SELLING LUMBER 



171 



hopes of "business betterment." Your good employer, at best, 

 can but fill you with established ideas and give you his routine 

 training; but the world pays mighty little in wages for canned 

 ability, however excellent the brand. Machine-made memories and 

 standardized brains can instantly be duplicated. There are millions 

 of machine-made memories and millions of standardized brains. 

 Hands and minds that have merely memorized examples are com- 

 mon. The uncommon thing, the thing with the germ of success 

 within it, is aggressiveness. The moment a man starts to manifest 

 individuality, to think for himself, to originate, to show aggressive- 

 ness, that moment he steps up out of the general mass of men 

 and demands and receives attention for himself he throws off his 

 confining fetters, gets out of the rut, and begins to grow. If you are 

 to make a success, you must make it out of self. The only things 

 on earth that have ever counted for success have been expressions 

 of self. It is always some single self that moulds men and makes 

 history. It is individuals, not nations, that shape destiny. It is 

 persons not peoples who remake nations. Why live lives of quiet 

 desperation, minimizing self and exaggerating the idea of devoted- 

 ness to some other fellow, when most jobs are mostly stopping 

 places, and stopping places are never stepping stones. Devotedness 

 to some other fellow, or to an ordinary job, just because it is 

 a job, can be a disease, although the malady lies not exactly in 

 being devoted, but in being content to remain forever devoted to 

 the idea of being an employe. If you are content to think of 

 yourself forever in terms of being an employe, you are not worth 

 a whoop to your firm, no matter what your firm thinks about it. 

 Your employer can hire your time, but only you can give him your 

 zeal. What makes the growing, aggressive men of our big in- 

 dustries valuable to their concerns is that they have within them 

 the irrepressible determination to expand. \Vorth-while employers 

 don't want worms warranted not to turn. They want restless, 

 aggressive men like themselves. Yesterday's employer, I will 

 admit, bought help pretty much as he bought office equipment, 

 paying as little as possible for as much as he could. get, keeping 

 it as long as it served its purpose, and then displacing it with 

 other equipment just as cheap. As a consequence, he was con- 

 stantly drawing a circle of limitations around himselt, giving his 

 competitors every opportunity to take,' away from him the brains 

 to which he would not give a chance, and keeping away from him 

 the young manhood in search of a man for a boss. Because brainy 



Aggressive- 

 ness the Un- 

 common Thing 



The Salesman 

 Worth-While 

 Employers 

 Want 



