Elsie Lincoln Benedict

“ Human Analysis, which shows that each type tends automatically to the doing of certain things in certain ways whenever free to act, proves that this is just as literal as it sounds.
The only time we are free to act is during our leisure hours. All other hours are mortgaged to earning a living—in the accomplishment of which we often have very little outlet for natural trends. ”

“ Unless he confines himself to finance—working as exclusively with money as possible—or to dealing with natural resources, the Osseous seldom becomes rich.
He cares more for money than any of the other types, saves a much larger portion of what he earns, and no matter how rich, is seldom extravagant. His greatest obstacle to money-making is his tendency to hang on to whatever he has, awaiting the rise in prices which never go quite high enough to suit him. ”

“ What Every Individual Owes to Himself
¶ Every individual owes it to himself to find the right work and the right mate, because these are fundamental needs of every human being.
Lacking them, life is a failure; possessing but one of them, life is half a failure. ”

“ His heart and his home belong to the stranger almost as completely as to his family, for he does not feel a stranger to any one. He feels from the first moment, and acts, as though he had known you always. ”

“ Never choose a vocation just because it looks easy. No work will be easy for you except that which Nature intended for you. [Pg 331]
Never choose a vocation just because it permits the wearing of good clothes. You need more than a permit; you need ability.
Never choose a vocation just because the hours are short. You can't fool employers that way. They also know they are short, and pay you accordingly. The extra play these leisure hours give you will amount to nothing but loss to you ten years hence.
Never choose a vocation just because it is popular or sounds interesting. ”

“ If you do the latter at the expense of the former you are doomed to work forever for other people, to play some other man's game. If you do the former at the expense of the latter you are doomed to know only the fringes of life, never to be taken seriously and never to achieve. ”

“ An understanding of people is the greatest weapon you can possess. Therefore these are the most precious tools you can own. But like every tool in the world and all knowledge in the world, they must be used as they were built to be used or you will get little service out of them. ”

“ If an Osseous decides to do a piece of work for you you can go ahead and forget all about it. No need to advise, urge, watch, inspire, coax and cajole him to keep him at it. He prefers to keep at a thing if he starts it himself. You may have to hurry him but you will not have to watch him in order to know he is sticking to his task. This type starts few things but he brings those few to a pretty successful conclusion. ”

“ Step into the room of any little-bodied large-headed man and you will be struck by two facts—that he has fewer jimcracks and more journals lying around than the rest of your friends.
In the room of the Alimentive you will find cushions, sofas and "eats;" in that of the Thoracic you will find colorful, unusual things; the Muscular will have durable, solid, plain things; the Osseous will have fewer of everything but what he does have will be in order.
But the pure Cerebral's furnishings—if he is responsible for them—will be an indifferent array, with no two pieces matching. ”

“ Every individual in a civilized community is surrounded by temptations of some kind most of the time. He does not want to yield to any of them. Every man and woman does the best of which his particular type is capable under a given circumstance.
Each individual resists many temptations for which we fail to give him credit. He yields only to those which make such a strong appeal to his type that he lacks the power of resistance. ”

“ But the fat man gets this philosophy from the same source that gives him most of his other traits—his predominating system.
Digestion and Contentment
¶ The eating of delicious food is one of the most intense and poignant pleasures of life. The digestion of food, when one possesses the splendid machinery for it which characterizes the Alimentive, gives a deep feeling of serenity and contentment.
Since the fat man is always just going to a big meal or in the process of digesting one he does not give himself a chance to become ill natured. His own and the world's troubles sit lightly upon him. ”

“ But the Osseous despises, hates and loathes—and keeps on for years after every one else has forgotten all about it. The "rock-bound Puritan" type, as stony as the New England land from which it gets its living, is always bony. The implacable father who turns his child away from home, with orders "never to darken his door again," always has a lot of bone in his structure. Those who refuse to be softened into forgiveness by the years are always of this type. ”

“ A thousand [Pg 312] years of labor could never have produced an Edison, a Marconi, a Curie, a Rockefeller, a Roosevelt, a Wilson, a Bryan, a Ford, a Babe Ruth, a Carpentier, a Mary Pickford, a Caruso, a Spencer or an Emerson.
Fame's Foundation
¶ The reserved seat in the tip-top peak of the pyramid is procured only by him who has found his real vocation.
To such a one his work is not hard. No hours are long enough to tire his body; no thought is difficult enough to weary his mind; to him there is no day and no night, no quitting time, no Saturday afternoons and no Sundays. ”

“ Infatuation No Guide
¶ These biological bents are so deeply embedded in every individual that no amount of affection, admiration, or respect, or passion for any other individual suffices to enable any one to go through long years doing what he dislikes and still be happy. Only in the first flush of infatuation can he sacrifice his own preferences for those of another. ”

“ If, in your heart, you can answer "Yes" to these questions, your problem is settled; you will succeed in that vocation. For you will so enjoy your work that it will be play. Being play, you will do it so happily that you will get from it new strength each day.
Because you are doing what you were built to do, you will think of countless improvements, inventions, ways of marketing them. This will promote you over the others who are there only for the pay envelope; it will raise your salary; it will eventually and inevitably take you to the top.
A man we know aptly illustrates this point. ”

