoat in winter. “I will not give in to the cold,” he said. For a year, on account of dyspepsia, he lived on buttermilk and stale bread, and wore a wet shirt next his body because his doctor advised it, although everybody else ridiculed the idea. This was while he was professor at the Virginia Military Institute. His doctor advised him to retire at nine o’clock; and, no matter where he was, or who was present, he always sought his bed on the minute. He adhered rigidly through life to this stern system of discipline. Such self-training, such self-conquest, gives one great power over others. It is equal to genius itself.

“I can do nothing,” said Grant, “without nine hours’ sleep.”

What else is so grand as to stand on life’s threshold, fresh, young, hopeful, with a consciousness of power equal to any emergency,–a master of the situation? The glory of a young man is his strength.

Our great need of the world to-day is for men and women who are good animals. To endure the strain of our concentrated civilization, the coming man and woman must have an excess of animal spirits. They must have a robustness of health. Mere absence of disease is not health. It is the overflowing fountain, not the one half full, that gives life and beauty to the valley below. Only he is healthy who exults in mere animal existence; whose very life is a luxury; who feels a bounding pulse throughout his body; who feels life in every limb, as dogs do when scouring over the field, or as boys do when gliding over fields of ice.

II.

Yet in spite of all this, in defiance of it, we know that an iron will is often triumphant in the contest with physical infirmity.

“Brave spirits are a balsam to themselves:

There is a nobleness of mind that heals

Wounds beyond salves.”

“One day,” said a noted rope-walker, “I signed an agreement to wheel a barrow along a rope on a given day. A day or two before I was seized with lumbago. I called in my medical man, and told him I must be cured by a certain day; not only because I should lose what I hoped to earn, but also forfeit a large sum. I got no better, and the doctor forbade my getting up. I told him, ‘What do I want with your advice? If you cannot cure me, of what good is your advice?’ When I got to the place, there was the doctor protesting I was unfit for the exploit. I went on, though I felt like a frog with my back. I got ready my pole and my barrow, took hold of the handles and wheeled it along the rope as well as I ever did. When I got to the end I wheeled it back again, and when this was done I was a frog again. What made me that I could wheel the barrow? It was my reserve will.”

“What does he know,” asks the sage, “who has not suffered?” Did not Schiller produce his greatest tragedies in the midst of physical suffering almost amounting to torture? Handel was never greater than when, warned by palsy of the approach of death, and struggling with distress and suffering, he sat down to compose the great works which have made his name immortal in music. Beethoven was almost totally deaf and burdened with sorrow when he produced his greatest works. Milton writing “Who best can suffer, best can do,” wrote at his best when in feeble health, and when poor and blind.

“… Yet I argue not

Against Heaven’s hand or will, nor bate a jot

Of heart or hope; but still bear up and steer

Right onward.”

The Rev. William H. Milburn, who lost his sight when a child, studied for the ministry, and was ordained before he attained his majority. He has written half a dozen books, among them a very careful history of the Mississippi Valley. He has long been chaplain of the lower house of Congress.

Blind Fanny Crosby, of New York, was a teacher of the blind for many years. She has written nearly three thousand hymns, among which are: “Pass Me not, O Gentle Saviour,” “Rescue the Perishing,” “Saviour More than Life to Me,” and “Jesus keep Me near the Cross.”

“The truest help we can render one who is afflicted,” said Bishop Brooks, “is not to take his burden from him, but to call out his best energy, that he may be able to bear.”

What a mighty will Darwin had! He was in continual ill health. He was in constant suffering. His patience was marvellous. No one but his wife knew what he endured. “For forty years,” says his son, “he never knew one day of health;” yet during those forty years he unremittingly forced himself to do the work from which the mightiest minds and the strongest constitutions would have shrunk. He had a wonderful power of sticking to a subject. He used almost to apologize for his patience, saying that he could not bear to be beaten, as if it were a sign of weakness.

Bulwer advises us to refuse to be ill, never to tell people we are ill, never to own it ourselves. Illness is one of those things which a man should resist on principle. Do not dwell upon your ailments nor study your symptoms. Never allow yourself to be convinced that you are not complete master of yourself. Stoutly affirm your own superiority over bodily ills. We should keep a high ideal of health and harmony constantly before the mind.

Is not the mind the natural protector of the body? We cannot believe that the Creator has left the whole human race entirely at the mercy of only about half a dozen specific drugs which always act with certainty. There is a divine remedy placed within us for many of the ills we suffer. If we only knew how to use this power of will and mind to protect ourselves, many of us would be able to carry youth and cheerfulness with us into the teens of our second century. The mind has undoubted power to preserve and sustain physical youth and beauty, to keep the body strong and healthy, to renew life, and to preserve it from decay, many years longer than it does now. The longest-lived men and women have, as a rule, been those who have attained great mental and moral development. They have lived in the upper region of a higher life, beyond the reach of much of the jar, the friction, and the discords which weaken and shatter most lives.

