Chapter 5

Vacations

Every man owes it to himself and to his family to take a vacation each year.

Vacate means to get out or away from, and if you take your so called vacation by a trip to another city and spend your time in the whirl of industry, you are not helping yourself, you are not taking a vacation. Neither are you resting your mind and body if you go to a swell summer resort where white duck trousers in the day and full dress in the evening is the rule.

The real vacation you get is when you take yourself away from the business marts of trade, and go to a place where you can get your feet on good old mother earth. Go where fences are unknown, where there are no "keep off the grass" signs, climb the hills, walk through the forests, fill your lungs with good ozone, say to yourself "all these beautiful things are mine."

Nature has arranged it so that the poorest man in the world can get the most priceless things as easily as the multi-millionaire. The four most precious things in the world are good air, good food, good water and good health. Money cannot buy any one of these things. The man with millions cannot get any better air, or more nourishing food, or purer water, or better health than can the poor man.

The man who goes to the big woods for his vacation, who lives out of doors, who gets near to nature, is putting by a reserve in his constitution and brain that he will draw upon for the remainder of the year. Such vacations will clear the cobwebs from your brain. It will give you ability to do greater things, and make you see the beautiful side of life.

A man should not depend wholly on his two or three weeks in the woods, however. He should take a little vacation every day. He should arrange to get some benefit for his brain and body in each twenty-four hours. He should take a few moments each day and devote it to mental and physical relaxation. And, above all, he can get a good vacation every twenty-four hours if he sleeps properly.

Our good friend Grizzly Pete, of Frozen Dog, understands the real vacation when he says.

Mighty pleasin' sport, you bet, sittin' on a rock; Beats a store or office an' workin' by a clock. Clears away the cobwebs from your weary brain; Gives you inspiration; makes you a man again.

There ain't no medicine I know for the appetite Like a summer mornin', waitin' fer a bite. Lazy summer days are here--ain't you kind o' wishin' That you had your old clothes on, an' was settin here a-fishin'?

Health

There is no misfortune, no real hard luck except sickness and poor health.

If you find your health is becoming impaired, change your methods and vocation. Change before it is too late. A stitch in time saves nine times nine in matters of health.

Get plenty of exercise, good air, good water, sleep with your windows open in winter as well as summer, walk over two miles every day. Avoid worry. Do good deeds. Help others. Eliminate evil thoughts and deterrent influences.

If your health is impaired, forsake dollars if necessary and make health your first concern.

Dollars are worth having, but sense is infinitely better to be possessed of.

If your health will not permit you to get dollars and cents, then make it your object to get health and sense.

Rockefeller would give his millions if he could have the health of nearly any of the thousand of employes who work for him. A good stomach is rather to be chosen than great riches.

Patience

Supposin' fish don't bite at first, What are you goin' to do? Throw down your pole, chuck out your bait, An' say your fishin's through? You bet you ain't; you're goin' to fish, An' fish, an' fish, an' wait Until you've ketched a basketful Or used up all your bait.

Suppose success don't come at first, What are you goin' to do? Throw up the sponge and kick yourself? An' growl, an' fret, an' stew? You bet you ain't; you're goin' to fish, An' bait, an' bait agin, Until success will bite your hook, For grit is sure to win.

Patient effort and hard work each day, properly directed, will surely bring success.

Failure comes to those who grow weary in the struggle, and to those who overwork themselves and overtax their abilities.

Such persons hope that by large sacrifices of sleep and happiness, and by extra application and hard work, they will build for themselves fortune, that they may be happy at some future time. They make a great mistake in this respect.

Divide your energies so that each individual day is successful, no matter how much the success may be.

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.

If you can start out each day with a resolve not to grumble you will find the proposition not difficult. The first two or three hours of the day is the time when your resistance is called into play. There is no better antidote or cure for the poisonous grumbling disposition than the following, which has been for many years a pet sermonette of the writer: Be pleasant in the morning until ten o'clock, the rest of the day will take care of itself.

Associates

"Birds of a feather flock together." "A man is known by the company he keeps." "Like begets like." "We are creatures of environment."

All these truthful sayings have been preserved as proverbs simply because they are simon pure truths.

The matter of associates is most important for the business man or employe to consider. The young man who spends his time in gambling, drinking or dissipation cannot do his best work. He can no more hide these practices than the clouds can obscure the sun permanently, for evil, as well as truth, is sure to come out.

One of the best attributes a man can possess is character. Character gives him credit at the bank, it gives him a standing among men. If the employe ever expects to be a boss he must have character, and he must associate with men of ideas who will be helpful to him.

