CHAPTER XII. _the Celebration Stage_

The Celebration Stage

You know now the certain way to get your chance to succeed in the vocation of your choice. You are convinced that a good salesman can create and control his opportunities in any field, can bring himself to good luck in the right market for his services. You are resolved to master the art of selling, and so to insure your future against any possibility of failure. You feel confident of success; because you are willing to earn it by the diligent study and practice of salesmanship. There is no doubt in your mind that when you become a skillful salesman of your best capabilities, you can get a chance to succeed. Now what are you going to do with success after you gain it?

Suppose you had sold yourself into the very opportunity you want, suppose you had won the coveted job or promotion, how would you celebrate? It has been said that a man shows his real self either in the moment of his failure or in the moment of his success. Let us assume that you have reached your present objective. You stand at the goal, a winner. Does your victory intoxicate, or does it sober you with the realization that you have but opened the way to limitless fields of bigger service ahead? Has success gone to your hands and made them tingle with eagerness to grasp more chances to succeed, or has it gone to your head?

The celebration stage of the selling process should be the first stepping-stone leading to another successful sale. Often it proves to be a stumbling block that marks the beginning of a downfall to failure. Rare is the man who is not spoiled a little by achievement. Success is the severest test of salesmanship.

I recall a chief clerk who worked more than a year for promotion to the position of assistant manager. He earned the better job, and was assigned to the desk toward which he had been looking longingly for sixteen months. Then he "celebrated" by starting to take life easy. He developed a manner of superiority. He acted as if the little foothill he had climbed was a big mountain. He sunned himself on the top, basking in complacency because he had risen above his former clerkship.

One day he was called into the manager's office. He came out chop-fallen and took his personal belongings from the assistant's desk. Another man was promoted to the place he had failed to fill. He went back to his clerk's stool and is roosting there today.

I know a salesman who closed so many orders the first time he covered his territory that he came back to headquarters with an inflated idea of his importance. He strutted into the president's room and boasted of what he had done. The delighted head of the business gave him a cigar and invited him to tell the story. The salesman betrayed such egotism that his employer was disgusted. The president was plain-spoken. He warned the successful salesman against getting a "swelled head."

The egotist felt insulted. He resigned his position, arrogantly declaring that he would not work for a house where results were so little appreciated. He was cocksure of himself. However, when he offered his services to a competing firm, his application was turned down. The rebuff stunned him. He did not realize that his egotism disgusted the second executive as much as the first. The salesman's spirit was broken. He has never since been more than a fair peddler.

Think of "successful" men you know. Compare them as they are now with the men they used to be before they succeeded. As they rose did they loom bigger and bigger in your respect, or grow smaller and smaller in admirable qualities? There are so-called successful men whose characters seem to be dwarfed by the mountain tops they attain. Other men grow to be giants and overshadow any eminences they climb. The littleness of the last Kaiser and Crown Prince of Germany was only emphasized by their elevation above the common people. On the other hand the bigness of Lincoln and Roosevelt was so tremendous that their personalities towered above even the highest honor in the world.

When football players are fighting for the championship of the season, they are governed by rigid rules of living. They keep themselves fit by strict diet, by the avoidance of all dissipations, by hardening exercise, and by recuperative rest. But after the "big game" is won, they break training. They stuff themselves with rich food until their bodies and minds are sluggish. Then they celebrate their victory by some sort of jollification that lasts half the night. The next day a second-rate team could beat the champions.

A man who has kept himself lean, hard-muscled, and healthy all the way to the achievement of his ambition is apt to take on flabby flesh and gout when he succeeds. The celebration of Thanksgiving is an ordeal from which one does not recover for weeks. Turkey and mince pie immoderately eaten are poisons. Our annual Feast Day is more deadly than the Fourth of July.

A great many people "break training" mentally as well as physically at the celebration stage. Their minds and muscles turn flabby after they succeed. They are so proud of their accomplishments that they rust in self-satisfaction. Then, usually too late for remedy, they find themselves afflicted by the rheumatic twinges of deep-seated discontent with what they have done.

We are all familiar with the tragedies of the farmer who sells his acres and moves into town "so that he can take life easy," and of the business man who retires from his "daily grind" to enjoy the fortune of success. So long as they remained at work they were vigorous in mind and body. But nearly always men who give up their accustomed activities begin to develop mental and physical ailments soon afterward. They age and break down in a few years. In order to stay well, one must keep going. It is far less wearying to walk than to stand still. Normal fatigue of mind and body are not so exhaustive of mental and physical energy as torpid idleness.

