SELLING LUMBER 



173 



luxuries, applying every waking hour to greater and greater ag- 

 gressiveness. Influence and pull won't avail you anything against 

 their methods. Aggressiveness is supreme. Influence and prestige 

 are dying abroad to Krupp music. Where kings have failed to 

 be men, men have become kings. Manhood can have just exactly 

 what it dares to go after. Dare to do something, for yourself. 

 You can't share until you dare. The actual doing of what you 

 dare will turn out to be a surprising stimulus. The more you dare 

 the more you will do and the more you do the greater will be your 

 success. Success won't come to you, and nobody is going to hand 

 it to you. There isn't enough of it to go around. Neither are 

 there any known laws for finding it; but the laws of making 

 success are just as exact as the laws of the tides which moan and 

 cry and beat upon the shore the round world over. Just as surely 

 as water rises to the height of its source, just as truly as chickens 

 come home to roost, just so certain is it that Fortune is overtaken 

 by the pursuer of Fortune, but you have to go after it. Old folks 

 who are sent back over the hills to the poorhouse have merited 

 their fate, and you and I are on the way back, over the hills to the 

 poorhouse if we are not on the way aggressively forward to 

 something better than what we now have. 



The whole wide world is wanting to be sold to. There is a 

 famine in high-priced salesmen throughout the land. The biggest 

 prizes with which success can lure you are waiting if you are only 

 willing to be aggressive, if you are only willing to be different 

 from the ordinary, if you are only determined to be dissatisfied 

 with the commonplace and the ordinary and the possible, and, in 

 their stead, resolve to actually accomplish the impossible. For, 

 believe me, it is some new beautiful ^possibility that the suc- 

 cessful men of today must be constantly striving after. The men 

 of yesterday lived in the days of possibles and waited and hoped 

 in vain for the miracles of today that never came to them. The 

 aggressive, growing men of today go out and perform the miracles 

 that they demand, and, oh, such miracles as we DO perform ! We 

 are making our car wheels as well as our napkins out of paper, and 

 our sidewalks out of glass where once we traveled first on the 

 ground, then under the ground, now we travel through the air we 

 wind up operas on spools we play chess with the empty ether 

 that is over the sea we make clouds speak with tongues of fire 

 always aggressively giving some stretch to what we have, always 

 getting a new grasp on what we have not. And who shall say 



A Famine in 



High-Pric 



Salesmen 