A man will never improve his game of billiards if he always associates and plays with an inferior. He may satisfy himself for the time being that he is a big toad in a little puddle, but if he plays with a poorer player than he is he is bound to retrograde.

The only way we can advance is to surround ourselves and associate with uplifting influences and healthful individuals. Our eyes should be turned forward and not backward.

It will make several seconds difference in the speed of a horse whether he is running against a horse he can beat or running against a horse that can beat him. Race horse men have reduced this truth to actual practice. They have what is called a pace maker. When they want a horse to trot fast they mount a boy on a running horse just ahead of the trotter.

If a man associates with his inferiors, the association will surely keep him from progressing.

If you want to make money, if you want to progress in the business world, go where money is being made and mix with people who are making money.

No man is naturally bad. No man gives himself over to criminal acts or hurtful habits solely upon his own instincts. These actions and habits come about through associations.

Go to the criminal court any day and you will see evidences of the man who is pulled down on account of his associates.

Mix with your superiors in matters of business and morals and you will unconsciously absorb qualities and ideas that will push you to the front.

Hitch your wagon to a star. Aim high. Pick out ideals in business, and eliminate from your path all deterrent influences. There is no hold-back like harmful associations. You will be judged by the company you keep.

Old dog Tray was really a good dog, but he suffered because of his propensity to associate with bad dogs.

Fixed Charges

Fixed charges are sums you have to pay out regularly, week after week, or year after year. When you buy materials and supplies, when you lease property or hire employes, or pay interest on borrowed money all such things are fixed charges, and it calls for the best there is in a man to keep these fixed charges down as low as possible. When you buy a single item, such as a desk or a chair or a waste basket, do not lose a lot of valuable time trying to save too much on those articles.

When you go to New York once a year, do not stay at a second class hotel for the several days you are in New York, when by the expenditure of fifty cents a day more you could stop at a good hotel.

It is false economy to spend five dollars' worth of time to save fifty cents.

When you are buying single articles that are not fixed charges you have a little more leeway in the matter of price than when you are buying things that come under the head of fixed charges.

In the matter of fixed charges the penny you save on the unit assumes vast proportions in the many multiples.

Some men will deny themselves a respectable desk because they can buy a cheaper one for ten dollars less, and this same person will lose a thousand dollars through laxity in buying things that come under the head of fixed charges.

If you buy one lead pencil never mind whether the price is five or ten cents, but if you buy great gross lots every few weeks you can afford to be very circumspect and painstaking in the matter of price.

If you are buying a shirt, fifty cents one way or the other does not make much difference, but if you are in the furnishing goods business and buying thousands of shirts at a time, twenty-five cents a dozen means quite a lot.

The matter of stationery and printing comes under the head of fixed charges. If you are buying letter paper for your personal use and you require but three or four hundred sheets in the course of a year, don't bother very much about the price per quire. The stationery you use in your business, which you buy in large quantities, you should be careful of. Plain, respectable, good quality letter paper is the kind used by successful concerns. The fancy-colored, freakish paper is nearly always used by the four-flusher in business. He is trying to put on a good front. He uses hand made paper and hand made envelopes. All the get-rich-quick people use fancy, high-priced stationery.

The successful house uses a good quality of linen or bond paper, and a medium grade, regular stock size envelope. Envelopes are thrown away; letters are saved. That is why an envelope does not require to be as good quality as the letter. It is the letter and what you put on the letter that cuts the ice.

Fixed charges usually hide a lot of little leaks. Stop them. Many little leaks make a big aggregate in the course of a year, and there is no place where these leaks start as easily as in the matter of fixed charges.

Cigarets

We cannot call to mind a single instance where the habitual cigaret smoker got to the top of the ladder and held his position. We see heads of large establishments smoke cigarets, but the habit was acquired after the position was attained.

The cigaret smoker suffers from lapses of memory, his nerves are shattered, his judgment is not good, he forgets things and is irritable. He cannot hope to compete with the clear-brained individual who does not smoke cigarets.

It is not the cigaret itself that does the harm, it is the smoke inhaled into the delicate lung tissue. This smoke covers the lungs with yellow nicotine, carbon and poisonous gases.

Some men smoke pipes because they wish to escape the criticism to which the cigaret smoker is subject. The pipe smoker who inhales does himself more injury than the cigaret smoker who inhales, because the pipe smoker takes in more smoke.

Go to the medical college dissecting room and see the lungs of a man who inhaled smoke, and you will quit the habit if you have been guilty.

Don't burn your lungs with cigaret smoke, or pipe smoke either.

The fight to get to the front is hard enough anyway, and if you want to win, do not poison your blood with tobacco smoke.