Every physician knows that courageous people, with indomitable will, are not half as likely to contract contagious diseases as the timid, the vacillating, the irresolute. A thoughtful physician once assured a friend that if an express agent were to visit New Orleans in the yellow-fever season, having forty thousand dollars in his care, he would be in little danger of the fever so long as he kept possession of the money. Let him once deliver that into other hands, and the sooner he left the city the better.

Napoleon used to visit the plague hospitals even when the physicians dreaded to go, and actually put his hands upon the plague-stricken patients. He said the man who was not afraid could vanish the plague. A will power like this is a strong tonic to the body. Such a will has taken many men from apparent death-beds, and enabled them to perform wonderful deeds of valor. When told by his physicians that he must die, Douglas Jerrold said: “And leave a family of helpless children? I won’t die.” He kept his word, and lived for years.

Chapter V

The Romance Of Achievement Under Difficulties

What doth the poor man’s son inherit?

Stout muscles, and a sinewy heart,

A hardy frame, a hardier spirit!

King of two hands he does his part

In every useful toil and art:

A heritage it seems to me,

A king might wish to hold in fee.

Lowell.

Has not God given every man a capital to start with? Are we not born rich? He is rich who has good health, a sound body, good muscles; he is rich who has a good head, a good disposition, a good heart; he is rich who has two good hands, with five chances on each. Equipped? Every man is equipped as only God could equip him. What a fortune he possesses in the marvellous mechanism of his body and mind. It is individual effort that has achieved everything worth achieving.

THE FUN OF THE LITTLE GAME.

A big Australian, six feet four, James Tyson, died not long since, with a property of $25,000,000, who began life as a farm hand. Tyson cared little for money. He used to say of it:

“I shall just leave it behind me when I go. I shall have done with it then, and it will not concern me afterwards. But,” he would add, with a characteristic semi-exultant snap of the fingers, “the money is nothing. It was the little game that was the fun.”

Being asked, “What was the little game?” he replied with an energy of concentration peculiar to him: “_Fighting the desert_. That has been my work. I have been fighting the desert all my life, and I have won. I have put water where was no water, and beef where was no beef. I have put fences where there were no fences, and roads where there were no roads. Nothing can undo what I have done, and millions will be happier for it after I am long dead and forgotten.”

Has not self-help accomplished about all the great things of the world? How many young men falter, faint, and dally with their purpose because they have no capital to start with, and wait and wait for some good luck to give them a lift. But success is the child of drudgery and perseverance. It cannot be coaxed or bribed; pay the price, and it is yours. A constant struggle, a ceaseless battle to bring success from inhospitable surroundings, is the price of all great achievements.

CONQUERORS OF FORTUNE.

Benjamin Franklin had this tenacity of purpose in a wonderful degree. When he started in the printing business in Philadelphia, he carried his material through the streets on a wheelbarrow. He hired one room for his office, work-room, and sleeping-room. He found a formidable rival in the city and invited him to his room. Pointing to a piece of bread from which he had just eaten his dinner, he said:

“Unless you can live cheaper than I can, you cannot starve me out.”

It was so that he proved the wisdom of Edmund Burke’s saying, that “He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves, and sharpens our skill: our antagonist is our helper.”

The poor and friendless lad, George Peabody, weary, footsore, and hungry, called at a tavern in Concord, N.H., and asked to be allowed to saw wood for lodging and breakfast. Yet he put in work for everything he ever received, and out-matched the poverty of early days.

Gideon Lee could not even get shoes to wear in winter, when a boy, but he went to work barefoot in the snow. He made a bargain with himself to work sixteen hours a day. He fulfilled it to the letter, and when from interruption he lost time, he robbed himself of sleep to make it up. He became a wealthy merchant of New York, mayor of the city, and a member of Congress.

COMMERCIAL COURAGE.

The business affairs of a gentleman named Rouss were once in a complicated condition, owing to his conflicting interests in various states, and he was thrown into prison. While confined he wrote on the walls of his cell:

“I am forty years of age this day. When I am fifty, I shall be worth half a million; and by the time I am sixty, I shall be worth a million dollars.”

He lived to accumulate more than three million dollars.

“The ruin which overtakes so many merchants,” says Whipple, “is due not so much to their lack of business talent as to their lack of business nerve.”

Cyrus W. Field had retired from business with a large fortune when he became possessed with the idea that by means of a cable laid upon the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, telegraphic communication could be established between Europe and America. He plunged into the undertaking with all the force of his being. It was an incredibly hard contest: the forests of Newfoundland, the lobby in Congress, the unskilled handling of brakes on his Agamemnon cable, a second and a third breaking of the cable at sea, the cessation of the current in a well-laid cable, the snapping of a superior cable on the Great Eastern–all these availed not to foil the iron will of Field, whose final triumph was that of mental energy in the application of science.

FOUR NEW YORK JOURNALISTS.

To Horace Greeley, the founder of the “Tribune,” I need not allude; his story is or ought to be in every school-book.

James Brooks, once the editor and proprietor of the “Daily Express,” and later an eminent congressman, began life as a clerk in a store in Maine, and when twenty-one received for his pay a hogshead of New England rum. He was so eager to go to college that he started for Waterville with his trunk on his back, and when he was graduated he was so poor and plucky that he carried his trunk on his back to the station as he went home.

