166 SELLING LUMBER 



soul will be that you will rear up your children with the hearts 

 of clerks. For your own sake, and for the sake of your firm, use 

 your God-given right to GROW. 



Give me the healthily aggressive salesman who is hourly selling 

 himself into a bigger and better growth. I'll stake his self-reliance 

 against any tupenny hireling's servitude. I'll invest in his vitality, 

 whereas I wouldn't gamble a penny upon the stifled mentality of 

 the stupefied servant whose faculties have atrophied from disuse. 

 I'll trust to the aggressive man's capacity to develop, whereas I 

 couldn't hope for anything from the latent possibilities of the 

 craven who subsists on what is flung to him instead of growing 

 upon all that he can legitimately get. 



It may be that you are beginning to ask yourselves if I am 

 not over-estimating the side of the salesman and wanting to impose 

 an unnecessary burden upon the employer over and above what 

 he now sustains towards his salesmen. My answer to this is, 

 emphatically, NO ! I will even go farther and add that the first 

 duty to himself of the average employer of average salesmen is to 

 lop promptly off that percentage of his sales force whose sales 

 do not constantly show a regular growth, whose methods are not 

 Cut Off the aggressive, whose conduct is not saturated with initiative and the 

 Non-Growing spirit of enterprise ; because no man can grow, much less par- 

 ticipate in the growth of another, who has not within him the irre- 

 pressible determination to expand. In other words, participation 

 in the profits of an organization must be first qualified for in 

 terms of aggressiveness and enterprise. Let me therefore round 

 out or complete the working definition of salesmanship, as being 

 the "act of growth," by reminding you that the very essence 

 of growth is aggressiveness, and the one thing that I do want 

 to emphasize is the value to you and to your firm of your "individ- 

 ual self-development through aggressiveness. 



And as I begin to emphasize the value of enlightened selfish- 

 ness, of sensible self-interest, of intelligent discontent, which is the 

 very secret of successful selling, I must frankly confess to being 

 soberly conscious, as I stand here, that the individual placed in 

 the position of impressing and influencing American business 

 men at this critical moment in the world's history assumes a re- 

 sponsibility that is not slight, for the very good reason that not 

 within exactly one hundred years has the happiness and the pros- 

 perity of the world depended so completely, as it does at this 

 hour, upon the aggressiveness of American salesmen. The Old 