Probably you do not think of quitting work for a long time. You look at your future retirement as a remote possibility. Very likely you feel it is premature to consider "your declining years" now, when you are in the full vigor of ambition. But if you stop advancing, in order to celebrate your progress thus far, you have quit working your way ahead. If you stay contented with what you have done, even for a little while, you have temporarily retired from the game of success and are in danger of rusting into a partial failure. If you do not continue moving ever upward, you will slip into a decline without realizing that you are going back and down.

The successful salesman thrives on his work, and pines for it when he "lays off." He welcomes the end of his annual vacation with more zest than its beginning. He celebrates each order gained by planning at once how he will get another. He is like Alexander, who sighed only when there were no more worlds to conquer. He is as perennially tireless as Edison, the wizard who is never weary. To the true salesman there is no enjoyment equal to selling. He often declares that he "would rather sell than eat."

You know the importance of being a good salesman. You have studied the methods he uses throughout the selling process. Now at the celebration stage pattern after the masters of the profession. Do not get into the bad habits of the mediocre fellows who slacken their efforts after each success, and who need the spur of necessity to make them do their utmost.

When a good salesman has booked an order, and has taken pains to make a fine last impression on his customer, he does not go to his hotel and play Kelly pool, or otherwise spend the rest of the day just loafing around. Only the poor salesman celebrates in such a way; thereby showing that his successes are so rare he is not used to them.

The good salesman looks at his watch the moment he is out of his customer's sight. He makes a swift calculation of the time it will take him to reach and sell the next man on his list. If he has no other prospect nearby, he starts looking for one that minute. His keen eyes catch every name on the business signs he passes. His imaginative mind is planning how he can use the order he just has closed, to influence some other buyer to make a contract. If there are no additional customers for his line in the town, he sprints to the station to catch the first train up the road. He does not waste a minute getting to his next selling opportunity.

Some pretty good salesmen never win the grand quota prize in a sales contest because they take so much time out for celebrating the big orders they close. If they land a fine contract in the morning, they don't try to do much selling that afternoon. The prize-winning salesman, too, is delighted to secure a big order. But he doesn't say to himself, "That will put me 'way ahead on the sales record for today." Instead he grins and thinks, "This is my day. I'm going to fatten up my batting average while I'm going good." Success is pepper to him, not the poppy drug that slackens energy.

You have worked hard to get the chance you now have. You have paid for it with your best efforts. It represents an accumulation of your salesmanship. The good job or the promotion you have gained is like a savings account. Let us compare it with the first hundred dollars a thrifty man puts into the bank for a rainy day. Would he celebrate the accumulation of that moderate amount of money, the first evidence of his ability to save, by quitting the practice of spending less than his earnings? Would he then say to himself, "I am now successful as a saver"? Would he stop putting a few dollars in the bank every Saturday, just because he already had a hundred?

No. He would continue to save until he had enough "units of thrift," enough hundreds of dollars, to take a longer step toward success. He would invest his accumulated savings in a lot, or house. Perhaps he would start a business of his own. After his investment he still would continue to save. So he would build his success.

All building is a gradual, continual process. The bricks are laid one after another. It takes many to complete the structure. Likewise a series of minor successes must be built into a major accomplishment. It does not rise all at once.

If you are tempted to pause where you are in order to celebrate, ask yourself, "Is this really the celebration stage?" Probably you will find you have only laid the corner-stone, or made an excavation for the foundation of your success. You would not think of having a housewarming because you had finished the basement walls. Nor would you consider it an occasion for especial jollification the day you erected the scantlings around the first floor joists. Not until the walls are up and the roof is on, not until the house is plastered and papered and painted, not until it is finished would you think of standing on the sidewalk to look it over pride fully and exult, "I did that. It's a good job."

But if you complete one house, you will not only feel the satisfaction of accomplishment, you will also want to build another that would be a great improvement on the one just finished. You will be healthily dissatisfied with what you have already done. Very likely you will sell the first house at a profit, and straightway start to put up a better building on another lot. In time you will sell that, too. You will continue the procedure until you become a master builder of houses, and continually achieve more and more success.

We have assumed that you now are successfully in possession of an opportunity. You have sold yourself into the very job you want, or into a better position that you believe will afford you fine chances to advance. Do not slump or relax in salesmanship. Do not think back, or spend much time contemplating your present success. Look ahead to your next sale of true ideas of your best capabilities. The successful salesman is a quick repeater. He counts his accomplishments in totals, not by units. He has successful "years," each made up of about three hundred successful working days. He plans in campaigns; so he is not inclined to over-celebrate the winning of a battle.

Samuel McRoberts, vice-president of the great National City Bank of New York, started working for Armour & Company at a small salary in the early nineties. He was a young man who was always healthily ambitious to keep moving ahead. He "ate up" the minor work assigned to him, and celebrated the completion of each task by asking at once, "What next?"

