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Contents

PREFACE

I address myself to the young men of the post-war age. Those who have youth also possess opportunity. There is in Great Britain today no bar to success which resolution cannot break. The young clerk with courage and ability has the key to success in his pocket. The wide world of business and finance is open to him.

A career today is open to talent, for there is no heredity in finance, commerce, or industry. The Succession and Death Duties are wiping out those reserves by which old-fashioned banks and businesses warded off from themselves for two or three generations the result of a heredity run to seed. Ability, from whatever source it springs, is bound to be recognised.

If I give encouragement to a single young man to set his feet on the path which leads upwards to success, and warn him of a few of the perils which will beset him on the road, I shall feel satisfied that this book has not been written in vain.

Beaverbrook signature

INTRODUCTION

More than 30 years ago I wrote for the Sunday Express a series of articles which I hoped would prove useful to young men anxious to succeed in the practical affairs of life. I hoped, too, it would help the sale of the Sunday Express. The articles were made into a book. Fifteen editions were sold in Britain, Canada and the United States. There were translations into many languages. This little volume is that same book brought up to date.

The reviewers of long ago thought it presumptuous that at the age of 42 I should tender advice oh success.

Well, the issue has now been decided. I am 75. I have no regret for the past and no hope for the future. There have been pitfalls, of course. Frequently I have stumbled. Henceforward I do not intend to put grave issues to the test. Younger men must carry the lance and wear the breast-plate.

I would like to be of assistance to them. The theme of my book is that there are three main qualities necessary to achieve success—Judgment, Industry and Health.

A man may have two of these attributes and go far, but unless he has all three he will not go all the way.

Are there exceptions which prove the rule? If there are, they must surely be very few. I can only think of one—Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Roosevelt lacked good health. And Roosevelt was a great man. He might have been supreme if he had not suffered from his grave affliction. There have also been well-known authors who were sick men—Stevenson, Henley and George Meredith are three examples which come to my mind. But they might have done still better work had they been physically well and strong.

I do not deny that many men in ill-health have made immense effort and taken effective action which might have been impossible but for the confining circumstances of their illness.

Kipling once said to me of Curzon, that his activity was the product of bad health. Ordinary existence was barred to him. So his iron corset may have been responsible for his ill-directed drive and energy which enabled him to destroy the independence of the House of Lords. He helped to pass through a Tory Parliament the very Bill that limited the Tory power. Curzon succeeded but his betrayal was never forgiven. He became the titular leader of his party in the Lords. But he never gained the confidence and trust of the Back Benchers. He lost the prize of Premiership. He had bad judgment in Politics.

“Roosevelt lacked good health”

President Roosevelt and the Prime Minister
on board H.M.S. Prince of Wales in 1941

As many people fail in judgment as in industry. A man’s judgment may be sound in certain fields of activity but fail in others.

My own, for instance. I have had success in many walks of life but not in politics. I consider myself to be a political failure.

Otherwise I would have succeeded with the Empire Free Trade Campaign. This was started in 1929 and found much favour with the electors. In 1931 it appeared that we would succeed in building a tariff fence around the British Empire, with all the promise that held of closer constitutional relationships. The hope proved false. Had the MacDonald-Baldwin Coalition in 1931 held to the promises made to me then we would have succeeded. But what is near-success but another term for failure?

Why did I fail? I had industry. I had health. It must be supposed that my political judgment was faulty. Had it been unerring, the Empire today might have been a flourishing economic unit. The Empire might have been built up on Empire Free Trade. For I had my chance. Beyond doubt I had my chance. I had Baldwin and his party “over a barrel”. But I was defeated and my movement destroyed by the cunning of Stanley Baldwin. In order to escape from our successful challenge in the constituencies he came to an accommodation with me, pretending he would carry out the Empire Free Trade policy.

Stanley Baldwin then went to Ottawa in 1932 with a scheme limited to a form of reciprocal Imperial Preferences. My own crusade was not for a reciprocal lowering of tariffs between Empire countries, but for Empire free trade. By introducing his smaller scheme, Baldwin defeated my larger and better scheme. When I tried to renew the movement he misled the public by confusing the issues. I blame my own political judgment for the trust I had placed in the man.^[1]

Another political failure of mine was a great practical success. When Churchill gave me the opportunity to form the Ministry of Aircraft Production in the crisis of 1940 it was necessary to throw off the restraints imposed by the polite system of dealing “through the usual channels”.

A flashback of an
Empire Crusade meeting in 1931

“The Empire might have been built up on Empire Free Trade”

Cartoon by LOW, July 1940

HOW DOTH THE BUSY LITTLE B
“The airplanes were produced”

I had to take short cuts. I had to scatter people—many of them very important persons—right and left.

The airplanes were produced. That was what mattered. But I made innumerable enemies in and out of Parliament. And from a political standpoint everything was wrong with the Aircraft Ministry—everything except the production of airplanes. That production saved the situation.

Churchill himself, whose support was absolutely necessary to my administration, has not lacked political judgment. That has been fortunate for his country and for the world. Less fortunate for his country is the fact that his judgment has been used in a cause other than Empire Free Trade. He has always been a world free trader at heart.

Churchill has been supported in his prodigious career not only by judgment but by health and industry. He is the greatest living exemplar of the three basic attributes of success.

Heed the life story of Churchill. It will help the young aspirant; it will show that judgment can be improved, that industry can be acquired and that health can be maintained. If he really devotes himself to the cultivation of these attributes he will not, it is true, become another Winston Churchill, but he can still achieve in the career of his own choosing a very great success.

This book follows closely—but not slavishly—the pattern of the original. Many passages have been eliminated, some foolish sentences have been suppressed. A little has been added here and there. And I have drawn on several speeches made by me on similar subjects.

I have found it necessary to change some of the axioms I expounded thirty years ago. Others stand the test of time.

In preparing this new version of an old theme I have relied upon competent assistance. But the voice is mine, even though some of the words are borrowed.

Chapter 1
JUDGMENT IS THE MASTER KEY

Men do not dream the same dreams. The artist knows one joy, the soldier another; what delights the business man leaves the politician cold. But however much they may despise each other’s ambitions, they want their dreams to be fulfilled. In a word, they desire success.

The bitterest thing in life is failure, and the pity is that it is almost always the result of some avoidable error or misconception. There need be no such thing as failure. Every man has a career before him, or, at least, every man can find a niche in the social order which he can successfully occupy.

The trouble in so many cases is that it takes time and opportunity for a man to discover in what direction his natural bent lies.

Hence the misfits. A young man may choose the wrong trade or profession, or he may be in the right business but the wrong department. The employer, nevertheless, votes him no use, or at least just passable, or second-rate. Much worse, the employee admits his failure, and by that very act of admission he has failed.

We are too apt to believe that if a man is clever at one thing or successful under one set of circumstances he must be equally clever at everything and equally successful under all conditions.

Anyone who has strayed in youth to the wrong profession and failed may yet prove himself an immense success in another. These broad distinctions at the top reach downwards until the general truth is equally applicable to all the sub-divisions of business and even to all the administrative sections of particular firms.

To take a practical instance: salesmanship requires, above all, the spirit of optimism. That same spirit carried into the sphere of finance might ruin a firm. The success in one branch might be the failure in the other, and vice versa. No young man, therefore, should be judged a failure. He may yet succeed in another venture.

“The first Lord Reading began life as a ship’s cabin boy”

Daily Express building, Manchester

“The mill must have grist on which to work”

The first Lord Reading began life as a ship’s cabin boy. It is probable that he did not make a very good cabin boy. I can imagine the Chief Steward shaking his head and saying: “Young Rufus Isaacs isn’t very bright at his job. He won’t get anywhere”. Neither would he, had he made ships’ cabins his career. But he did nothing of the kind. And where did he get? To the position of Lord Chief Justice of England and then of Viceroy of India.

Like all human affairs, success is partly a result of predestination and partly of free will. You cannot create genius, but you can either improve or destroy it. But what are the qualities which make for success? I repeat my answer. They are three: Judgment, Industry, and Health, and the greatest of these is Judgment.

In the affairs of the world it is the supreme quality. Many men have brilliant schemes and yet are quite unable to execute them. Through their very brilliancy, unsupported by sound judgment, they stumble upon ruin.

Genius goes to the heart of a matter like an arrow from a bow, but judgment is the quality which learns from the world what the world has to teach and then goes one better. Judgment, indeed, is the power to assimilate knowledge and to use it.

But judgment may prove sterile if it is not accompanied by industry. The mill must have grist on which to work. It is industry which pours in the grain.

The faculties, therefore, must be kept constantly alert.

A great opportunity may be lost and an irretrievable error committed by a brief break in lucidity or in the train of thought. “He who would be Cæsar anywhere”, said Kipling, “must know everything everywhere”. Nearly everything comes to the man who is always all there.

Men are not born either hopelessly idle or feverishly industrious. They may move in one direction or the other as will or circumstances dictate, but it is open to any man to work. Industry has to be applied in the right direction—and it is therefore the servant of judgment. The true secret of industry well applied is concentration, and there are many ways of learning that art—the most potent handmaiden of success. Industry can be acquired; it should never be squandered.

Health is the foundation both of judgment and industry—and therefore of success. Without health everything is difficult. Who can exercise a sound judgment if he is feeling irritable in the morning? Who can work hard if he is suffering from a perpetual illness?

The future lies with the people who will take exercise and not too much exercise.

No ordinary man can hope to succeed who does not work his body in moderation, but the danger of the athlete is to believe that in kicking a goal he has won the game of life. His object is no longer to be fit for work, but to be superfit for play. Obsession with sport leads only to failure, satiety, or impotence.

The pursuit of pleasure is equally ephemeral. Time and experience rob even amusement of its charm, and the night before is not worth next morning’s headache.

Practical success alone makes middle-age the most pleasurable period of a man’s career. What has been worked for in youth then comes to its fruition.

“Pleasures are like poppies spread.” And I am not unwilling to gather poppies. For life must strike a balance between work and pleasure. But I do maintain this—if the scales must lean in any direction, let it be towards work. A man will come to less harm by over-working than he will by over-playing.

Never has Great Britain had greater need of, or offered more scope to, the man or woman whom ambition stirs to make a success of life. Recovered from convalescence after her war-time sufferings, she now requires sons and daughters who will work hard and intelligently. No artificial obstacles will impede them. No bar now prevents poverty rising to the heights of wealth and power.