When James Gordon Bennett was forty years old he collected all his property, three hundred dollars, and in a cellar with a board upon two barrels for a desk, himself his own typesetter, office boy, publisher, newsboy, clerk, editor, proofreader, and printer’s devil, he started the “New York Herald.” He did this, after many attempts and defeats in trying to follow the routine, instead of doing his own way. Never was any man’s early career a better illustration of Wendell Phillips’ dictum: “What is defeat? Nothing but education; nothing but the first steps to something better.”

Thurlow Weed, who was a journalist for fifty-seven years, strong, sensible, genial, tactful, and of magnificent physique, who did so much to shape public policy in the Empire State, tells a most romantic story of his boyhood:–

“I cannot ascertain how much schooling I got at Catskill, probably less than a year, certainly not a year and a half, and this was when I was not more than five or six years old. I felt a necessity, at an early age, of trying to do something for my own support.

“My first employment was in sugar-making, an occupation to which I became much attached. I now look with great pleasure upon the days and nights passed in the sap-bush. The want of shoes (which, as the snow was deep, was no small privation) was the only drawback upon my happiness. I used, however, to tie pieces of an old rag carpet around my feet, and got along pretty well, chopping wood and gathering up sap. But when the spring advanced, and bare ground appeared in spots, I threw off the old carpet encumbrance and did my work barefoot.

“There is much leisure time for boys who are making maple sugar. I devoted this time to reading, when I could obtain books; but the farmers of that period had few or no books, save their Bibles. I borrowed books whenever and wherever I could.

“I heard that a neighbor, three miles off, had borrowed from a still more distant neighbor a book of great interest. I started off, barefoot, in the snow, to obtain the treasure. There were spots of bare ground, upon which I would stop to warm my feet. And there were also, along the road, occasional lengths of log-fence from which the snow had melted, and upon which it was a luxury to walk. The book was at home, and the good people consented, upon my promise that it should be neither torn nor soiled, to lend it to me. In returning with the prize, I was too happy to think of the snow or my naked feet.

“Candles were then among the luxuries, not the necessaries, of life. If boys, instead of going to bed after dark, wanted to read, they supplied themselves with pine knots, by the light of which, in a horizontal position, they pursued their studies. In this manner, with my body in the sugar-house, and my head out of doors, where the fat pine was blazing, I read with intense interest the book I had borrowed, a ‘History of the French Revolution.’”

Weed’s next earning was in an iron foundry at Onondaga:

“My business was, after a casting, to temper and prepare the molding ‘dogs,’ myself. This was night and day work. We ate salt pork and rye and Indian bread, three times a day, and slept on straw in bunks. I liked the excitement of a furnace life.”

When he went to the “Albany Argus” to learn the printing business he worked from five in the morning till nine at night.

FROM HUMBLEST BEGINNINGS.

The more difficulties one has to encounter, within and without, the more significant and the higher in inspiration his life will be.–Horace Bushnell.

The story of Weed and of Greeley is not an uncommon one in America. Some of the most eminent men on the globe have struggled with poverty in early life and triumphed over it.

The astronomer Kepler, whose name can never die, was kept in constant anxieties; and he told fortunes by astrology for a livelihood, saying that astrology, as the daughter of astronomy, ought to keep her mother. All sorts of service he had to accept; he made almanacs and worked for any one who would pay him.

Linnaeus was so poor when getting his education that he had to mend his shoes with folded paper, and often had to beg his meals of his friends.

During the ten years in which he made his greatest discoveries, Isaac Newton could hardly pay two shillings a week to the Royal Society of which he was a member. Some of his friends wanted to get him excused from this payment, but he would not allow them to act.

Humphry Davy had but a slender chance to acquire great scientific knowledge, yet he had true mettle in him, and he made even old pans, kettles, and bottles contribute to his success, as he experimented and studied in the attic of the apothecary store where he worked.

George Stephenson was one of eight children whose parents were so poor that all lived in a single room. George had to watch cows for a neighbor, but he managed to get time to make engines of clay, with hemlock sticks for pipes. At seventeen he had charge of an engine, with his father for fireman. He could neither read nor write, but the engine was his teacher, and he a faithful student. While the other hands were playing games or loafing in liquor shops during the holidays, George was taking his machine to pieces, cleaning it, studying it, and making experiments in engines. When he had become famous as a great inventor of improvements in engines, those who had loafed and played called him lucky.

It was by steadfastly keeping at it, by indomitable will power, that these men won their positions in life.

“We rise by the things that are under our feet;

By what we have mastered of good or gain.”

TALENT IN TATTERS.

Among the companions of Sir Joshua Reynolds, while he was studying his art at Rome, was a fellow-pupil of the name of Astley. They made an excursion, with some others, on a sultry day, and all except Astley took off their coats. After several taunts he was persuaded to do the same, and displayed on the back of his waistcoat a foaming waterfall. Distress had compelled him to patch his clothes with one of his own landscapes.

