Unknown

“ You conceive a big idea, get the whole organization on tiptoes to carry it out, and then you lose interest and go off on a new tangent. You think everybody else's mind ought to function as swiftly as your own, so you are alternately overenthusiastic and over-depressed. One day you carry some poor devil up into a high mountain and make him think he has a chance to become general manager. The next day you blow him up for not doing something which you think you told him, but which you actually forgot. You are always living, in imagination, about six jumps ahead. ”

“ As it happened, I had come under the influence of the first of my costly collection of brilliant men. I will call him Carroll. He was five years older than I was and a member of my college fraternity. But he had dropped out at the end of his freshman year and was supposed to be making a great record with a wholesale grocery house in New York. We undergraduates were dazzled by the splendor of his visits. He wore fine clothes, smoked the best cigars, and talked with the assurance of a successful man of the world. ”

“ Geniuses almost never do. I look very critically into little things respecting the men I hire; the details of their dress, their handwriting, their record of tying up a job and leaving no loose ends. The biggest men of my acquaintance in business are "detail men" to an amazing degree. Often the president of a company is the only man in it who knows the little things about every department. ”

“ But my experience with college men was not fortunate. If I selected good students, I found too often that their leadership had been won by doing very well what their teachers had laid out for them. They had developed a fine capacity for taking orders, but not much initiative. If I hired athletes, too many of them seemed to feel that their life work was done; that the world owed them a living in exchange for what they had achieved for the grand old school. ”

“ I should think it might be a good profession for Carroll. He is a bad employer for himself, but he could put a lot of ginger into somebody else's business, if the other man knew the trick of handling and properly discounting brilliant men. ”

“ I had no plan, I answered, except to finish my course and to take the best job that came along.
"You'll just be wasting two years," he said decidedly. "You've got everything that college can give you, except a diploma. Look at me. I'm just as much a college man as though I had hung around here four years; and compared with my classmates I've got a three-years start in business. I've been watching you ever since you entered, and I think you have the stuff.
"I'll make you a proposition," he went on confidentially. "The big future in the grocery business is in chain stores." ”

“ But twenty months have passed, and the sales simply have not grown.
"That's the stubborn fact which can't be blinked; and now it's come to a point where I must choose between you and my good old wheel horses who, in spite of their mediocrity, have somehow managed to build a very profitable business.
"You can stay here until your contract expires, but you will have no further responsibilities. The news will get around that you are merely hanging on; and when the end comes you will step out, discredited, to look for another job. ”

“ I know a city where we can buy two good little stores for that amount in cash, and pay off the balance out of the profits. When we get those two going right, we'll buy another, and another, until we have a big chain. ”

“ You never sold yourself to the people with whom and through whom you had to work. You say they were jealous, but a man of your intelligence ought to know that the answer to jealousy is modesty, hard work -- and results. ”

“ The five-dollar shoe has a lot more wear in it because there was a lot more work in it. Even fine material, carelessly put together, will not make a fine shoe; but if material which is of just average quality is fashioned with special care and attention, it will result in a quite superior article.
What my father was trying to teach me was this: God Almighty, in fashioning his most useful men, often works slowly with quite common stuff. Now and then He turns out a quick job of superfine materials -- a genius who really delivers the goods. ”

“ After that, I never hired a brilliant man from one of our competitors, nor listened to the siren-tones of "experts" who promised to double our volume -- until I encountered the twenty-five-thousand-dollar beauty I have mentioned at the start of this story. Every year I picked up a half-dozen live young fellows who seemed to have a capacity for hard work, and shoved them in at the bottom of the pile, letting them make their way up to the better air and sunlight at the top -- if they had it in them to do it. ”

“ In one of our largest cities is a newspaper which is said to earn nearly a million dollars a year. It was on the verge of bankruptcy when the present owner purchased it. He has made it practically a daily necessity to the business men of his city -- complete, accurate, dependable. ”

“ If we could unscrew the top of men's heads and look in, many of our problems would be eliminated, for we could see what sort of thinking goes on there. Lacking that privilege however, we have to judge by what comes out of the mind through the tongue and fingers. If a man writes and speaks "neatly" it is because his thinking is orderly ”

“ My experience is that it pays to buy the best; and what applies to things applies equally to men. Pick out the best men for employers; and when you get along in life pick out the best men for employees. ”

“ I like to throw something rather hard at a young man, and see how squarely he meets it. For with courage and the habit of going forward he can travel a long way. He will pass many men more brilliant than he is. Their active minds can always see two sides to every question ”

“ I answer, "That is too bad, but think what it means. You have lived twenty-five or thirty years without making a profit on your life; how can I expect that you will be a profit-maker for me?" Does he talk and write effectively? ”

“ Or you can leave now with ten thousand dollars, which is the additional penalty I am willing to pay for my mistake in judgment. If you go in the proper spirit, you are still young enough to profit by your failure. ”