Men are no longer born into Cabinets and City board rooms. True, nepotism and favouritism and privilege still prevail. But the ladder of education enables a man born in a cottage or slum to reach the zenith of success and power.

One cannot repeat too often that judgment can be improved, industry can be acquired, health can be attained by those who will take the trouble. These are the foundations on which to build success.

Chapter 2
THAT FIRST £1,000

It has been said that money is the root of all evil. That is nonsense. If it is sometimes made the servant of a wicked purpose, then the master and not the servant is to blame.

I am sometimes regarded as the apostle of pure materialism. The description is false. Humbly do I recognise the existence of values other than money values. Even so, I have never noticed that the creator of an artistic achievement becomes downcast if it also proves to be a financial success.

The maker of money has become unjustifiably suspect in recent times, not least in the eyes of men and women who would make money if they could.

To win a sweepstake or a big dividend on the pools is considered justified, but to amass a fortune by hard work which creates opportunities of life and happiness for thousands is considered wicked by silly politicians and foolish journalists. There is a lot of hypocrisy talked and written about money.

In reality money carries with it only two qualities of value: the character it creates in the making; the self-expression of the individuality in the use of it, when once it has been made.

The art of making money implies all those qualities—resolution, concentration, economy, self-control—which make for success and happiness. The power of using it makes a man who has become the captain of his own soul in the process of its acquirement also the master of the circumstances which surround him. He can shape his immediate world to his own liking.

Apart from these two qualities, character in acquirement, power in use, money has little value, and is just as likely to be a curse as a blessing. For this reason the money master will care little for leaving vast wealth to his descendants. He knows that they would be better men for going down stripped into the struggle, with no inheritance but that of brains and character.

Wealth without the wish, the brains, or the power to use it is too often the medium through which men pamper the flesh with good living, and the mind with inanity, until death, operating through the liver, hurries the fortunate youth into an early grave. The inheritance tax should have no terrors for the millionaire.

The value of money is, therefore, first in the striving for it and then in the use of it. The ambition itself is a fine one—but how is it to be achieved?

I would lay down certain definite rules for the guidance of the young man who, starting from scratch, is determined to go on to great achievement.

1. The key which opens the door of success is the trading instinct, the knowledge and sense of the real value of any article. Without it a man need not trouble to enter business at all, but if he possesses it even in a rudimentary form he can cultivate it in the early days when the mind is still plastic until it develops beyond all recognition. The practice of valuing articles of commerce becomes a subconscious habit.

The young man who will walk through life developing the capacity for determining values, and then correcting his judgments by his information, will help himself on the way that leads to success in business.

2. But supposing that a young man has acquired this sense of values, he may yet ruin himself before he comes to the fruition of his talent if he will not practise economy.

By economy I mean the economic conduct of his business. Examine your profit and loss account before you go out to conquer the world, and then go out for conquest—if the account justifies the enterprise.

Too many men spend their time in laying down “pipe-lines” for future profits which may not arrive or only arrive for some newcomer who has taken over the business.

There is nothing like sticking to one line of business until you have mastered it. A man who has learned how to conduct a single industry at a profit has conquered the obstacles which stand in the way of success in the larger world of enterprise.

3. Do not try to cut with too wide a swath. This rule is the most important of all. Many promising young men have fallen into ruin from the neglect of this simple principle.

It is so easy for ambition to launch men out prematurely into daring schemes for which they have neither the resources nor the experience.

Acquire the knowledge of values, practise economy, and learn to read the minds of men, and your technique will then be perfected and ready for use on wider fields. The instinct for values, the habit of economy, the technique of business are only three forms of the supreme quality of that judgment which is success.

For these reasons it is the first £1,000 which counts. There is the real struggle, the test of character and the warranty of success.

Youth and strength are given us to use in that first struggle, and a man must feel those early deals right down to the pit of his stomach if he is going to be a great man of business. They must shake the very fibre of his being as the conception of a great picture shakes an artist.

But the first thousand made, he can advance with greater freedom and take affairs in his stride. He will have the confidence of experience, and can paint with a big brush because all the details of affairs are now familiar to him. With this assured technique nothing will check the career.

Such in effect is the career of the great captains of industry. Yet the man who attains a fortune by the practice of these rules, may fail of real achievement and happiness. He may not be able to recognise that the qualities of the aspirant are not exactly the qualities of the man who has arrived. The sense of general responsibility must supersede the spirit of private adventure.

Money which is striven for brings with it the real qualities in life. Here are the counters which mark character and brains. The money brain is, in the modern world, the shrewdest brain.

Why? Because that which the greatest number of men strive for will produce the fiercest competition of intellect.

I once considered the money brain to be not only the shrewdest brain but also the supreme brain. This is no longer my view. The money brain relies, more than I once thought, on experience, rejecting what has failed in the past and repeating what has succeeded.

Politics are for the few: they are a game, a fancy, or an inheritance.

Leaving out the man of genius who flares up, perhaps, once or twice in a century, the amount of ability which enables a man to cut a very respectable figure in a Cabinet is extraordinarily low, compared with that demanded in the world of industry and finance. The politician will never believe this truth, but it is truth.

There are many men, attractive, popular, able to argue a case with eloquence and skill. But when it comes to carrying out their ideas they are impotent. They lack the power of action. Such men usually excel in public life. As men of business, as administrators, they are not successful.

Consider the converse. There is often on a staff a man with no ability to present a case. When required to do so he becomes confused, even incoherent and embarrassed. But confront him with a situation requiring action and he is magnificent. He deals effectively on the instant with the problem. He shows himself a man to be relied upon in the hour of crisis. In business a man with the capacity for action is worth any number of talkers.

The battles of the market-place are real duels, on which realities of life and fortune or poverty and even of fame depend. Here men fight with a precipice behind them, not a pension of £2,000 a year. The young men who go down into that arena must win their battles by no man’s favour. But youth can triumph; it has the resolution when the mind is still plastic to gain that judgment which experience gives.

My advice to the young men of today is simply this: money is nothing but the fruit of resolution and intellect applied to the affairs of the world. To an unshakable resolution fortune will oppose no bar.

Chapter 3
NOTHING SO BAD AS CONSISTENCY

Lasting success in the modern world demands moderation. The days of the brilliant debauchee are over. Politicians no longer retire for good at 40 to nurse the gout. The antagonists encountered in these gruelling times are too formidable to be met and overcome by the roistering faro-playing habits of an earlier age.

The modern men of action understand that a sacrifice of health is a sacrifice of years—and that every year is of value. They protect their constitutions as the final bulwark against the assault of the enemy.

Moral courage springs as much from the nerves of the stomach as from the brain. And without such courage no politician or business man is worth anything. Moderation is, therefore, one secret of success.

Above all, I would urge on ambitious youth the absolute necessity of moderation in alcohol.

I am the last man to favour the regulation of the social habits of the people by law. But this much is certain: no man can achieve success who is not strict with himself in this matter; nor is it a bad thing for an aspiring man of business to be a teetotaller.

It is the complexity of modern life which enforces moderation. Science has created new conditions and brought into existence huge industries, and also given the means by which single minds can direct them. Invention gives these gifts, and compels man to use them.

Man is as much the slave as the master of the machine, as he turns to the telephone or the telegram, the sound-scriber, the wire recorder. In this fierce turmoil he can only keep his judgment intact, his nerves sound and his mind secure by the process of self-discipline, which may be equally defined as restraint, control, or moderation. This is the price which must be paid for the gifts the gods confer.

I would also enjoin upon young men the need to cultivate moderation in their attitude towards themselves and their achievements. Particularly would I warn them against that immoderate attitude known as arrogance.

What is arrogance? To begin with, it is the besetting vice of young men who have begun to prosper by their own exertions in the affairs of the world.

It is not pride, which is a more or less just estimate of one’s own power and responsibilities. It is not vanity or conceit, which consists in pluming oneself on the qualities one does not possess.

Arrogance is something of far tougher fibre than conceit. It is the sense of ability and power run riot; the feeling that the world is an oyster, and that in opening its rough edges there is no need to care a jot for the interests or susceptibilities of others.

For every individual the young man tramples on in the arrogance of his successful career a hundred enemies will spring up to dog with an implacable dislike the middle of his life.

A fault of manner, a deal pressed too hard in equity, the abruptness by which the old gods are tumbled out to make room for the new—all these are treasured up against the successful newcomer.

In the very heat of the strife men take no more account of these things than of a flesh wound in the middle of a hand-to-hand battle. It is the later recollection on the part of the vanquished that breeds the sullen resentment rankling against the arrogance of the conqueror.

Years afterwards, when all these things seem to have passed away, and the very recollection of them is dim in the mind of the young man, he will suddenly be struck by an unlooked-for blow dealt from a strange, or even a friendly, quarter.

He will stagger, as though hit from behind with a stone, and exclaim: “Why did this man hit me suddenly from the dark?” Then searching back he will remember some long past piece of arrogance—conceived of at the time merely as an exertion of legitimate power and ability—and he will realise that he is paying in maturity for the indiscretions of his youth.

Then there is prejudice. That, too, is a symptom of an immoderate attitude.

Prejudice is worse than arrogance, for it comes before the age of achievement, which may give arrogance some excuse. It is imbibed with one’s mother’s milk, fortified by all one’s youthful surroundings, and only broken through, if at all, by experience of the world and a deliberate mental effort.

Prejudice is, indeed, a vice in the most serious sense of the term. It is more damaging and corroding in its effects than most of the evil habits which are usually described by that word.

It is destructive of judgment and devastating in its effect on the mentality because it creates a narrowness of outlook on the world. The man who can learn to outlive prejudice has broken through an iron ring which binds the mind.

Prejudice can harden into consistency. And nothing is so bad as consistency. There exists no more futile person than the man who remarks: “Well, you may say what you like, but at any rate I have been consistent”. This argument is generally advanced as the palliation of some notorious failure. And this is natural.

The man who is consistent must be out of touch with reality.

There is no consistency in the course of events, in history, in the weather, or in the mental attitude of one’s fellow-men. The consistent man means that he intends to apply a single foot-rule to all the chances and changes of the universe.

He does not know, he has not learned, that it is essential to make at all times an adjustment of thought or action to circumstances.

The successful man will not adhere to consistency, but will deal with each situation as it arises, and veer with each change as his ever fresh judgment may suggest.

Chapter 4
FEAR CAN BE CONQUERED

No man can travel far along the road to success without courage.

I do not refer to the physical courage which sustains men on the battlefield, but to that rarer quality—moral courage.