James Sharpies, the celebrated blacksmith artist of England, was very poor, but he often rose at three o’clock to copy books he could not buy. He would walk eighteen miles to Manchester and back after a hard day’s work, to buy a shilling’s worth of artist’s materials. He would ask for the heaviest work in the blacksmith shop, because it took a longer time to heat at the forge, and he could thus have many spare minutes to study the precious book, which he propped up against the chimney. He was a great miser of spare moments, and used every one as though he might never see another. He devoted his leisure hours for five years to that wonderful production, “The Forge,” copies of which are to be seen in many a home. It was by one unwavering aim, carried out by an iron will, that he wrought out his life triumph.

“That boy will beat me one day,” said an old painter as he watched a little fellow named Michael Angelo making drawings of pot and brushes, easel and stool, and other articles in the studio. The barefoot boy did persevere until he had overcome every difficulty and become the greatest master of art the world has known. Although Michael Angelo made himself immortal in three different occupations,–and his fame might well rest upon his dome of St. Peter as an architect, upon his “Moses” as a sculptor, or upon his “Last Judgment” as a painter,–yet we find by his correspondence, now in the British Museum, that when he was at work on his colossal bronze statue of Pope Julius II., he was so poor that he could not have his younger brother come to visit him at Bologna, because he had but one bed in which he and three of his assistants slept together. Yet

“The star of an unconquered will

Arose in his breast,

Serene, and resolute and still,

And calm and self-possessed.”

CONCENTRATED ENERGY.

The struggles and triumphs of those who are bound to win is a never-ending tale. Nor will the procession of enthusiastic workers cease so long as the globe is turning on its axle.

Say what we will of genius, specialized in a hundred callings, yet the fact remains that no amount of genius has ever availed upon the earth unless enforced by will power to overcome the obstacles that hedge about every one who would rise above the circumstances in which he was born, or become greater than his calling. Was not Virgil the son of a porter, Horace of a shopkeeper, Demosthenes of a cutler, Milton of a money scrivener, Shakespeare of a wool stapler, and Cromwell of a brewer?

Ben Jonson, when following his trade of a mason, worked on Lincoln’s Inn in London with trowel in hand and a book in his pocket. Joseph Hunter was a carpenter in youth, Robert Burns a plowman, Keats a druggist, Thomas Carlyle and Hugh Miller masons. Dante and Descartes were soldiers. Cardinal Wolsey, Defoe, and Kirke White were butchers’ sons. Faraday was the son of a hostler, and his teacher, Humphry Davy, was an apprentice to an apothecary. Kepler was a waiter boy in a German hotel, Bunyan a tinker, Copernicus the son of a Polish baker. They rose by being greater than their callings, as Arkwright rose above mere barbering, Bunyan above tinkering, Wilson above shoemaking, Lincoln above rail-splitting, and Grant above tanning. By being first-class barbers, tinkers, shoemakers, rail-splitters, tanners, they acquired the power which enabled them to become great inventors, authors, statesmen, generals. John Kay, the inventor of the fly-shuttle, James Hargreaves, who introduced the spinning-jenny, and Samuel Compton, who originated mule-spinning, were all artisans, uneducated and poor, but were endowed with natural faculties which enabled them to make a more enduring impression upon the world than anything that could have been done by the mere power of scholarship or wealth.

It cannot be said of any of these great names that their individual courses in life would have been what they were, had there been lacking a superb will power resistless as the tide to bear them upward and onward.

Let Fortune empty her whole quiver on me,

I have a soul that, like an ample shield,

Can take in all, and verge enough for more;

Fate was not mine, nor am I Fate’s:

Souls know no conquerors.

Dryden.

Chapter VI

Staying Power

“Never give up, there are chances and changes,

Helping the hopeful, a hundred to one;

And, through the chaos, High Wisdom arranges

Ever success, if you’ll only hold on.

Never give up; for the wisest is boldest,

Knowing that Providence mingles the cup,

And of all maxims, the best, as the oldest,

Is the stern watchword of ‘Never give up!’”

Be firm; one constant element of luck

Is genuine, solid, old Teutonic pluck.

Holmes.

Success in most things depends on knowing how long it takes to succeed.–_Montesquieu_.

The power to hold on is characteristic of all men who have accomplished anything great; they may lack in some other particular, have many weaknesses or eccentricities, but the quality of persistence is never absent from a successful man. No matter what opposition he meets or what discouragement overtakes him, drudgery cannot disgust him, obstacles cannot discourage him, labor cannot weary him; misfortune, sorrow, and reverses cannot harm him. It is not so much brilliancy of intellect, or fertility of resource, as persistency of effort, constancy of purpose, that makes a great man. Those who succeed in life are the men and women who keep everlastingly at it, who do not believe themselves geniuses, but who know that if they ever accomplish anything they must do it by determined and persistent industry.

Audubon after years of forest life had two hundred of his priceless drawings destroyed by mice.

“A poignant flame,” he relates, “pierced my brain like an arrow of fire, and for several weeks I was prostrated with fever. At length physical and moral strength awoke within me. Again I took my gun, my game-bag, my portfolio, and my pencils, and plunged once more into the depths of the forests.”