“ This is what has enabled him, when combined with some other type, to be so successful in banking—a business where you risk the other man's money, not your own.
The extreme Osseous is never lax or extravagant with his money no matter how much he has. He never believes in paying any more for a thing than is necessary. Take note of the men who carry purses for silver instead of letting their change lie loose in their pockets. They are bony every time! Fat people and florid people are the ones who let their greenbacks fall on the floor while paying the cashier! ”

“ On the other hand, two people who agree perfectly as to religious, social and political views but who can not agree as to the disposition of their leisure hours are bound for the rocks.
As the honeymoon fades, each reverts to the kind of recreation congenial to his type. If his mate is averse to his diversions each goes his own way. ”

“ No matter how rich he may be he will not buy one kind of car today and another tomorrow, nor one house this week and another in six weeks.
He uses his money, as all of us do, to maintain his type-habits and to give freer rein to them, not to change them to any extent. This type likes sameness. He likes to "get acquainted" with a thing. He never takes up fads and is the most conservative of all types. Unlike the Thoracic, he avoids extremes in everything and dislikes anything savoring of the "showy" or conspicuous. ”

“ His Pet Aversions
¶ Whereas the Alimentive avoids people he does not care for, the Thoracic is inclined to betray his aversions. He occasionally delights to put people he dislikes at a disadvantage by his wit or satire. The stony individual who walks through life like an Ionian pillar is a complete mystery to the Thoracic; and the pillar returns the compliment. We do not like anything we do not understand and we seldom understand anything that differs decidedly from ourselves. ”

“ The fat man has a harder time than any other listening to long speeches.
The fashion of trying to mix the two most opposite extremes—food and ideas—and expecting them to go down, was due to our misunderstanding of the real nature of human beings. It is rapidly going out, as must every fashion which fails to take the human instincts into account. ”

“ Business Assets
¶ The ability to make people like him is the greatest business and professional asset of this type, and one every other type might well emulate. One average-minded fat man near the door of a business establishment will make more customers in a month by his geniality, joviality and sociableness than a dozen brilliant thinkers will in a year. Every business that deals directly with the public should have at least one fat person in it. ”

“ An Osseous friend of ours has lived for forty years on almost nothing while holding, for a fabulous price, an old residential corner on a desirable block of a downtown street in one of the large American cities. He could have sold it years ago for enough to make him comfortable for life, to give him travel, leisure, comforts and self-expression, but he refused.
As has been pointed out before, each individual prefers the self-expression common to his type. ”

“ No Guesswork in Nature
¶ Nature has no accidents. With her everything is organized, everything has a purpose, and every part of a thing, inside and out, matches the whole. So the hand of the Osseous and the face of the Osseous match the body and head.
This is also true of every other type. The Alimentive has small, fat, dimpled hands and feet like his body; the Thoracic has tapering hands and feet to match his face and body; the Muscular's body, hands and feet are all square; but the Osseous has a bony body, so his hands and feet are equally bony. ”

“ Why They are Loved
¶ Each type has traits peculiar to itself which tend to make others fall in love with it. In the Alimentive the outstanding trait which wins love is his sweet disposition. [Pg 276]
The human ego is so constituted that we tend to like all interesting people who do not offer us opposition. The Alimentive is amenable, affable, agreeable. His ready smile, his tendency to promote harmony and his general geniality bring him love and keep it for him while more clever types lose it. ”

“ But when lacking in conscience, either through bad training or other causes, he occasionally turns to crime for his income. This is because his physical frailty makes it difficult for him to do heavy work, while his mentality enables him to think out ways and means of getting a living without it.
Though the clumsy criminal may belong to any type, the cleverest crooks—those who defy detection for years—always have a large element of the Cerebral in their makeup. ”

“ Meditation, imagining, dreaming, visualizing and all voluntary mental processes take place in the cerebrum, or brain, as we shall hereinafter call it. The brain is the headquarters of the nervous system—its "home office"—just as the stomach is the home office of the Alimentive system and the heart and lungs the home office of the Thoracic. ”

“ He frequently goes to serious lectures—something the pure Alimentive always avoids—and he especially enjoys them if they deal with the problem of the here and now.
He cares little for comic opera, vaudeville or revues because he feels they serve no practical purpose and get him nowhere. This type does not attend the theater merely to be amused. He goes for light on his everyday experiences and usually considers time wasted that is spent solely on entertainment. ”

“ Inborn inclination determines the things every human being prefers to do, concerning all the fundamental activities of his life, and also the manner in which he prefers to do them. These inborn inclinations, as we have previously pointed out, are written all over us in the unmistakable language of type.
When we know a man's type we know what [Pg 266] things he prefers to do in life's main experiences and how he prefers to do them. And we know that unless he is permitted to do approximately what he wants to do in approximately the way he prefers, he becomes unhappy and unsuccessful. ”

“ Part One THE ALIMENTIVE IN LOVE
¶ Just as each type reacts differently to all the other situations in life, each reacts differently to love.
The Alimentive, as we have pointed out, is less mature than the other types, with the Thoracic next, and so on down to the Cerebral which is the most mature of all. Because the Alimentive has [Pg 275] rightly been called "the baby of the race;" because no extremely fat person ever really grows up, this type prefers those love-expressions natural to the immature. ”