This quality has nothing to do with mere stubbornness, which is sometimes a kind of cowardice. Many weaknesses derive from stubbornness.

Men cling to a business indefinitely in the fond wish that a loss may yet be turned into a profit. They hope for a better day, which their intelligence tells them will never dawn.

For this attitude of mind stupidity is a better word than stubbornness, and a far better word than courage. When reason and judgment bid us give up the immediate battle and start afresh on some new line, it is intellectual cowardice, not moral courage, which bids us persevere.

Courage cannot be divorced from judgment.

On the other hand, cowardice can also consist in too great a readiness for compromise. To the compromising mind the certainty of half a loaf is always better than the probability of a whole one.

Great affairs above all things require for their successful conduct sensitivity to the drift of events, to the characters or changing views of friends and opponents. Great affairs require a careful avoidance of that rigidity of standpoint which stamps the doctrinaire or the mule. The mind must be receptive and plastic.

But this quality in the man of affairs, which is akin to the artistic temperament, may degenerate into mere pliability.

Never to fight, always to negotiate for a remnant of the profits, then becomes the rule of life. At each stage in the career the primroses will beckon more attractively towards the bonfire, and the uphill path of contest look more stony and unattractive. In this process the intellect may remain unimpaired, but the moral fibre degenerates.

I once had to make a difficult choice between sticking to my guns or compromising. It was in the days of my youth when I was forming the Canada Cement Company. One of the concerns offered for sale to the combine was valued at far too high a price. In fact, it was obvious that only by selling it at an over-valuation could its debts be paid.

The president of this over-valued concern, an old man named Sir Sandford Fleming, was connected with the most powerful group of financiers that Canada has ever seen. Their smile would mean fortune to a young man, and their frown ruin to men of lesser position. The loss of including an unproductive concern at an unfair price would have been little to me personally—but it would have saddled the new amalgamated industry and the investors with a liability instead of an asset.

It was certainly far easier to be pliable than to be firm. Every kind of private pressure was brought to bear on me to accede to the purchase of the property.

When this failed, all the immense engines for the formation of public opinion which were at the disposal of the opposing forces were directed against me. And that attack was cleverly conducted. Those who had failed to induce me to break faith with the investing public appealed to that public to condemn me for forming a Trust.

I am prepared now to confess that I was (in my youth) bitterly hurt and injured by the injustice of these attacks. But I regret nothing. Why? Because these early violent criticisms taught me to treat ferocious onslaughts in later life with complete indifference.

What is more, that innate judgment which dwells in the recesses of the mind tells me that my whole capacity for action in affairs would have been damaged by the moral collapse of yielding to that threat. Pliability would have become a habit rather than a matter of judgment and will, for fortitude only comes by practice.

Every young man who enters business will at some time or another meet a similar crisis which will determine the bias of his career and dictate his habitual technique in negotiation.

But he may well exclaim, “How do you help me? You warn me in one and the same breath against rigidity and pliability!”

It is the old question: How can firmness be combined with adaptability to circumstances? There is no answer except that the two qualities must be made to run concurrently in the mind. One must be responsive to the world and yet faithful to one’s own instincts.

It is only the special circumstance of a grave crisis which will put a young man to this crucial test of judgment. The case will have to be judged on its merits, and yet the final decision will affect the whole of his career.

But one piece of practical advice can be given. Never bully, and never talk about the whip-hand—it is a word that should never arise in big business.

Every man who leads a life of big business must face in time the day of panic.

Moral courage is never more needed than when the public or private interest is involved in panic.

Moral cowardice is even more common in politics than it is in business. Those who seek place in public life depend upon (1) the continuing support of the Party Machine in their Constituencies; (2) the good-will and favourable notice of their leader for preference and promotion. Often a group of politicians, resentful of the official “line”, will determine to oppose it. Then they meet their leader in conference, listen to a harangue, and go away as resentful as before—without a single man having dared to enter upon a campaign of dissent. The truly courageous man, given judgment, will occasionally succeed in resisting both his leader and his political organisation.

In business moral courage in times of panic ensures for the venturesome operator a flying start over all competitors, and enables him to increase his lead.

Be sure that panic will return again and again in the course of the cycles of business. For long we have been passing through a series of prosperous and expansive years.

But times will change and depression will beset us in our careers.

To face a business panic one must first of all marshal the facts, and then allow for the mis-reading of others. It is the plastic and ingenious mind which will best grapple with unusual circumstances. It will invent weapons and expedients with which to face each new phase of the position. “Whenever you meet an abnormal situation”, said the sage, “deal with it in an abnormal manner”.

But a business panic is, after all, rare. It is the panic in the mind of the individual which is the perpetual danger.

Those who only see the mask put on in the daytime would be astonished to know the number of men who lie awake at night quaking with fear at some imagined disaster, the day of which will probably never come.

These are the men who cannot keep a good heart—who lack that particular kind of courage which prevents a man becoming the prey of his own nervous imagination.

They sell out good business enterprises at an absurdly low price because they have not got the nerve to hold on. Those who buy them secure the profits. One may pity the sellers, but cannot blame the buyers. Those who have the courage of their judgment are bound to win.

How can the victim exorcise from his mind this dread of the unknown—this partly conscious and partly subconscious fear—“which eats the heart away”?

Nothing can throw it off, except a resolute effort of will and intelligence.

I would give one simple recipe for the cure. When you feel anxious about the present, think of the worst anxiety you ever had in the past. Instead of one grip on the mind, there will be two distinct grips—and the greater grip of the past will overpower the lesser one in the present.

“Nothing”, a man will say, “can be as bad as that crisis of old, and yet I survived it successfully. If I went through that and survived, how far less arduous and dangerous is the situation today?” A man can thus will himself into the possession of a stout heart.

If a man can still that inner panic he will need to fear very little all the storms which may rage against him from outside.

The courage of the heart will let no expedient be left untried. But both ingenuity and courage will find their real strength in a health which has not yet exhausted the resources of the body.

I have written that moral courage is rarer than physical courage. It is much too rare. The man with the courage of his own convictions is the exception rather than the rule. Sometimes it may seem that his fearlessness and independence of judgment serve him but ill, that he would do better for himself were he to cultivate the arts of the courtier and the flatterer and say what he does not believe whenever his genuine beliefs might be unpalatable.

What is the answer to that? I would say that where a man can only prosper at the expense of his manhood, it is better that he should remain poor. But I do not accept the necessity for sycophancy. It never leads to real success.

Firmness which is not obstinacy, health which is not the fad of the valetudinarian, adaptability which is not weakness, enterprise which is not rashness—these are the qualities which will preserve men in those evil days when the “blast of the terrible one is against the wall”.

Chapter 5
READ ANYTHING—AND EVERYTHING

To young men who complain of defects in their education, I would send this message: Never believe that success cannot come your way because of the manner of your education.

The nineteenth century made a god of education. Its eminent men placed learning as the foremost influence in life.

Education imposed from without may be a hindrance rather than a help. The young man on the verge of life need not be discouraged by the fact that he has been denied the hall-mark of Oxford or Cambridge. Valuable indeed is the training offered to youth in these venerable establishments. But the inquiring mind may have escaped a grave danger; for if, in the impressionable period of youth, attention is given to one kind of knowledge, it may be withdrawn from another.

The truth is that education is the fruit of temperament, not success the fruit of education. What a man draws into himself by his own natural volition is what counts, because it becomes a living part of himself.

Of course, a child or an adult should learn what he can from his teachers. I value formal education and I recommend university training. In these days of scholarships the bright, ambitious and venturesome youth will make full use of the opportunities they afford. But if the student should find that he has genuine difficulty in learning lessons imposed upon him from above, let him not despair. He will be in good company. Did not the great Churchill almost break the hearts of the masters at Harrow? But a boy should not model himself on the Harrovian Winston. He may be quite sure that he lacks the qualities which were to make Churchill great, and should therefore do the best he can to master the subjects of the school curriculum.

My own education was most rudimentary. It will be difficult for the modern English mind to grasp life in the parish of Newcastle, New Brunswick, in the ’eighties—sparse patches of cultivation surrounded by the virgin forest and broken by the rush of an immense river. For half the year the land is in the iron grip of snow and frost, and the Miramichi is frozen right down to its estuary—so that “the rain was turned to a white dust, and the sea to a great green stone”.

In such conditions and in those days, education lacked continuity.

Men and books have been my real school. Reading is the source of education and of style. Read what you like, not what somebody else tells you that you ought to like. That reading alone is valuable which becomes part of the reader’s own mind and nature.

Little remains of what is forced on the student from outside.

Read anything and read everything—just as a man with a sound digestion and a good appetite eats largely and indifferently of all that is set before him.

The process of selection and rejection—in other words, of taste—will come naturally to any man who has the right kind of brains in his head. Some books he will throw away; others he will read over again. My education owes much to Scott, Stevenson, and Kinglake.

As a liking for the right kind of literature grows on a man he unconsciously forms his mind and his taste and his style, and by a natural impulse, without forced growth, the whole world of letters is his.

There are, of course, certain special branches of education which many youths consider unnecessary equipment for a business career.

Foremost among these are mathematics and foreign languages. Knowledge of the higher mathematics is not essential to a successful career; none the less, the type of mind which takes readily to mathematics is the kind which succeeds in the realm of industry and finance.

I regret that my business career was shaped on a continent which speaks one single language for commercial purposes from the Arctic Circle to the Gulf of Mexico. Foreign languages are, therefore, a sealed book to me.

If a man can properly appraise the value of something he does not possess, I would place a knowledge of languages high in the list of acquirements making for success.

But when all is said and done, the real education is the market-place of the street. There the study of character enables the boy of judgment to develop an unholy proficiency in estimating the value of the currency of the realm.

Experience teaches that no man ought to be downcast in setting out on the adventure of life by a lack of formal knowledge.

The first Lord Birkenhead many years ago asked me where I was going to educate one of my sons. When I replied that I had not thought about the matter, and did not care, he was unable to repress his horror.

And yet the real reasons for such indifference are deep rooted in my mind. A boy is master, and the only master, of his fortune. If he wants to succeed in literature, or in any other walk of life, he will read until he obtains by what he draws into himself that kind of trained perception which enables him to distinguish between good work and bad, just as the expert with his eyes shut knows the difference between a good and a bad glass of wine.

Neither may be able to give any reason, for a verdict based on unconscious knowledge, but each will be right when he says, “Here I have written well”, or “Here I have taken bad drink”.