All are familiar with the misfortune of Carlyle while writing his “History of the French Revolution.” After the first volume was ready for the press, he loaned the manuscript to a neighbor, who left it lying on the floor, and the servant girl took it to kindle the fire. It was a bitter disappointment, but Carlyle was not the man to give up. After many months of poring Over hundreds of volumes of authorities and scores of manuscripts, he reproduced that which had burned in a few minutes.

PROCEED, AND LIGHT WILL DAWN.

The slightest acquaintance with literary history would bring to light a multitude of heroes of poverty or misfortune, of men and women perplexed and disheartened, who have yet aroused themselves to new effort at every new obstacle.

It is related by Arago that he found under the cover of a text book he was binding a short note from D’Alembert to a student:

“Go on, sir, go on. The difficulties you meet with will resolve themselves as you advance. Proceed; and light will dawn, and shine with increasing clearness on your path.”

“That maxim,” said Arago, “was my greatest master in mathematics.”

Had Balzac been easily discouraged he would have hesitated at the words
of warning given by his father:

“Do you know that in literature a man must be either a king or a beggar?”

“Very well,” was the reply, “_I will be a king_.”

His parents left him to his fate in a garret. For ten years he fought terrible battles with hardship and poverty, but won a great victory at last. He won it after producing forty novels that did not win.

Zola’s early manhood witnessed a bitter struggle against poverty and deprivation. Until twenty he was a spoiled child; but, on his father’s death, he and his mother began the battle of life in Paris. Of his dark time, Zola himself says:

“Often I went hungry for so long, that it seemed as if I must die. I scarcely tasted meat from one month’s end to another, and for two days I lived on three apples. Fire, even on the coldest nights, was an undreamed-of luxury; and I was the happiest man in Paris when I could get a candle, by the light of which I might study at night.”

Samuel Johnson’s bare feet at Oxford showed through the holes in his shoes, yet he threw out at his window the new pair that some one left at his door. He lived for a time in London on nine cents a day. For thirteen years he had a hard struggle with want. John Locke once lived on bread and water in a Dutch garret, and Heyne slept many a night on a barn floor with only a book for his pillow. It was to poverty as a thorn urging the breast of Harriet Martineau that we owe her writings.

There are no more interesting pages in biography than those which record how Emerson, as a child, was unable to read the second volume of a certain book, because his widowed mother could not afford the amount (five cents) necessary to obtain it from the circulating library.

“Poor fellow!” said Emerson, as he looked at his delicately-reared little son, “how much he loses by not having to go through the hard
experiences I had in my youth.”

It was through the necessity laid upon him to earn that Emerson made his first great success in life as a teacher. “I know,” he said, “no such unquestionable badge and ensign of a sovereign mind as that tenacity of purpose, which, through all change of companions or parties or fortunes, changes never, bates no jot of heart or hope, but wearies out opposition and arrives at its port.”

“SHE CAN NEVER SUCCEED.”

Louisa Alcott earned two hundred thousand dollars by her pen. Yet, when she was first dreaming of her power, her father handed her a manuscript one day that had been rejected by Mr. Fields, editor of the “Atlantic,” with the message:

“Tell Louisa to stick to her teaching; she can never succeed as a writer.”

“Tell him I _will_ succeed as a writer, and some day I shall write for the ‘Atlantic.’”

Not long after she wrote for the “Atlantic” a poem that Longfellow attributed to Emerson. And there came a time when she wrote in her diary:

“Twenty years ago I resolved to make the family independent if I could. At forty, that is done. Debts all paid, even the outlawed ones, and we have enough to be comfortable. It has cost me my health, perhaps.”

“I TRAMPLE ON IMPOSSIBILITIES”:

So it was said by Lord Chatham. “Why,” asked Mirabeau, “should we call ourselves men, unless it be to succeed in everything everywhere?”

“It is all very well,” said Charles J. Fox, “to tell me that a young man has distinguished himself by a brilliant first speech. He may go on satisfied with his first triumph; but show me a young man who has not succeeded at first, and has then gone on, and I will back that man to do better than those who succeeded at the first trial.” Cobden broke down completely the first time he appeared on a platform in Manchester, and the chairman apologized for him; but he did not give up speaking until every poor man in England had a larger, better, and cheaper loaf. Young Disraeli sprung from a hated and persecuted race, pushed his way up through the middle classes and upper classes, until he stood self-poised upon the topmost round of political and social power. At first he was scoffed at, ridiculed, rebuffed, hissed from the House of Commons; he simply said, “The time will come when you will hear me.” The time did come, and he swayed the sceptre of England for a quarter of a century.

How massive was the incalculable reserve power of Lincoln as a youth; or of President Garfield, wood-chopper, bell-ringer, and sweeper-general in college!

PERSISTENT PURPOSE.

