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W/M
THE
VOL. LXV. No. 7
Published Every Saturday by Edward Lyman BUI, Inc., at 373 4th Ave., New York. Aug. 18, 1917
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Reserve Power a Factor in Success
OETS," said the old Roman, "are born, not made." Comfortable assurance for those who want an
'excuse for failure—plausible explanation of the incompetent's non-achievement.
Poets, perhaps, are born, yet every man is potentially a poet, a thinker; a doer. Every man, at
his birth, has within him the seeds of victory as well as of failure. Poets may be born poets, but no
man became a poet, or an engineer, or a financier, or a general-, or a statesman by being born one, and then
sitting down and waiting for the genius to sprout.
Genius, said Carlyle, is an infinite capacity for taking pains. Every man, said William James twenty
years ago, has within him reservoirs of energy which he habitually never uses. Men live all their lives on
half their forces, travel from cradle to grave at half speed. The successful man is the man who has grasped
the truth of living at full power.
But full power does not mean haste. The great dreadnaught, rushing through the water at twenty-five
knots an hour, gives no impression of haste. Her engines work with incredible smoothness and ease. It is
the sign of true power that its exercise is never apparent. So it follows that the successful man is always the
quiet man.
Noise, what is stupidly called "hustle," the habit of doing everything very quickly, of talking very loudly
and rapidly the while; all these are signs that an inferior intellect is at work, striving to imitate the externals
of power. The motor cycle splutters and pops, slaps and bangs; but the six thousand dollar limousine slips
past with scarce a whisper to tell of the hundred horse-power beneath its bonnet.
The great man is he who has found out how to utilize the powers within him. These powers are the
property, the rightful heritage of every man. Ignorance, frivolity and fear are the obstacles to a more
general realization of these facts. Any man who sets his powers to work at their rightful, their normal, full
capacity, must and will succeed.
It is America's proper boast that she has endowed the world with a new concept of the meaning of
business. In this country the energies of men, who elsewhere would have been statesmen or warriors, have
been devoted to business. Not because w ? e are a superior people, but because the opportunity has been at
hand, we have begun to make business a profession.
The history of the evolution of business into a profession reads like a romance. It is, indeed, the romance
of our nation. Rule-of-thumb methods, slip-shod procedure, carelessness and inefficiency have all given way
to exact rules and carefully plotted regulations for the successful conduct of the great American profession of
business. The laws of business are as exact and as unerring as the law r s of mathematics, and the man who
studies and applies those laws intelligently and to the full extent of his capabilities cannot help but achieve
lasting success.
Success in this most intricate and wonderful of professions is the goal of every young American. Let
each such young man know that success does not depend on luck, for luck is a myth. Let him know that "born
business men", are figments of the imagination. The successful business man is only the man who devotes
the full-power capacity of his mind to his business.
The reservoirs of energy, seldom used by most men, sometimes are tapped in the stress of a great
emergency. Sometimes—too often—they sleep forever untouched. Success in the business game—the greatest
game in the world—may come to the man who never opens the reservoirs of sleeping energy, but probably that
man will never have more than a bowing acquaintance with success. Success will come—it must come—to
the man who uses his powers to their utmost, knowing that "born, not made," is the refuge of the coward, the
excuse of the lazy.