The message, therefore, is one of encouragement to the young men of England who are determined to succeed in the affairs of the world, and yet have not been through the public school and university mill. There is the danger that the public school may turn out a boy to type—the individual turns out himself.

In the hour of action it is probable that the individual will defeat the type.

Style cannot be acquired except by reading for oneself. Nothing is of advantage in the art of learning to know a good cup of wine but the actual practice of drinking. Nothing can help in business except going in young, liking the game, and buying one’s experience.

In a word, man is the creator, and not the sport, of his fate. He can triumph over his upbringing and, what is more, over himself. The lack of education in the formal sense need be no bar to advancement.

Every young man has his chance. But will he practise industry, economy, and moderation, avoid arrogance and panic, and know how to face depression with a stout heart? Even if he is a genius, will he take off with caution and soar with safety?

The secret of power is the method by which the fire of youth is translated into the knowledge of experience. I have suggested a short cut to that knowledge.

I once had youth, and now I have experience, and I believe that youth can do anything if its desire for success is sufficiently strong to curb all other desires. I also believe that a few words of experience can teach youth how to avoid the pitfalls of commerce which wait for the most audacious spirits. I write out of the conviction of my own experience.

Chapter 6
IMPROVISATION

Improvisation is the gift of invention in its most primitive form. It is the art of coping with the unexpected, of dealing with entirely unforeseen circumstances in such a way that one snatches advantage from them.

The young man who would succeed must learn to practise this art until it becomes habitual, until his mind is ever alert and never at a loss when situations which he had not contemplated arise.

Improvisation is a large part of the art of life. It is of immense importance in the art of success in business.

I strongly urge the young man who would be successful to learn how to improvise.

Although the examples of improvisation which I place before him are taken from war, it is far from my mind to prepare him for another outburst of senseless savagery. My devout hope is that he will live his life in peace. But war does present in an accentuated form many of the problems of business life, and for that reason its lessons are more vivid.

Such examples are also useful in that we still live in a period of transition from war to peace.

Let the young improviser begin by studying the life of Churchill. Almost every act of his throughout the war was an act of improvisation.

Britain’s struggle against foreign invasion is an epic of improvisation and individualism. The nation’s defence turned on opportunities taken, on individual decisions, on improvised means. How to meet what seemed the virtual certainty of invasion from the French coast? Everything depended upon British domination of the air over England. And domination depended upon a supply of fighter ’planes. The Battle of Britain was won by the pilots, but it was also won by scrapping plans and improvising ’planes. The plans would have led to certain defeat; the ’planes gave Britain victory.

“Saucepans into Spitfires”

When Europe fell, the supply lines to Britain were cut. Aluminium is the first need for aircraft production. The supply of bauxite, the raw material of aluminium, was cut off altogether. Three-quarters of the import of iron and steel, most of the import of iron ore, came from Europe. How did Britain face this crisis? By improvising new sources of supply; by setting up new lines of transportation for the aluminium, iron ore, iron and steel. What was lost in Europe was found in Africa and America.

By December, 1941, Churchill wanted more “tools to finish the job”. Did he wait on the organisation? Did he trust to the machine? Did he tell his Minister of Supply to “tidy it all up”? Not at all! Churchill, the individualist, set out for Washington in search of weapons for British soldiers, and ships for British sailors. He took me with him.

On arrival in Washington we found that the Americans had drawn up an elaborate programme for production. Their plans had been prepared down to the last detail. On paper they made a most imposing sight. The type-scripts had been gorgeously bound, while some of the plans had even been printed, to indicate finality and perfection. There was only one thing wrong with this scheme—it was fantastically inadequate to meet allied requirements.

My role was to make its inadequacy clear to the American Government. I had to persuade Washington to base its production programme, not on the theories of the painstaking planners, but on the realities of America’s enormous productive capacity.

To do this the American Government would have to improvise as no country had ever improvised before. The United States official publication, “Industrial Mobilisation for War”, gives an account of the ferment we caused in Washington. We certainly went all out to smash official complacency. We pressed our point of view at innumerable meetings in the White House, the Vice-President’s office and elsewhere. I took the battle to the President, plying him with letters and memoranda and putting to him at personal interviews the case for abandoning the planned programme and adopting a policy of improvisation on a mighty scale. We campaigned with such force that soon official Washington seemed to become involved in the controversy. The newspapers joined in, adding to the general stir.

My argument was based on my own experience and I claimed that America could produce in 1942, 45,000 tanks, 17,700 anti-tank guns, 45,000 anti-aircraft guns, 24,000 fighter airplanes and other war material.

“Churchill, the individualist, set out for Washington in search of weapons for British soldiers, and ships for British sailors. He took me with him.”

“My role was to make its inadequacy clear to the American Government”

The planners objected. Preposterous! they exclaimed. The demand is ridiculous.

Their inadequate schemes would assuredly have been accepted, had not the imaginative grasp of President Roosevelt seized on our programme and made it his own. Had the worthy planners prevailed over the improvisers the war certainly could not have been won in 1945. Instead, we prevailed. We changed the entire American outlook.

Thanks to the President, our estimates of production were adopted. A war programme increased by billions of dollars for 1942 was presented to Congress by him.^[2] It was designed to give us overwhelming superiority in armaments. This revised programme was not only fulfilled but exceeded—a triumph for improvisation.

Improvisation, whether in peace or war, serves its greatest use when danger menaces and misfortune is on the prowl. The man set in his ways is then lost, because he demands too much time to think and thus moves slower than events. The improviser is off on a new tack before the man of routine has fully appreciated the problem.

But improvisation must be used while there is still time to gain an advantage. It is little use following the routine ways until all is lost and then expect that improvisation will automatically put everything right again. Improvisations must be carried through at once, as soon as the first difficulties are glimpsed. Take them on the run and they are nothing. Walk at a slow and ponderous pace and they may seem insurmountable.

To the man who sees, the man who can make snap decisions—and alter them as quickly if he finds that they are not as good as he thought—advantage can come from the most frightening situation.

Success belongs to those who, by swift improvisations, snatch triumph from catastrophe.

Beware of the rigid minds. The man who sits back and says complacently that something cannot be done is always beaten by the enterprising fellow who makes a way of doing it.

“HALVES, PARTNER”
Cartoon by LOW, November 1940

NEW LIMIT
Cartoon by LOW, October 1941

Cartoon by LOW, Feb. 1942

“BOY! LET HER GO!”
“Success belongs to those who, by swift improvisations, snatch triumph from catastrophe”

That is another way of saying, “Beware of paying too much attention to organisation”. Over-organisation is the enemy of improvisation. The ever-present temptation which obsesses organisers, as always, is to over-organise. And over-organisation leads to the strangulation of enterprise.

Nowhere has this truth been more clearly demonstrated than in the Soviet Union, which relies for its production upon long-range State control of every branch of industry. Stalin told this story of his conversation with a Commissar responsible for organising the work of the collective farms.

Stalin: How are you getting on with the sowing?

Commissar: With the sowing, Comrade Stalin? We have mobilised ourselves.

Stalin: Well, and what then?

Commissar: We have put the question squarely.

Stalin: And what next?

Commissar: There is a turn, Comrade Stalin; soon there will be a turn.

Stalin: But still?

Commissar: We can say that there is an indication of some progress.

Stalin: But for all that how are you getting on with the sowing?

Commissar: So far, Comrade Stalin, we have not begun to sow.

The organisers have a very honourable part to play in any enterprise, but it must never be the leading part. Otherwise there will soon be nothing but organisation.

The successful man may have a flair for organisation, but the very fact of his success proves that he is not its slave.

Such a man has little patience with endless committee meetings in which talk stifles action.

Neither does the successful man give undue importance to “plans”. Plans can go awry. Then new plans are laboriously prepared and followed, but before they are followed they must be approved and by the time they are approved the situation they are designed to meet may have completely altered.

The art of dealing with the unexpected is lost when a man is waiting on a machine, on an organisation or a committee. And the lamps of passion and conviction burn low when we do not seek by every instrument of persuasion or education to maintain the integrity of our own judgment and conscience.

That lesson has remained with me. I urge every leader of an enterprise to keep under vigilant observation every kind of organisational device, to make sure that it is not stifling the activities it was created to help.

Organisation, if not watched, will cease to be the servant of industry. It will become its master. And that, for industry, will be the beginning of the end. Over-organisation takes the punch out of business.

Although wars are won by improvisers, they also offer great opportunities for the organisers to become deeply entrenched in a country’s economic life. They remain entrenched long after the armies have been demobilised. It happens in this way.

When war breaks out, Government becomes the only purchaser, and the sole customer of all the great producers in the country. They are confined to a single market and transactions are conducted on the basis of cost plus a percentage of profits. As a result, efficiency declines, there are wasteful increases in salaries, and the only brake on complete extravagance is the patriotism which animates all branches of industry.

When peace comes the system is slowly disbanded. The producers cling to the cost plus profit system and administrators are loath to divest themselves of the control of industry which makes for importance. Changing demands are ignored, new opportunities neglected. The planning authorities still impose their fixed conditions.

Gradually, as Government control is lifted, efficiency increases, economic working is restored. The field is again open for free enterprise.

Related to the danger of over-organisation is the danger of trusting new enterprises to men who “know it all”. There is a general idea that if you want some enterprise to succeed and prosper you must pick the most experienced man you can find to run it. He must be the man—or so they say—with the greatest measure of success already behind him. Put him in charge of the new venture and expect that the results he has already achieved in life will be repeated. But things do not always work out that way. In fact, this is a bad principle.

It is a principle which results in more errors and failures than successes. Frequently, very frequently, the selection of such a man brings to bear on the task a tired and weary mind, someone who is already set in his ways and fixed in his ideas. Often he is so hide-bound that he has no capacity at all for improvisation. He cannot meet a new situation in a new and changing world.

The proper method to start a new enterprise is to select new men, relying on one’s own knowledge of human nature. Experience will train the untried talent. First of all, settle in your own mind the qualities you wish to develop, and then decide where you can find these qualities in the raw, ready and ripe for development. Now, when these qualities are present in the men you select, you have a fortunate and utterly satisfying experience.

Such men will make fruitful use of their opportunities. They will enrich the world.

“Blessed is the man whose strength is in thee: in whose heart are thy ways. Who going through the vale of misery use it for a well: and the pools are filled with water.”

Chapter 7
CARD INDEX MINDS

Errors in business are of two kinds. They may be the result of inexperience or of natural and experienced folly. It is no use talking to mature incompetence, for it will not heed the words either of experience or wisdom. Nothing can prevent the man, who has had all his chances and continues to lose them, rushing on his fate. The reading of a text book will not correct a fundamental incapacity for judgment. Advice is wasted on middle-aged error.