We hear a great deal of talk about genius, talent, luck, chance, cleverness, and fine manners playing a large part in one’s success. Leaving out luck and chance, all these elements are important factors. Yet the possession of any or all of them, unaccompanied by a definite aim, a determined purpose, will not insure success. Men drift into business. They drift into society. They drift into politics. They drift into what they fondly and but vainly imagine is religion. If winds and tides are favorable, all is well; if not, all is wrong. Stalker says: “Most men merely drift through life, and the work they do is determined by a hundred different circumstances; they might as well be doing anything else, or they would prefer to be doing nothing at all.” Yet whatever else may have been lacking in the giants of the race, the men who have been conspicuously successful have all had one characteristic in common–doggedness and persistence of purpose.

It does not matter how clever a youth may be, whether he leads his class in college or outshines all the other boys in his community, he will never succeed if he lacks this essential of determined persistence. Many men who might have made brilliant musicians, artists, teachers, lawyers, able physicians or surgeons, in spite of predictions to the contrary, have fallen short of success because deficient in this quality.

Persistency of purpose is a power. It creates confidence in others. Everybody believes in the determined man. When he undertakes anything his battle is half won, because not only he himself, but every one who knows him, believes that he will accomplish whatever he sets out to do. People know that it is useless to oppose a man who uses his stumbling-blocks as stepping-stones; who is not afraid of defeat; who never, in spite of calumny or criticism, shrinks from his task; who never shirks responsibility; who always keeps his compass pointed to the north star of his purpose, no matter what storms may rage about him.

The persistent man never stops to consider whether he is succeeding or not. The only question with him is how to push ahead, to get a little farther along, a little nearer his goal. Whether it lead over mountains, rivers, or morasses, he must reach it. Every other consideration is sacrificed to this one dominant purpose.

The success of a dull or average youth and the failure of a brilliant one is a constant surprise in American history. But if the different cases are closely analyzed we shall find that the explanation lies in the staying power of the seemingly dull boy, the ability to stand firm as a rock under all circumstances, to allow nothing to divert him from his purpose.

THREE NECESSARY THINGS.

“Three things are necessary,” said Charles Sumner, “first, backbone; second, backbone; third, backbone.”

A good chance alone is nothing. Education is nothing without strong and vigorous resolution and stamina to make one accomplish something in the world. An encouraging start is nothing without backbone. A man who cannot stand erect, who wabbles first one way and then the other, who has no opinion of his own, or courage to think his own thought, is of very little use in this world. It is grit, it is perseverance, it is moral stamina and courage that govern the world.

At the trial of the seven bishops of the Church of England for refusing to aid the king to overthrow the Protestant faith, it was necessary to watch the officers at the doors, lest they send food to some juryman, and aid him to starve the others into an agreement. Nothing was allowed to be sent in but water for the jurymen to wash in, and they were so thirsty they drank it up. At first nine were for acquitting, and three for convicting. Two of the minority soon gave way; the third, Arnold, was obstinate. He declined to argue. Austin said to him, “Look at me. I am the largest and the strongest of the twelve; and before I will find such a petition as this libel, here will I stay till I am no bigger than a tobacco pipe.” Arnold yielded at six in the morning.

SUCCESS AGAINST ODDS.

Yes, to this thought I hold with firm persistence;

The last result of wisdom stamps it true:

He only earns his freedom and existence

Who daily conquers them anew.

Goethe.

“It is interesting to notice how some minds seem almost to create themselves,” says Irving, “springing up under every disadvantage, and working their solitary but irresistible way through a thousand obstacles.” Opposing circumstances create strength. Opposition gives us greater power of resistance. To overcome one barrier gives us greater ability to overcome the next. History is full of examples of men and women who have redeemed themselves from disgrace, poverty, and misfortune, by the firm resolution of an iron will.

Success is not measured by what a man accomplishes, but by the opposition he has encountered, and the courage with which he has maintained the struggle against overwhelming odds. Not the distance we have run, but the obstacles we have overcome, the disadvantages under which we have made the race, will decide the prizes.

“It is defeat,” says Henry Ward Beecher, “that turns bone to flint, and gristle to muscle, and makes men invincible, and formed those heroic natures that are now in ascendency in the world. Do not, then, be afraid of defeat. You are never so near to victory as when defeated in a good cause.”

Governor Seymour of New York, a man of great force and character, said, in reviewing his life: “If I were to wipe out twenty acts, what should they be? Should it be my business mistakes, my foolish acts (for I suppose all do foolish acts occasionally), my grievances? No; for, after all, these are the very things by which I have profited. So I finally concluded I should expunge, instead of my mistakes, my triumphs. I could not afford to dismiss the tonic of mortification, the refinement of sorrow; I needed them every one.”

“Every condition, be it what it may,” says Channing, “has hardships, hazards, pains. We try to escape them; we pine for a sheltered lot, for a smooth path, for cheering friends, and unbroken success. But Providence ordains storms, disasters, hostilities, sufferings; and the great question whether we shall live to any purpose or not, whether we shall grow strong in mind and heart, or be weak and pitiable, depends on nothing so much as on our use of the adverse circumstances. Outward evils are designed to school our passions, and to rouse our faculties and virtues into intenser action. Sometimes they seem to create new powers. Difficulty is the element, and resistance the true work of man. Self-culture never goes on so fast as when embarrassed circumstances, the opposition of men or the elements, unexpected changes of the times, or other forms of suffering, instead of disheartening, throw us on our inward resources, turn us for strength to God, clear up to us the great purpose of life, and inspire calm resolution. No greatness or goodness is worth much, unless tried in these fires.”

