Part 26

The world offers golden prizes to the man who thinks. Therefore we should cultivate our brains and make them expand. The brain is like a plant. If you nourish and cultivate it and care for it, it will grow too.

Excitement, striving for pleasures, indulging in reading light, frothy literature, excessive daily newspaper reading are all weeds and thought killers.

Don't act on impulses. The get-rich-quick man or the fake mine promoter says, "Buy today, the price goes up tomorrow." These fakirs don't want you to think. Thinking is an enemy to their persuasive arguments. If you think, and think rightly, the fakir does not get you.

When you get a nasty letter don't answer it right away. Think it over. Think carefully. If your thoughts of revenge are so strong that you cannot calm yourself down, then write a letter and express yourself in the fullest degree. Leave the letter on your desk. Do not look at it for three hours. Then when you look at it you will instantly determine to tear it up, because in the meantime you have been thinking.

Thoughts expressed on paper have a different sound than if they are uttered verbally, therefore you should think carefully when you write.

Cultivate poise, calmness, and practice careful thought before you speak or write.

In proportion as you master difficult problems through thought, your brain will be ready for greater conquests.

Here are some things to think about during these times when business is so good.

These prosperous times are dangerous times. In times of prosperity we build up false idols, and raise our hopes and ambitions beyond the safety point.

Prosperity makes most of us careless. We don't give our business the careful consideration we should. We run to extremes during prosperous times.

We should make the most of prosperity while it is here. We should enjoy it to the fullest, but we should remember that for every high tide there is a low ebb.

Prosperity should enable us to put away a reserve for the hard times.

We should be careful that prosperity does not turn our heads or cause us to lose our vigilance.

Home Life

After all we say and do, the real pleasure of this world comes from the home. The gilded palaces we see in our travels abroad are beautiful to look upon presently, but later on they serve their purpose to make a contrast with the sweet simplicity of home.

When you go home, cut business out, and let play and sociability and love occupy your time.

A married man should be in partnership with his wife. The man being fitted with sturdier physique, with strong ability to combat, should take up the heavy burden of business, for those are the things he can do the best. The wife should take up the home part of the duties of the firm, and when evening falls each member of the firm should try to lessen or take away the cares to which the other has been subject during the day.

The best place in the world is the home, and in proportion as home life is unsatisfactory or uncongenial, so in proportion are the Clubs filled with dissatisfied and unhappy men. If you want to hear pessimistic talks on home life, talk with those derelicts who spend most of their time at the Clubs.

Learn to make much of little things. Learn that smiles and good humor in the home bring happiness, and iron out the frowns and check the mean impulses arising within us. Be pleasant every morning until ten o'clock, and the rest of the day will take care of itself. Start out in the morning right and happiness will be home at night.

There is nothing in your old age that will be such a comfort to you as retrospection, or looking back over a long life of happiness in the home. The happy little incidents which today seem trivial will be remembered in the future, and a thousand and one occurrences which are happening in the home are being put away in the store-house of memory, later to be called upon and enjoyed again.

In the evening of life when you and your silver-haired partner sit before the fire place, when you have retired from active participation in your respective branches of the business, which is bread winning on the part of the man and bread making on the part of the woman, then you will have a happiness and satisfaction which all the gold in the world could not buy. The pleasures of the old who have had happy homes during their lives are the greatest pleasures in the world.

The sunset of your life will not be beautiful unless your home life was pleasant during your day of work.

Optimism

The man who is an optimist may be laboring under a delusion, but certain it is that he is happy while under the delusion.

Every man should have ideals. He should see the beauty and good in things. He may not accomplish his ideals, but the anticipation and working out of them is a mighty pleasant vocation.

The pessimist is always unhappy, and when no definite thing is before him to worry about, the very fact that there is nothing to worry about makes him unhappy.

The pessimist says "Business is not half as good as it would be if it was twice as good as it is." The optimist says "Business is twice as good as it would be if it was only half as good as it is."

Grizzly Pete, of Frozen Dog, Idaho, is an optimist, and Webb Grubb, of the same town, is a pessimist. A short time ago they had a big rain storm in Frozen Dog. Webb Grubb kicked about the rain. Grizzly Pete, all wreathed in smiles, said "Rain is a mighty good thing to lay the dust." A few days later the sun came out oppressively warm. Webb Grubb kicked about the warm weather. Grizzly Pete, again all smiles, said "Hot weather and sunshine are mighty good things to dry the mud."