But the errors of youth can be easily forgiven, just because they can be corrected with such ease. A young man can learn the lesson through a bitter experience, or he may take a short cut to success by the precept and experience of those who have trodden the hard path before him. The one man in a thousand who is a natural genius in the realm of affairs may even be the better for allowing his ignorance and his spirit of adventure to break him once or twice on the wheel.

But to the main run of rising youth, the acceptance of a wise precept is better than a financial disaster which may destroy that self-confidence which is the soul of success.

What then are the besetting errors of the able, the inexperienced, the self-confident, and the untried?

The first is that of chasing the rainbow vision. The little things which are the beginnings of greatness appear unworthy of consideration. Somewhere in the background there lurks that wonderful scheme, that mirage in the financial desert, which will make the optimist a capitalist in a night. The youthful victim explains that he is dominated by his possession of imagination. His rivals are mere plodders; he alone has grasped the golden key which unlocks at a single turn the gates of fortune.

If this were indeed so he would have nothing to fear. But the truth is that he is not the possessor of imagination, but the victim of that terrible disease—the pursuit of the rainbow. The gates do not swing open and the victim knocks, in vain. No man who has not, in the day of small things, acquired that technique which means the mastery of business can step into a fortune in a fortnight.

Beware of the man who proclaims that he alone possesses the genius of imagination. It is too probable that he is making a mistake.

The second error may be called the disease of the personal interview. It devastates those who are susceptible to this form of attack. It generally takes the form of procuring personal introductions to prominent men of business and asking for a minute’s conversation “absolutely uninterrupted”, not on any definite proposal, but simply in order to make a favourable impression. Now, as a matter of fact, an extremely busy man in the middle of his own day’s work is not to be impressed at all by such methods, and in three weeks’ time will have probably forgotten the whole incident. But the young man who insists on such an interview calls it “establishing contact”.

What he means is that he is preparing for very remote and contingent ramifications of his business, which are as improbable as they would be unwise. It may be added that the man who grants such interviews is as guilty as the man who asks for them. Both parties devote energy to a waste of time.

Both these errors spring from what may be described as an over-development of the artistic temperament applied to affairs, or at least it exhibits the temperament of the painter who has a magnificent conception of a picture but is devoid of the technique necessary to put his ideas on the canvas.

The third error is the tendency to run to extremes in a precisely opposite direction. It is chiefly found among young men who are the victims of the card index system and the mentality which a devotion to that system implies. It is as though the human race had been created in the form of a perfect skeleton without the advantage of flesh and blood and life. The card index system is the bane of a business man, because it is the nightmare of a Treasury clerk.

I was once persuaded to introduce the most perfect form of it which existed into my office in Canada. The card index system worked admirably, until I noticed that a substantial falling off in business coincided with its introduction. The explanation was simple. The energy of the office was concentrated on working the card index system. No one had enough time for doing business. I abolished the system instantly. Many promising careers have been ruined by the card index habit of mind.

The conscientious letter writer is also akin in temperament to the man who believes in system at the cost of practicability. This mania for letter-writing leads him to spend two or three hours in his office answering with skill and elaboration communications which might be just as well met by a general form of reply.

Certain important letters must, of course, be dictated personally. In these, brevity is the essence of business letter-writing. Even the most important matters do not need pages and pages of explanation, and the shorter the letter as a rule the clearer it is. But the man with the mania will not have it so. After the morning toil the wretched man sits down in the early evening to read and correct his dictated letters. He immediately begins to see mistakes and to reconstruct on a large scale.

By the time he has thoroughly finished expressing through a blue pencil his discontent with the output another two hours have slipped away and the business day is over, and a good many of the letters have not even gone.

When a young man has finished his personal interviews of a futuristic character, and has written and corrected his letters on a thorough-going business basis, and when his staff have exhausted themselves completely at the typewriter and the card index, there will still remain a few moments in which business may be done.

It might be imagined that all these various and discordant errors in the business mind could not be included in the mentality of a single individual. The imagination which outstrips reality seems far removed from the type of mind which places its faith in the card index system, or in an interminable waste of time over the answering of telephone calls or letters. The curious fact is that these two divergent forms of character are often found in conjunction. They are expressed in the final type of error often known as the “hustler”—the man who is too energetic and busy ever to arrive at his goal.

His imagination overleaps the bounds of reality, and, as though he were in his innermost mind painfully conscious of this fact, he safeguards himself by a meticulous regard for system and detail which robs him of his last energies. The menace of this type of hustler is that he is like a hen without a tail. He can push ahead but he cannot steer a steady course. His imagination stretches to the extent of the absurd; his energies are concentrated on the details of the ridiculous.

Chapter 8
DO NOT TRUST TO LUCK!

There is one attitude against which I warn the young man who would do well in life—that summed up in the phrase: “Trust to luck”.

No attitude is more hostile to success, and no phrase more foolish. The phrase is foolish because in a universe governed by the law of cause and effect, strictly speaking there can be no such thing as luck. There is much in the saying: “Mrs. Harris’s pork pies are not always good by chance”. In other words, Mrs. Harris was a good cook. So with the consistently “lucky” man. It is a fair assumption that he is a consistently industrious and able man.

What we really mean when we say “Trust to luck” is “Trust to circumstances outside our own control”. And as long as there is any chance whatever of controlling those factors, not to bring them under control is, of course, folly.

As the years pass I become increasingly reluctant to believe in any kind of luck. I once wrote that: “It is luckier to be born heir to a peerage and £100,000 than to be born in Whitechapel”. Even that no longer is true. Being born to poverty may be a spur, whereas being born to riches may lead to ruin.

If a disaster should destroy a man’s fortune, something he has laboured many years of his life to build, we naturally think that he has had bad luck. But it may be that the disaster was caused by factors which he neglected to control. Or it may be that the disaster was a blessing in disguise, forcing him to exercise intellectual muscles endangered by atrophy, or to strengthen his character at some hitherto unsuspected weak point.

So I will not dogmatise about the existence of luck, except to say this—do not trust in it.

The idea that some are born lucky and some unlucky, in the same way that some are born to be tall and some born to be short, is just nonsense. Most “good luck” may be explained by industry and judgment, most “bad luck” by a lack of these qualities.

The gambler’s creed has been defined as a belief in the imagined tendencies of chance to produce events continuously favourable or continuously unfavourable. To live in this sort of mental atmosphere is to live in a nightmare. It seems to drive some people very nearly insane. They constantly consult oracles of one sort or another or perform compulsive actions in a ceaseless endeavour to propitiate Fortune.

Fortune cannot be flattered by such fetish-worship. But she can be wooed and won by hard work.

The law of some games of chance is inexorable. It is for instance in card games like canasta or cribbage that in the long run a skilful player will beat a player less skilled. So with the great game of life. He who succeeds will be he who, through the totality of his qualities, deserves to succeed. He who fails will be he who deserves to fail and nowhere more than in this—that he has trusted to luck where he should have trusted to himself.

It may be that most of us have something of the gambler in our dispositions. We achieve real success only when we have got the better of that imp or demon. In affairs the gambler is doomed before he begins to play.

Consider the young man who stakes everything on the hope that some magic key to success will be placed before him on a golden plate. Pathetic is his plight. He consistently refuses good offers or even small chances of work because they are not good enough for him. He expects that Luck will suddenly bestow on him a ready-made position or a gorgeous chance suitable to the high opinion he holds of his own capacities. After a time people tire of giving him any openings at all. In wooing Luck he has neglected Opportunity.

These men in middle-age fall into a well-known class. They can be seen waylaying their more industrious and successful associates to pour out a sorry tale of the misfortune which has dogged them throughout life and prevented their reaping the rewards which ought to have been theirs. They develop that terrible disease known as “the genius of the untried”.

Far different is the attitude of the man who really means to succeed. He will banish the idea of luck from his mind. He will accept every opportunity, however small it may appear, which seems to lead to the possibility of greater things. He will not wait on that airy-fairy concept called Luck to launch him royally on his career. He will make his own opportunity and develop its chances by his industry. Here and there he may go wrong, where judgment or experience is lacking. But out of his very defeats he will learn to do better in the future, and in the maturity of his knowledge he will attain success. At least, he will not be found sitting down and whining that luck has been against him.

There remains to be considered a more subtle argument in favour of a belief in luck. It is that certain men possess a kind of sixth sense, so that they know by instinct what enterprise will succeed or fail, or whether the market will rise or fall. These men are supposed to make their way to success by what might be called a series of “psychic bids”.

Do not believe any of this mystical rubbish.

The real explanation is very different. Eminent men who are closely in touch with the great affairs of politics or business often act on what appears to be instinct. But, in truth, they have absorbed, through a careful and continuous study of events, so much knowledge that they appear to reach a conclusion “without stopping to think”, just as the heart beats without any conscious stimulus from the brain. Ask them for the reasons of their decision, and they can say no more than “Just a hunch.” Their conscious minds do not take into account the long-hoarded experience beneath the level of their conscious thinking. When they prove right in their forecast, the world exclaims: “What luck!” The world would do better to exclaim: “What judgment! What a wealth of experience!”

The “lucky” speculator is a very different kind of person. He makes a brilliant coup or so and then disappears in some overwhelming disaster. He is as quick in losing his fortune as he is in making it. Nothing except Judgment and Industry, backed by Health, will ensure real and permanent success. The rest is sheer superstition.

It is natural for youth to hope, but if hope turns to a belief in luck, it becomes poisonous and debilitating. The youth of Britain has before it a splendid opportunity, but let it remember always that nothing but work and brain counts, and that a man can even work himself into brains. No fairy-godmother will waft a young man to success.

He can attain to that goal only by his own sense of direction and relentless toil.

There is no substitute for toil. He who is work-shy will never achieve a permanent success. At best he will eke out a bare subsistence. At worst he will become a charge on the National Health.

Chapter 9
TO SAVE IS TO CREATE

Saving is a habit which very few men acquire. The man who does it in youth lays the foundation of success. Of him may it be said: “Wisdom is his only choice”.

Saving builds character. It is essential to strengthen a man’s resolution and give edge to his determination to triumph in life.