Return Good For Evil

One of the first laws was "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth," but as time went on and man developed mentally his animal instincts were subordinated and the law was changed, and the new law was this: "return good for evil."

Nearly every man who has an injury done him tries to repay the injury. He must either repay it with good or with evil. If he repays it with evil he does not get satisfaction. If he repays it with good he gets happiness. It is certain that payment of evil with good can satisfy a man who is looking for revenge, while it has always been a question whether there is any satisfaction in paying evil with evil.

If a man does you a mean turn he is expecting you will repay him in like manner. He guards himself against this. He is ready for your revenge, but if you repay him with good you attack him in a weak spot and make him feel like thirty cents, and this is all the revenge you can ask for.

It is all right to get square with a man who does you a wrong, and the best way to get square is by doing him a good turn.

You should keep mental ledger accounts with all of your friends and all your enemies. When a person does you an injury, debit him until you have a chance to credit his account with some good turn; when you credit his account be sure you overpay what you are owing him, so you will have a balance coming to your credit.

We have been taught to return good for evil, but we have heard the saying so many times that few of us pay any attention to it.

It's worth while testing, this rule of returning good for evil. The next time someone harms you, repay him by doing him a kindness, and see if you don't feel happier, and at the same time get all the satisfaction you are looking for. It matters not whether the person to whom you have done a kindness appreciates it; you have been benefited and received happiness by your own act, for virtue is its own reward.

The man who returns good for evil, has the satisfaction of the man who has on clean underwear, the world may not know it but he does, and that is all that is necessary.

Learn to Play

Nature has given us many positives and negatives. It has given us the ability to work hard, and it has given us the ability to play hard. Work while you work and play while you play. The man who is successful is the man who works hard during business hours, and then goes home and leaves his office behind him and takes up play.

A man should devote a part of each day to recreation, to outdoor exercise, to frivolity and to frollicking with his children at home. If he does not care to play, worry will take the place of play.

Worry and hard work together will kill a man. Work and play will make him live.

No two things can occupy the same space at the same time. These brains of ours are always busy, and we should be careful what we give the brain to act upon.

If we work hard all day, the tendency is that in the evening the brain revolves the things that have been going through it during the day. A review of these thoughts produces worry, especially if our occupation has been a strenuous one and if things have not been to our liking. When we devote ourselves to play, then worry and brain rack will be absent all the time we are playing. Play was made to rest the brain. Your sleep will be better if you have indulged in recreation, and your mind will be clearer the next morning.

Good Fellowship

Call a man a fellow and he will resent it, call him a good fellow and he feels complimented.

The good fellow is ever found where pleasures abound. He shines at the dinner. His knowledge of mixed drinks is a revelation.

The good fellow spends his time where the glasses clink, where the horses run, and where the revelers congregate. His earnings go for dinners, bottles and shows, and while these occupy his mind he imagines he is having a good time, that his actions evidence "good fellowship."

Go to the clubs and you will see the "good fellow." He is spoken of by all the other "good fellows" as a "good fellow." And they are all good fellows together.

Some day the good fellow is taken sick and dies. He has not a cent to his name, and the other good fellows take up a collection to bury him. The only persons at the funeral are the other good fellows, and the only requiem he receives is "Well, he was a good fellow."

The good fellow at fifty is working for the good business man. The good fellow is like the butterfly, and sips life's pleasures, and shows off his fancy colors, living for today only.

The successful man is like the ant, he works and puts something away each day, where he can get at it in the future.

When winter comes with its chilling blasts, the butterfly has nothing in reserve and it starves to death, while the ant keeps himself alive on the product of his own labor.

Some day the good fellow finds himself in need. He goes to other good fellows, but they can't help him because they are in the same boat themselves. Then our good fellow grows pessimistic, and finds out too late that it does not pay to be a good fellow.

Good fellows don't get good jobs very often. When they do get them they don't hold them very long.

It is a mighty poor recommendation to be referred to as a good fellow. People seem to think that the words "good fellow" cover a multitude of sins, and when a man has done wrong, or makes a mistake, or uses bad judgment, the other good fellows try to excuse his faults by saying--"Well, he is a good fellow, anyhow."

The good fellow bursts upon us with his halo about him. As time passes the halo dims and the good fellow peters out.

The good fellow who is so popular at the Club today is found tomorrow trying to eke out an existence selling books and life insurance to other good fellows.

There is nothing in good fellowship that can be negotiated at the bank. The credit man of the wholesale house does not give credit on good fellowship.

Hard Work

It is a mistaken idea that hard work kills men. Hard work never killed a man. It is the improper care of oneself when he is not working that does the damage.