In a few years he had risen by successive promotions to the position of treasurer of Armour & Company. But that wasn't a goal to McRoberts. It seemed to him only a good starting point to bigger successes in the financial world. He became a director of several banks, an officer in important railroad and other corporations. He continually enlarged his service value until he was called to New York's greatest bank, and took his place among the masters of American finance.

He did not loll back in his chair then and start taking it easy. He packed more and more accomplishments into every day. When the war began, he went to Washington to take executive charge of the job of procuring ordnance for the fighters. He held a post analogous to that of Lloyd-George when he was Minister of Munitions for Great Britain. McRoberts made good as a brigadier general, and after the war resumed his success in business. Whatever he did, wherever he worked, Samuel McRoberts smiled welcomes to more opportunities for service, and reached out his ready hands to grasp them.

That is the way to celebrate--by tackling the job ahead. There is no end to the selling process. One sale should lead directly to another. The good salesman celebrates only the opportunity to get the next order in prospect. He may chuckle to himself over the sale just closed, but he does his rejoicing on his way to a new selling chance.

You haven't "arrived" yet. You are just well started. Keep moving, and you will never "see your finish." Your successes thus far should have developed a considerable degree of self-confidence. Be careful not to let that dynamic quality change into the static element of self-complacency. Never be satisfied with what you have done. Always have the zest of appetite for more to do. Add every day to your success chances.

Do not lose either your self-respect, or the respect of the men with whom you are associated, by ceasing to grow. Do more than you are paid for, and pretty soon your job will be unable to hold all your earning capacity. You will be promoted to bigger opportunities. If you shrink in the place you occupy now, your future chances will shrivel to fit your smaller size. The way to get a better-paying job, to win a bigger, more profitable field for your salesmanship, is to crowd your present position with your capabilities. Burst out of your limited territory and spread over more ground.

Render your utmost possible service to other people. Celebrate each opportunity to form a friendship. Make some one like you for what you are willing to do for him. Hold your friends, once they are made. As Emerson advised, "Be concerned for other people and their welfare. Put their interests sometimes ahead of your own. You can love your fellow men so much that you will never trample on their rights; and while you yourself keep climbing, raise as many of them as you can along with you. That is the way to make friends."

Celebrate the good fortune of your business associates, rather than your own. When a big contract is closed by your employer, be as tickled over it as he feels. Genuinely rejoice in his success. Have no envy of the man above you, then when you rise to a higher level the men below you will not be likely to feel jealous.

Why has Henry Ford won so unique a place in the personal regard of the everyday man? Ford is one of the richest men in the world; yet he is not hated. What is the reason for his general popularity? He is not an idler. He has celebrated each success by taking on another job. And he always has given a hand-up to the other fellow instead of kicking him down so that he might climb higher because of his failure. He has understood and sympathized with the hopes and viewpoint of people who work. As a result countless men and women, most of whom never have seen him, think of Henry Ford as their friend. His finest success is not signified by the millions of money he has accumulated, but by the millions of friendships he enjoys.

Charles M. Schwab, too, is popular. He is a man whom people like. Because he was so successful in winning friends, rather than for his generally recognized business ability, he was made the head of the Government's ship-building program in the war. Other men were eager to work with and for Charles M. Schwab. The co-operation of thousands of friendships, new and old, more than anything else enabled him to succeed in his big, patriotic job. How much more he has to celebrate in his wealth of good will than in his great fortune of dollars! Schwab has been called the most successful salesman in the world, which is another way of saying that he has no equal in ability to make other people both trust and like him.

You may never accumulate millions of dollars. That in itself is not success. Many wealthy men are failures in life. But with the aid of masterly salesmanship you can so enrich yourself with friendships and the opportunities they bring that making all the money you want will be merely incidental to your real success. Let every accomplishment be a stimulus to better selling of your service. Celebrate successful sales of your ideas by undertaking to sell more true ideas about your best capabilities in a larger field of usefulness.

The good salesman goes from opportunity to opportunity through a revolving door. As it closes on one selling chance, it opens on another. He steps directly from a finished sale into the prospect of getting an order elsewhere. So he never stops selling.

You have sold yourself some knowledge of salesmanship. Do not rest contented with what you have already learned. These chapters should but whet your appetite for more opportunities to master the principles and methods of selling true ideas of your best capabilities. So as you close this book, reach out your hand to open another. You cannot over-study the subject of salesmanship. Never be satisfied with what you know. Continue to search for more golden knowledge, and make it yours by practicing everything you learn.

It is impossible to fail in life if you become a master salesman of the best that is in you. You will be sure to succeed. So here is Good Luck to you! Keep on making it for yourself, and you never will run out. CERTAIN SUCCESS WILL BE YOURS.

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It is you that you offer for sale, With your traits ranged like goods on a shelf, And the first thing to do, without fail, Is to make a success of yourself.

EDGAR A. GUEST.