Nevertheless, saving by itself will not today speed any man to fortune. Those of us who devote ourselves to an industrious life, wishing to provide for ourselves, and for others in our care, must recognise that under existing systems of taxation we can no longer greatly prosper simply by not spending money. Fortunately, in spite of the tax collector, there are other methods of improving our “outward estate”—our position in life. With a small measure of capital we can lavish care upon it to make it grow, and to make it grow we must deal with products expected to expand. The young man may deal with them in manufacture, in wholesale distribution or in the retail trade. To do so successfully he must retain and plough back a large proportion of his earnings. He must develop an unusual ability to make his assets grow and expand. So saving is the foundation.

It is my calculation that only one man in five saves. And even from that figure one must deduct the numbers of those who save not for the purpose of reinvestment or increasing their capital, but for safety’s sake. There are many who dread illness, misfortune, or premature death. They assess the limit of safety against these evils at a certain sum and, when that amount is attained, cease to strive.

The small percentage of men who save with the intention of using their capital productively soon acquire certain habits which spring from the original saving motive.

Time is money to them, and they save one as religiously as the other. They work continually, with no thought of overtime. As long as there remains anything to be done they do it. They are like the scholar who will not leave a lesson until he has it word perfect. They take their example from the farmer in harvest time who goes on bringing in the crops until the light fails—and begins again as soon as the sun rises. In the good times of commerce they work hard, and in the bad times they work harder.

The opposite type is all too common. He is the man who is fond of declaring that “the world owes him a living.” He is wrong. The world owes him nothing. On the contrary, he is indebted to society for his existence. If he labours at all, it is for four hours a day in good times because work is at a premium price and for four hours a day in bad times because industry can supply no longer hours. This is the type of man who takes every advantage of the Welfare State. Of course we should favour the Welfare State, but one proviso must be made. Such a State must be founded on hard work, not on the belief that the Government’s duty is to act as a wet nurse to the sluggards and parasites who contribute as little as possible in return.

There are also, of course, those who fail to save, not because they lack the inclination, but because they lack the chance. Hard cases of this kind are far more common than is supposed. There is, for example, the man whose health will not allow him to work at full pressure. Then there is the man who has a widowed mother to support or younger brothers and sisters to keep and educate. His savings go not to create capital which will make him rich, but to the help of others.

The great bulk of taxation comes from the invested savings of the people—that is, on the profits of industry. And the chief creator of that wealth is the man who saves and re-employs his capital. It is right that he should pay for the machinery of Government. He can afford to do so out of the superabundance of his energy and wealth.

There is no need to pity the payers of the high super-tax or to sympathise with those who are the victims of the big death duties. Nor will they ask for commiseration. In shouldering the burden they strengthen the muscles of their own backs, and they look with equanimity on all systems of government and taxation save those which would deny them the right to work, and to create.

Chapter 10
SALESMEN SERVE MANKIND

Salesmanship in commerce is the master quality.

The young man who aspires to be a successful merchant should develop the capacity for salesmanship to the utmost of his power. Should he fail to do so others will beat him to the post and claim the prize.

Salesmanship does not consist of selling at the biggest possible profit. This is a fallacy into which the young salesman is apt to fall at the start of his career. If the responsibility of fixing the price is his own, he may be tempted to make an excessive profit while opportunity offers itself. A short-term policy which is fatal to long-term success.

Some ancient philosophers, indeed, regarded all salesmanship as “exploitation” in the unpleasant sense of the word. Their argument was an extremely simple one. The merchant buys the article for what it is worth: he can only sell it for a higher price by misrepresenting its value. The bigger the profit, therefore, the bigger the lie, and the bigger the liar the greater the success in the career of merchanting!

This error of the ancient world was due to ignorance of economics. The real cost of an article is that of production plus the value of the services which place it on the market. In other words, the profit made on a sale is the price for the service in exchanging goods.

Experience has proved that it does not pay to sell on a small scale at an exaggerated profit. Such a policy is not the basis of a big business. Much better is the sale at a small profit of a large turnover on a great scale.

Whether the salesman has to deal with a small number of luxury articles or with a large turnover of cheaper goods, his business is to sell them. That is the art of salesmanship, springing not—as the philosophers thought—from a gift for dishonesty, but from the power of persuasion.

On what does this capacity for salesmanship depend? On the ideal combination of two qualities which appear opposed to each other—strength of personality and that imaginative power of putting oneself in touch with another man’s mind which is best known as tact.

There are two extremes which fail; there is the mean between the two which succeeds. One extreme may be described as “the excess of personality”.

The power of arresting attention and making an impression which is that subtle and indefinite thing called personality is essential to salesmanship. But it can be so over-developed as to constitute a defect. The man makes his impression, states his case, and is so carried away by his own force and his own arguments that he fails to register what is happening in the mind of the buyer opposite to him. At the critical moment there is a failure of contact—and no sale.

The other extreme is the passivity of the salesman who possesses the nervous ability to follow the twists and turns of the buyer’s brain. But in so doing he loses the upper ground in the manoeuvre. He is not making the impression he wants; another mind is forcing an impression on him. He begins to adopt a pleading attitude of subservience which is fatal to success. The buyer at once becomes elusive. The salesman loses control of the interview.

“Salesmanship in commerce is the master quality”

The “Evening Standard” is the only British newspaper to own and operate its own helicopter news service

“the rain was turned to a white dust, and the sea to a great green stone”

“Sparse patches of cultivation surrounded by the virgin forest and broken by the rush of an immense river . . . the Miramichi”

It has been well said that the seller is the courtier and the buyer is the king; but the great courtier never cringes.

These are the dangers of the extremes. The salesman will aim at the combination of power and persuasiveness, personality and tact. He will walk an intellectual tight-rope, swaying now this way and now the other to maintain his proper balance. He must exhibit in turn strength and subtlety. He will allow his personality as much free play as will make the right impression—and not an inch more; the other inches must be in reserve, ready for bestowal as a tribute to the personality of the buyer.

As in war, all depends on the last battle. Salesmanship must supply the power of clinching the bargain. It is to this climax that the whole conversation has led. The great salesman has that decisiveness of mind which enables him to grasp the right moment and close in an instant. Lack of that instancy of decision proves fatal to success. An indifferent salesman is too often like the tennis player with a pretty stroke who cannot carry through.

Yet that lack can be made good. In so far as a man is ready to cultivate his character and his confidence, and to apply his imagination to his experience, he can make himself a salesman. He can take a course of training in salesmanship at no expense to himself. If he aspires to big position and high distinction, let him begin his career by selling life insurance (that’s how I began) or any other form of activity known in my day as “selling blue sky”. The job will be tough, but the hard worker will swiftly equip himself for a larger, more remunerative task, and possibly one more to his liking.

It is a splendid ambition. Salesmanship is a worthy pursuit. It is the second of the arts which have led humanity into the paths of civilisation. It is not the first, because the man who can make with his hands the fine things or the practical instruments of human desire, or the man who can help the hands to create these objects, stands first in the roll of those who minister to human needs.

The craftsman and the industrial producer come first. But second only to them as the pioneer of civilisation is the salesman, the merchant, the trafficker in unknown economic seas, bringing the individuals and then the nations together through the medium of exchange.

The Tyrians who sold the silk and coins of the East for the tin of Cornwall and trafficked in the marts of Tyre and Alexandria, the traders who took skins and amber from the Baltic in exchange for the produce of the Mediterranean civilisation, the men who organised the caravan routes between China and Western Europe and made their bargains in Rome or Constantinople, the sea adventurers to America and the East, the Merchant Adventurers of Canada, and the firms they dealt with in London, were the forefathers of the salesman of today. They made production possible and profitable by selling the products of one man to another, of one district to another, and of one country to another. The individuals and the nations on either side of the process of exchange work with their minds and hands. The intermediaries work with their brains to put the handiwork of one nation into the possession of another.

While the creation of a nation or a civilisation depends on the producer, its economic success and its place in a world polity depend on the salesman. Let the young man who embarks upon such a career have a feeling of pride, because great may be his service to mankind.

Chapter 11
SPEAKING IN PUBLIC

Every man who would take part in business or affairs should learn to speak in public.

This capacity is not a “must” in the realm of commerce. But it is an advantage like speaking two languages.

He who cannot express his ideas clearly and confidently may be compared to an athlete who goes to the track with shoes that pinch. It is a disability.

And it is needless disability. From long experience with men and women I declare that anyone can learn to speak well, if he will practise with perseverance and industry.

I list four methods of public speaking.

First, there is the speech that is read. Churchill is perhaps the greatest exponent of this method. I once asked him in what the art of public speaking consisted.

“A strong pair of spectacles and a fountain pen,” he replied with a broad beam. And he meant it. Although he has improved as an extempore speaker, he is at his best when he speaks from manuscript. The measured emphasis of his sentences compels attention.

But there are times when he speaks as the spirit moves him. I was once present when he did so with a passionate intensity which deeply moved me.

On June 13th, 1940, the world seemed to be collapsing. Churchill went to France to try to rally the French Government and keep it at war.

Evidence of collapse was everywhere. Nobody came to Tours airport to meet him. After lunch with Baudouin, a pessimistic and depressing host, Churchill went to the Prefecteur. Only Mandel was there. Premier Reynaud arrived late and flustered.

But when several members of the French cabinet were eventually assembled Churchill forgot all the discouragements of the day and delivered an impromptu speech, partly in French, partly in English, which should have set on fire the most timid heart. It was sublime. But it was in vain.

Second on my list is the memorised speech. Bonar Law, who had a photographic memory, always used this method. He could dictate at leisure to a stenographer what he wished to say and repeat it with precision on the public platform. Capacity of this kind is very rare, and those who would be public speakers should be warned of the dangers of relying on a memorised speech.

Churchill would be able, from his own experience, to confirm this warning. Fifty years ago, unwisely setting aside his usual practice, he addressed the House of Commons, from memory, on the Trades Disputes Act.

In the middle of his speech he completely “dried up”. After agonised efforts to recover the “lost chord” he said, bowing to the Speaker, “I thank the House for its indulgence,” and resumed his seat amid a round of sympathetic cheers. Immediately after he left the Chamber.

“First there is the speech that is read. Churchill is perhaps the greatest exponent of this method”

Photographed at the Conservative
Party Conference at Margate 1953

“It requires a master of phrase like Churchill to make a speech sparkle”

Let the young aspirant brood upon that last unhappy scene and learn from it. He will ask me whether I would have him avoid such pitfalls by reading his speeches. By no means. Reading is the most difficult of all methods of public speaking. It requires a master of phrase like Churchill to make such a speech sparkle. To make it even bearable the speaker must practise over and over again—preferably in private. Otherwise his speech will be as flat and as ungainly as a burst tyre.