Better to stem with heart and hand

The roaring tide of life, than lie,

Unmindful, on its flowery strand,

Of God’s occasions drifting by!

Better with naked nerve to bear

The needles of this goading air,

Than in the lap of sensual ease forego

The godlike power to do, the godlike aim to know.

Whittier.

Chapter VII

The Degree Of “O.O.”

When Moody first visited Ireland he was introduced by a friend to an Irish merchant who asked at once:

“Is he an O.O.?”

“Out and Out”–that was what “O.O.” stood for.

“Out and Out” for God–that was what this merchant meant. He indeed is but a wooden man, and a poor stick at that, who is decided in everything else, but who never knows “where he is at” in all moral relations, being religiously nowhere.

The early books of the Hebrews have much to say about “The Valley of Decision” and the development of “Out and Out” moral character.

Wofully lacking in a well-balanced will power is the man who stands side by side with moral evil personified, in hands with it, to serve it willingly as a tool and servant.

Morally made in God’s image, what is more sane, more wholesome, more fitting, for a man than his rising up promptly, decidedly, to make the Divine Will his own will in all moral action, to take it as the supreme guide to go by? It is the glory of the human will to coincide with the Divine Will. Doing this, a man’s Iron Will, instead of being a malignant selfish power, will be useful in uplifting mankind.

God has spoken, or he has not spoken. If he has spoken, the wise will hear.

We search the world for truth; we cull

The good, the pure, the beautiful,

From graven stone and written scroll,

From all the flower-fields of the soul:

And, weary seekers of the best,

We come back laden from our quest,

To find that all the sages said

Is in the BOOK our mother read.

Whittier.

O earth that blooms and birds that sing,

O stars that shine when all is dark!

In type and symbol thou dost bring

The Life Divine, and bid us hark,

That we may catch the chant sublime,

And, rising, pass the bounds of time;

So shall we win the goal divine,

Our immortality.

Carrol Norton.

You Need to Delay Gratification

When I was around 14 years old I moved in with my father after living with my mother for my entire childhood. Although I was a good student in elementary school, once I got into middle school there were lots of fun things to do. This included taking my parents’ cars out at night without a license, and riding around on bikes through the neighborhood with other kids. If it was too cold outside, I could always watch television, play video games, or make other trouble indoors.

While I had been a very good student in elementary school, once I got into middle school I was on a downward spiral for several years because there were so many fun things for me to do. My troubles resulted in me getting kicked out of a private middle school and earning a 2.0 GPA my freshman year of high school.

There are lots of reasons why I had so many troubles, but when it came right down to it, the biggest was that when I was living with my mother I had no discipline. For me the most important thing was to enjoy myself at all costs.

I enjoyed watching television more than studying so I did that.

I enjoyed playing video games more than studying so I did that.

At school I enjoyed cutting class more than going to class so I did that.

In fact, I pretty much did whatever I wanted in my search of enjoyment. I remember at the time seeing kids I grew up with whose lives moved in different directions. These kids would study at night, go right home from school to do homework, and pay attention in class. I also remember at the time the kids I was associating with all loved to make fun of these same kids whether it was in class, or elsewhere. It was absurd to me that these kids were working so hard.

When I moved in with my father he was appalled by my grades and scholastic performance, as was I. His first order of business was to make sure I studied for a set number of hours each night. From 7:00 pm until 10:00 pm I was forced to stay in my room and study. For over a year this did little good. I made sure to distract myself with other things besides studying. I would call friends on the phone and chat. I would call girls in school and chat. I would do everything I could to enjoy myself instead of study. In 1995 our family moved to Bangkok, Thailand, where I had no friends and I was again forced to study between 7:00pm and 10:00 pm. Because it was impossible for me to sneak out of our high rise, I had no phone in my room, and no television to watch, I started studying every single evening. Within weeks my grades miraculously improved and my life was on a different path.

When we look at the people who are most successful in the world and their jobs, one of the most common themes to emerge is they have the ability to delay gratification. Every single one of us is interested in enjoying life to the maximum extent possible. However, we need to realize long-term enjoyment of life may require that we delay gratification until a later time. In my case, this meant it was important for me to consistently do schoolwork before other things. Delaying gratification as an adolescent is also something that sets our lives up for significant success in the future. Scott Peck, in The Road Less Traveled, writes:

While many have a well-developed capacity to delay gratification, some fifteen- or sixteen-year-olds seem to have hardly developed any capacity at all; indeed, some seem even to lack the capacity entirely. These are the problem students. Despite average or better intelligence, their grades are poor simply because they do not work. They skip classes or skip school entirely on the whim of the moment. They are impulsive, and their impulsiveness spills over into their social life as well. They get into frequent fights, they become involved with drugs, they begin to get involved with the police. ‘Play now, pay later’ is their motto. So the psychologists and psychotherapists are called in, but most of the time it seems too late. These adolescents are resentful of any attempt to intervene in their lifestyle of impulsiveness. Even when this resentment can be overcome by warmth and friendliness and a nonjudgmental attitude on the part of the therapist, their impulsiveness is often so severe it precludes their participation in the process of psychotherapy in any meaningful way. They miss their appointments. They avoid all important and painful issues. So usually the attempt at intervention fails, and these children drop out of school, only to continue a pattern of failure that frequently lands them in disastrous marriages, in accidents, in psychiatric hospitals or in jail.

