Part 20

It is the men who are doing little things today who will be picked out to do great things tomorrow.

And while you are making a little success each day, be sure that your heart sings while your hands work.

Men who can do things are discovered. They need not push themselves to the front. Good men are scarce, and the great successful business men of today are the ones who know how to do the work that they are hiring employes to do. Talent in this direction will surely attract the attention of your superiors.

Learn to master the details of your business yourself. Use conscientious effort and painstaking effort. Make a round-up each night of what you have done during the day. See wherein you have been in error and wherein you could have improved the day's work and you will be better fitted for tomorrow's duties. After closing your day's business, devote a part of the evening to your family and friends, and a part of it to some good book.

It is not the clock that strikes the loudest that keeps the best time. The expensive chronometer works steadily along doing its work well and faithfully. It does not attract as much attention as the gilt clock with its sweet chimes, but men who know things are aware that the chronometer has the more real merit. Have the chronometer for your ideal and not the fancy clock, for true merit will certainly receive due reward.

We should all have some ideal which we hope to attain tomorrow, but let us remember that the way to reach the ideal tomorrow is to make today successful.

Patience is a virtue few of us are possessed of, but the story of every successful business has written on every page of its history patience and perseverance.

Do not get discouraged if your rate of progress each day is not as much as you hoped for, but, so long as you are going forward and are patient, you may be sure that you are gaining.

Hard Times

Hard times follow good times with unerring regularity and certainty; this is in perfect accordance with the rule of compensation.

In good times we should prepare ourselves and erect strong guards around our business, so that when hard times come we may find ourselves able to go through the troublous times.

If prosperity ran on unchecked, the ordinary, well-established business would soon be a thing of the past, for people would speculate instead of work.

When the manufacturer has his bills paid and finds a surplus in the bank, that surplus is likely to be turned into speculation. When everyone speculates values rise, and continue to rise until prices reach fictitious altitudes, and then comes about the cashing in. It so happens that the cashing in is a general movement, and when this happens hard times quickly follow.

The successful business man should keep his money where it is get-at-able, and when hard times come and the prices go away down to low water mark, then he should buy. Later on prosperity will return, as sure as the sun will rise, and the things bought during the hard times will greatly increase in value.

Hard times and prosperity rotate several times in a man's business career.

Hard times are necessary to the general scheme, for with continuous prosperity business would increase to such a momentum that there is no telling what the results would be.

In times of prosperity you must make preparations for the hard times that are sure to come. If your pumps are greater than your leaks, your craft won't sink when the storm of adversity and hard times breaks across your ship.

Sleep

No one can do his best work if his mind is wool gathering. If an employe is thinking about the races, he is cheating his boss, for he cannot give him his best service. If the employe is in the habit of being up late nights, he cannot concentrate his mind nor bring out the best there is in him. Nothing is so good for the hard worker, nothing will stand him in such good stead, as plenty of sleep.

Go to bed early. Get lots of sleep every night and you will be ready and strong for the fray of the morrow. If you get plenty of sleep you are far ahead of your fellow employe who does not get enough sleep.

Sleep smooths out the wrinkles, builds up a storage battery in you and gives you confidence in yourself. You hold your head higher, your step is more elastic, your eyes are clearer, your mind works better, and your stomach does its full duty if you have taken plenty of time for sleep, for sleep is the plan of nature to restore the mind and the body.

Lack of sleep means wilful waste of your energies and a dulling of your abilities.

Business men pay for ability, keenness, alertness and capacity, and in proportion as you limit these qualifications by lack of sleep, so in proportion will your salary be kept down.

Grumbling

Grumbling kills friends. The business man who is ever grumbling and growling about things makes a blue atmosphere about him. People somehow or other seem to prefer a rosy atmosphere to a blue.

There is no good in grumbling. It gains nothing. Grumbling is an evidence that you have not sized things up correctly. That you are laboring under a delusion; that you are looking at the world through blue glasses, that you are not making proper estimates of other people.

Grumbling is an advertisement to the world that you are not well balanced. Grumbling won't help things a bit. The more you indulge in the habit the more firmly it becomes fixed upon you, and later you will find it almost impossible to shake it off. The grumbler grows to be a pessimist; he says disagreeable things; he makes his friends feel ill at ease. The grumbler gradually loses his acquaintances and even his close friends.

If you are starting on the grumbling path, pull yourself together and cut the habit quick and short. Grumbling and indigestion go hand in hand. If you have indigestion, square yourself against it, make up your mind you will not indulge yourself and vent your ill feelings in grumbling.