Premeditated speaking is next on my list. The general outline of such a speech—when it is not sheerly impromptu—may be carefully thought out, but the actual words are left to the occasion. This is the method I recommend.

Lloyd George was a master of the premeditated speech. He would give much consideration to what he proposed to say, but when he had established contact with his audience he would rely upon the magic of his inspiration to carry his theme to triumph.

The best speech of his I ever heard was not prepared. His prepared speech he discarded at the last moment. It happened when I took him to visit Canadian troops during the first world war. These troops had accumulated certain grievances and Lloyd George was brought to the camp at Bramshot to speak to them.

While in the car he was thinking very seriously about what he would say. But when we approached the camp some Canadian soldiers marching to the parade ground caught sight of him and gave him a spontaneous and tumultuous welcome.

It was vastly different from the more formal applause of public meetings. Lloyd George was affected by it and when he made his speech he rejected the ideas he had been marshalling in the car and spoke in truly impromptu sentences. I have rarely heard anything more majestic or exciting.

It was indeed an impromptu speech—that which is delivered on the spur of the moment. When it is not done by a master it is nearly always a failure.

That is the warning I would give to the young man who is tempted to rely on this fourth type of public speaking, the impromptu speech. Although often successful, it cannot be practised with safety. It serves well enough for after-dinner speeches, when no reporters are present, but to use it on important occasions is to plunge into grief.

The bad political reputation of Stanley Baldwin was strengthened and indeed sealed by a single sentence spoken impromptu in the House of Commons in 1936. With “appalling frankness” he said that if he had told the truth to the country—about German re-armament in the air—he would have made the loss of an election from his point of view quite certain. Hence he confessed that he told a lie. Baldwin admitted that he put party before country on an issue involving war. He had spoken to his own damnation.

“. . . the memorised speech. Bonar Law, who had a photographic memory, always used this method”

“Lloyd George was a master of the premeditated speech.”

John Wilkes, the reformer, who did not believe in reform, gave this advice to speakers: “Be as impudent as you like, as merry as you can, and say what comes uppermost”.

It is not advice to be taken too literally. The light-hearted approach might brighten a funeral oration, but the mourners would scarcely applaud.

But there is something in what Wilkes said. I have noticed that men whose conversation is gay and easy, often become unbearably stilted when they speak in public. Conversely, attractive orators usually make dull writers. A man may have a brilliant intellect, an enormous fecundity of speech, personal magnetism and a great outpouring of ideas, and yet in essence a failure as a writer.

Prime Minister Asquith was a very able man, but anyone who reads his memoirs will realise that he was an ineffective writer.

I sat for many years in the House of Commons with Mr. Lloyd George. He was far and away the most brilliant speaker of my time. His temperament was responsive to his audience—and his genius inflamed them. And yet as a writer he was not a marked success. Great brains, imagination, oratorical gifts, do not make a writer. He must possess the knack.

Lord Birkenhead was a public orator and a private wit. His immense intellectual abilities were universally recognized. Yet he often wrote most undigested slabs of matter for the newspapers. Wit and eloquence and learning did not make a writer. For why? Writing is a Convention. A deadly Convention. Whereas Oratory depends on lively presentation.

Public speaking is an act. The speaker is an actor. Showmanship is the secret of success and delivery is the showman’s trick.

Am I telling the beginner that he should be insincere? Certainly not. No actor whose acting is insincere can hope to do any good on the stage. So with the public speaker. He must be sincere.

He must believe in what he says. He will not cast doubt on his sincerity if he makes an unashamed appeal to the emotions. Nor need an emotional appeal be at the expense of the intellect. But what a man thinks to be true will have little force unless he also feels it to be true.

Now for some practical advice.

Let the opening sentence be electric, so that the audience’s attention is captured.

Do not fidget your listeners by unnecessary movements. Stand still. Gestures should be natural, not rehearsed beforehand in front of a mirror.

Watch out for nervous habits and crush them with iron resolution.

Do not allow your gaze to wander all round the hall. It is better to select one member of the audience and speak to him.

I once made just such a choice with gratifying results, during an election campaign. The man I selected repaid me by a continuous look of rapt attention which made me feel a really inspired orator. He was the last member of my audience to lay off applause.

Next day I encountered him sitting on a door-step while I was canvassing for votes, and was disappointed at not striking the same responsive chord.

His wife came to the door, welcoming me excitedly and explaining.

“Oh, don’t worry about him, he’s stone deaf—but True Blue (Tory) just the same.”

I was deflated.

But the advice is none the less sound.

How should one prepare a speech? Every man chooses the method best suited to himself. I write down the method which has served me well.

The procedure should be to trust only to steady, persistent work. Go through every phrase of your projected speech with deliberation, classifying your ideas and then writing down the heads of what you want to say in orderly sequence.

You cannot hope to carry your audience with you unless you have first made of your argument a broad, straight path leading to an inevitable conclusion.

Having reached this stage in preparation, having made brief, incisive and—above all—legible notes in heading form, use them as the basis for rehearsing your speech.

But only as a basis. Leave the exact form of words in which you embody your ideas to the inspiration of the moment. Allow your speech enough flexibility to meet the challenge of the audience and the requirements of the occasion.

“The procedure should be to trust only to steady, persistent work”

“Let the opening sentence be electric”

The extempore phrase may not be the neatest or the most pleasing phrase, but it will certainly be the freshest phrase. And it is the fresh phrase, not the dreary, hackneyed formula, which touches the imagination of the audience and makes it receptive to the idea which the speaker wishes to propound. The word-perfect speech, unless given by a master, is dead before it is delivered.

Some parts of the speech should nevertheless be committed to memory. The opening sentences, for example. And, I would say, the closing sentences too. At the beginning of a speech one has to engage the attention of one’s listeners. At the end of a speech one has to set the seal upon their approval.

So begin strongly and end strongly. I do not mean, of course, that the middle can be allowed to sag. Good openings and eloquent perorations are useless unless the argument throughout has been well sustained.

Except when occasion suits the theme, do not try to entertain the audience with stories. Such artifices creak.

But give wit and humour plenty of opportunity. Never be facetious. But when the subject is not too grave, by all means be as amusing as you can. Even serious matters are often best presented by a light and humorous technique.

Do not be too abstract. When you feel that you are in danger of becoming air-borne, keep firmly to the earth by illustrating your argument with simple analogies, preferably taken from daily life. Entertain!

But entertaining the audience will not lead to an acceptance of your arguments. Only your own honesty of approach can do that.

Whatever method of public speaking the young aspirant may choose, he will get nowhere without practice—constant, unwearying practice. Bonar Law, at the outset of his career, made a habit of attending meetings of all kinds—directors’ meetings, shareholders’ meetings, political meetings, for no other purpose than to take advantage of the opportunities they afforded of practising to speak in public. It is a good habit. “By dint of smithing a man becomes a smith.” By dint of public speaking a man becomes a public speaker and learns to persuade other men to accept his leadership.

But here is a warning. Good speaking, fluent speaking, is not synonymous with speaking at great length. Beware of “the gift of the gab”. Given the opportunity of public speaking, the love of hearing their own voice may grow upon even the most modest of men. The least modest of men may become intolerable in the demands they make upon their audiences. They care not whether what they have to say is of interest to others: they say it at the greatest possible length, and say it over and over again. We can avoid such men in our private lives, but in our public lives seem destined to be afflicted by them, because they have a peculiar flair for becoming Chairmen at meetings. Let the young man beware of following their loquacious example. He will be in no danger of doing so if, when about to make a speech, he remembers the old injunction: “Stand up! Speak up! Shut up!”

Chapter 12
ROADS TO HAPPINESS

Does success bring happiness?

Obviously not by itself. Everything depends on the use made of it. Success brings power and it is in the right use of power that happiness lies.

Many people quote Lord Acton’s dictum that “power corrupts” without stopping to examine the possibility that it is a piece of nonsense. Who is the more likely to be corrupted—he who, by bringing his ambitions to fruition, fulfils himself, or he who is warped and frustrated by defeat?

In the hatred of the world—really a form of self-hatred—which lodges in the breast of the failure is to be found evidence of an all-consuming corruption.

Of course, I do not deny that the successful man often succumbs to the temptations of power. That is why he must be very careful of the way he deals with other men who come within the scope of his patronage. He must conduct himself towards them in a manner that does not belittle their gifts and personalities. Never must he reduce them to flunkeydom, making them mere puppets dancing attendance upon his whim.

Where his power is over another man’s very bread, he must be at great pains never to do anything which detracts from that man’s proper pride and stature. Otherwise, in my belief, he may commit a mortal sin. (I have committed this mortal sin.)

In the main, however, I assert that successful men are freer from corruption than are defeated men. They have less cause for malice, a loftier opportunity to be magnanimous.

There are three great rules for the successful man who wishes to be happy: “To do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly”.

The first rule demands a fixed intention to be fair in dealing with money or politics, a natural desire to be just and to interpret all bargains and agreements in the spirit as well as in the letter.

The idea that nearly all successful men are unscrupulous is widespread. But it is untrue. Success is not the final test of character, but it is the best rough-and-ready reckoner. The notion that success probably implies a moral defect derives from judging a man by the opinions of his enemies. The real judges of a man’s character are his colleagues. If they speak well of him, there is nothing much wrong. The failure, on the other hand, can always be sure of being popular with the men who have beaten him. They give him a testimonial instead of a cheque.

The second quality, Mercy, is sometimes regarded as being in conflict with justice. It is not really so. Mercy lies in the prerogative of the judge to temper the law to suit individual cases. It must be of a kindred temper with justice, or it degenerates into mere weakness or folly. A man should be certain of his own just inclination before he dares to handle mercy.

But the quality of mercy is, perhaps, not so common in the human heart as to require this caution. It has to be acquired. The successful man ought to be the last person to complain of the difficulty of acquiring it. He has in his early days felt the whip-hand too often not to sympathise with the feelings of the under-dog. And he always knows that at some time in his career he, too, may need a merciful interpretation of a given situation. Shakespeare may not have had this in mind when he said that mercy “blesseth him that gives and him that takes”. But he spoke a great truth. Those who exercise mercy lay up a store of it for themselves. Shylock had law on his side, but not justice or mercy.

What, then, is the quality of mercy? It goes far beyond the mere desire not to push an advantage too far. It is a feeling of tenderness springing out of harsh experience, as a flower springs out of a rock. It is an inner sense of gratitude for the scheme of things, finding expression in outward action and, therefore, assuring those who exercise it of an abiding happiness.