The difference between success and failure in many of our lives comes down to our ability to delay gratification. This is what changed my life and it’s also what can make a difference in your life and career as well. Failure is the result of not delaying gratification. Our lives change when we begin to focus on how we can create long term results by delaying gratification.

People often become addicted to drugs and alcohol due to their inability to delay gratification. Faced with a decision between instant enjoyment and dealing with pain, people often choose substances. We do the same thing with our problems. If we have an issue we do not want to face we may ignore it because facing it would be too difficult for us. For example, if we do not like our jobs we may not face it because to face it would mean we need to look for a different career and give up the daily security of a paycheck, or where we live. But when we delay gratification we are setting ourselves up for better lives and careers.

Not facing problems is something related to our ability to delay gratification. One of the most important things we can do is to confront a problem early. Recently I was reading about what happens to people psychologically when they start to lose money in the stock market. One of the questions I have always asked myself is how people who own a stock often hold on while the stock goes from say $1,000 to $2. This is an incredibly common occurrence and an investor often holds on for months and months while the stock slowly declines to almost nothing. Here is how an investor often thinks while this is occurring:

1. Purchases Stock at $500
   “I’ll sell as soon as the stock gains or loses 10%.”
2. Stock goes to $700
   “This is great. I’m going to hold on to this stock for awhile.” Does not sell.
3. Stock goes to $1000
   “I’m never going to sell this one.” Does not sell.
4. Stock falls to $700
   “I’ve still made money. This is still a good stock.” Does not sell
5. Stock falls to $500
   “I’m still even.” Does not sell.
6. Stock falls to $300
   “I’ll sell when it gets back to $500.” Does not sell.
7. Stock falls to $100.
   “I told myself I would sell if it lost 10%. I’ll sell when it goes to $450.” Does not sell.
8. Stock falls to $10.
   “I’ll sell when it gets back to $100.” Does not sell.
9. Stock falls to $5.
   “I’ll sell when it gets back to $10. Does not sell.
10. Stock falls to $2.
    “I’ll sell when it gets back to $5. Does not sell.

This may not seem like it’s related to delaying gratification, but avoiding pain until a later date is another manifestation of seeking instant gratification. This entire psychology is extremely common and illustrates how most fortunes are lost in the stock market. When the stock starts going down people do not want to face the immediate pain that they have lost money, so they hold off selling the stock under the hope it will go up in value again. Instead, this aversion to pain continually keeps the person on the edge and they refuse to confront the fact that they have lost money. By not confronting the issue the investors lose even more money. Ignoring problems is a simple expression of the inability or unwillingness to delay gratification. To confront a problem like a massive stock market loss is painful. To confront a problem early on before being forced by circumstances to confront it means to ignore something less painful for something more painful. This is the choice between suffering right now versus present gratification, with the possibility that future suffering won’t be necessary. Our problems will not disappear. The problems we need to confront are a barrier to our future growth.

This is the reason so many people stay in careers and jobs they do not enjoy. One of the reasons people do not sacrifice to get higher degrees is because they want to avoid immediate suffering, despite the fact the education they would receive would likely produce long-term gains. Most of the people who are very wealthy have the power to delay gratification. Albert Einstein wrote that “The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest.” When we save money we are delaying the gratification we would get from spending the money. Many of the wealthiest people in the world know delaying gratification is the key to their success. I recently finished reading a book about Warren Buffett that asserted one of the main reasons for his wealth is he never sells a stock even after it has increased in value. This means he is not paying taxes on capital gains and the money he would have paid in capital gains keeps working for him. This is an example of delaying gratification.

We act mostly out of a desire to avoid pain and gain pleasure. When we procrastinate we do this because we experience less pain from not acting than we do from acting. For example, if we are interested in meeting someone we may not introduce ourselves because we are worried we will be rejected. A better attitude might be to do everything we can to meet that person because he or she could become a lifetime friend or mate. This would be far more valuable to us than the pain of a short brush-off could ever be. The same can be said of dentist trips and doctor visits. We know that the short term pain of seeing the dentist can prevent a much larger problem later. Few people think this way, however, because the desire to avoid pain is so strong. The need to avoid pain is much greater than the desire to gain pleasure.

Everything we do in our life is a push and a pull between long-term and short term rewards. One of the sayings I like is “You can pay now or you can pay later. If you pay later it is always going to be more expensive.” It is always better we pay now. Paying now is something that is in our best interest. When you are confronted with choosing between delaying gratification and not delaying gratification for long-term rewards you are almost always better off delaying gratification. The people who delay gratification are most often the people who experience the most success in their careers and lives.

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