Mercy involves, too, generosity and charity. There are many projects and much latitude for the rich man who wishes to show gratitude for the benefits bestowed upon him. In the pursuit of happiness he will not fail to make use of opportunities afforded him. Thus he will help himself to the happiness which all men desire.

The quality of Humility is by far the most difficult to attain. There is something deep down in the nature of a successful man of affairs which seems to conflict with it. His career is imbued with a sense of struggle and courage and conquest, and seems almost to invite arrogance. I cannot pretend to be humble myself; all I can confess is the knowledge that in so far as I could acquire humility I should be happier. Indeed, many instances prove that success and humility are not incompatible. The difficulty in reconciling the two qualities lies in that “perpetual presence of self to self which, though common enough in men of great ambition and ability, never ceases to be a flaw”.

After years of command it is understandable that a man should become arbitrary in his ways. But he should not be blind to this failing. He should resist it. And although he may be defeated over and over again, he should never regard the battle as lost.

There is certainly one form of humility which all successful men should practise. They should avoid a fatal tendency to despise the younger men who are following in their footsteps. The arrogance which refuses credit or opportunity to rising talent is unpardonable. A man who gives way to what is really simply a form of jealousy cannot hope to be happy, for jealousy is above all others the passion which tears the heart.

Humility is essential for happiness. Lacking it, even the most successful man will be imagining slights to his dignity and be spiritually ill at ease. The result is that he will communicate his ill-humour to others and create an atmosphere in which contentment cannot thrive.

Chapter 13
NEVER RESIGN!—RETIRE

“Never resign. Wait until you are fired.”

This was the advice given by the late Tim Healy, once a tremendous figure in Westminster and now almost forgotten on this side of St. George’s Channel, a sad and sobering thought on the speed with which oblivion does its work. True indeed is it that “them that plants them is soon forgotten”.

I picture Tim as he spoke, his eyes, as always dancing behind lenses which magnified them to saucer-size, the inevitable glass in his hand, and the humorous mouth upon which fun and wisdom never ceased to bubble.

As I resigned from Government posts, it cannot be said that I acted on Tim’s advice. But it was good advice.

A man feels slighted. Some recommendation of his may have been turned down too abruptly. He finds he cannot have his way. He feels neglected. So he resigns. His resignation damages his own interests and is a nuisance to his firm. It is much better for him to continue at work and seek other means of securing acceptance for his policy. To try to enforce it by resignation weakens his authority. If he prevails, his future in the firm will be uncomfortable. If he fails, and his resignation is accepted, the policy for which he fights will lack a champion.

Therefore, I say that a man should not resign. There is such a thing as a “resigning mind”. Beware of this vice. But retirement is an entirely different matter.

The business man who has achieved success should consider and meditate upon the need to retire.

That may seem to be heartless counsel, but it is sound. If enterprise is to flourish and expand, the young must be given a chance. And that is impossible where the old are cluttering up the road to promotion.

I agree with Bacon’s observation:—

That is why they should get out, before their hardened intellectual arteries destroy the good work done in their prime.

Retirement is neither a punitive measure nor a bulldozing tactic, but an act of grace, based on the recognition that younger men should be given their chance.

But it is not alone for the sake of the young that I recommend the successful man to retire. He should retire for his own sake as well. Let him not try to repeat success in the same field. It is never as joyous the second time.

There is no truth more difficult to impress upon the man of business than this declaration. The more successful he has been, the greater the difficulty.

He sees no reason why he should not carry on in the future and repeat over and over the triumphs of the past. It is, of course, an understandable temptation to hang on to the old patterns. All that you have to do, the tempter says to him, is to reproduce the process of success indefinitely. The riches and the powers of the world are to be had in increasing abundance by the mere exercise of qualities which, though they have been painfully acquired, have now become the very habit of pleasure. How dull life would seem if the process of making money was abandoned; how impossible for a man of ripe experience to fail where the mere stripling had succeeded!

The temptation is subtle, but the logic is wrong. Success is rarely a process which can be reproduced indefinitely in the same field. The dominant mind may lose its elasticity; it may fail to appreciate real values under changed conditions. Victory has become a habit rather than a struggle.

But let there be no mistake, when I urge a man to retire I do not mean that he should retire from an active life. On the contrary, I say that he should change his occupation. He should embrace what may prove to be an even more purposeful life by engaging in entirely new activities. Because change rejuvenates.

I have myself lived four separate lives. First I engaged in banking and promoting finance. Then I entered politics, serving in Lloyd George’s government. And when I retired from politics it was to produce newspapers. The fourth life, brief but packed with the stuff of history, began when I undertook Cabinet duties under Churchill as the Minister of Aircraft Production.

It was not as a politician that I plunged into this fourth life. Politics were ignored. Cabinet Ministers had no influence with me. My Production colleagues were drawn from Industry. This record is brief and their names cannot be mentioned. They joined me in going all out for the simple purpose of providing airplanes.

There were plenty of pilots for the battle-front, but many lacked “mounts”. Upon our ability to provide planes depended the nation’s safety.

Important political persons could not be allowed to stand in our way. We pushed them aside. I told them to go “jump in the river”. That is how we succeeded in mobilizing on the instant the necessary resources of labour and materials in the face of opposition from the obstructionists. Ernest Bevin who objected to our labour demands cried out loudly but the roar of oncoming enemy planes drowned his futile lamentations.

We had to deal as ruthlessly with some military Brass Hats who took no part in the Battle, but added to our difficulties with their foolish objections. Where possible we ignored them. When they resisted we made well considered counter-attacks.

We just managed to meet the demands of the Battle of Britain, with only a handful of planes left in our storage units. Thereafter our output overtook the numbers of pilots who were fully trained and available for war duty, but wanting airplanes.

At last there were more ’planes—more ’planes than pilots.

Did I enjoy this fourth life that was so intensely lived? I did. But the good time was certainly not shared by some of the Ministry’s delinquent contractors, and their voluble apologists.

In each of these lives I have experienced fulfillment and happiness. I have renewed my youth. Now, at 75, I seek yet another outlet for my activities.

A man does not run down his batteries by changing his interests: he re-charges them. He replenishes himself by feeding his faculties on different tasks and new problems.

What I advocate as suitable for a man’s re-employment is not a mild hobby at which he can gently doze, but a real job.

The work he chooses should be vital work. It should be charged with the stimulus of responsibility. It should plague him with doubts and worries. It should bring upon him triumphs and disasters. In short, it should keep him occupied.

By that means he may conceivably become immune from Bacon’s shrewd criticism of the weaknesses of old men. He will certainly save himself from a life of boredom.

The uplifting effect will be enormous, although only by experience can its full benefit be understood.

No resourceful man on retirement will fail to find work suited to his temperament.

To some, recreation, and the pursuit of art or science or study may bring satisfaction, but these will be the exceptions. Public service will beckon to most. And this is natural. Politics, journalism, the management of charitable organisations, all require much the same kind of aptitudes and draw on the same kind of experiences which are acquired by the successful man of affairs.

It is a great advantage to a nation that it should have at its disposal the services of those who possess this kind of capacity and experience. What public life needs above all things is the participation of men who have a knowledge of reality.

I have no intention to rhapsodize about old age. Were I to do so, somebody would silence me by quoting Dr. Johnson’s remark: “No man sought to persuade me when I was nineteen that I was happy.” It is the perfect retort to those who become ecstatic about growing old.

But old age, despite its disadvantages, can be made quite tolerable. All depends on the approach.

There is no reason why the old should not be of service to their fellows. The services of many old people are invaluable. Age has at least this on the credit side—experience of the world.

Not that experience alone can give to the old pre-eminence in any walk of life. It has to be accompanied by a determination to move with the times. What was successful thirty or forty years ago is not necessarily successful today. This has to be borne as much in mind by the man exploring new paths as it has by the man who remains in business.

We all have a nostalgia for the past. But failure to recognise when methods are out-of-date or when the social climate has changed is to become ossified. Men who deplore everything that is new have sent their minds in advance to stand sentinel over the grave.

To those who retain their zest, old age has much to offer. From them the world has much to gain. But only if they retire in time and seek new outlets for their talents.

There will be some who wish not only to retire from business but to retire from all useful activity.

“Is there to be no repose?” they will demand of me in indignant voices. “Must the hubble-bubble go on without pause?” The answer is that repose must be earned. One must go on earning it to the last moment of one’s days. What follows can then have no terrors for the man who has spent all of himself in the service of life.

There is comfort for the old.

But youth is far removed from such meditations. I have written this book for youth and now I address myself once again to the young.

I bid them throw themselves with energy into the great struggle of life and not to concern themselves too much with the problems discussed in this chapter until they have won their way to Success.

EPILOGUE

Here is some most important advice to young aspirants to fame and fortune: They cannot hope to flourish in a realm of desolation.

When a country is in decay, only parasites wax fat. It is of the utmost personal importance to every young Briton that the land which sustains him shall prosper, not merely for his own material good, but even more for his own spiritual good. Where decay is rampant, none can escape its ravages.

This truth should require no stressing, because patriotism is among the healthiest of human instincts. The young men and the young women of the nation must be constantly alive to its needs and must do the utmost in their power to promote its welfare, and the welfare of the British lands beyond the seas.

I must give testimony to the faith that is in me, the faith and confidence in the future of the British Empire. It is with the spirit of Empire as it is with the spirit of life. After some period of fiery illumination, the light may for a moment seem to grow dim. To men who have forgotten the complexities of human nature, spread over every continent and clime of the globe; to those who have not read history, and watched the Empire in every phase of glory or decay, the dying down of the lamp may seem the prelude of an eternal night. They have not realised what a flashing, inconsequent and yet ever vital thing is the spirit of that Empire. Believe me, the lamp is not dying down. The light of the lamp only grows dim as the dawn rises; the reaction has run its course.

We stand on the threshold of an Empire which will be more vital and enduring than its predecessors, because it will include every class and every party in all our wide-flung lands.

Only believe this, and have faith to work in this belief, and all that the prophets and sages of the British Empire have dreamt in the years gone by, and in our day, and in your day, will come to pass.

My final message is one of hope to youth. Dare all, yet keep a sense of proportion. Deny yourself all, and yet do not boast of self-restraint. Hope all, without arrogance, and you will achieve all without losing the capacity for moderation. Then the Temple of Success will assuredly be open to you, and you will pass through to the inner shrine of happiness.

THE END

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