Leadership and Initiative
I must tell you something that happened last Saturday. I went down to the travel agency to get my ticket changed so I could come back on Monday instead of Sunday. When I walked in, the manager of the travel agency grabbed my hand. He introduced himself and started into selling me Think and Grow Rich. In a little while, while he still had hold of my hand, a man came in, a friend of his who was connected with one of the airlines. He heard the name “Napoleon Hill,” and he grabbed the other hand and started to sell me Think and Grow Rich. He said, “You may be interested in knowing that before I went with the airline, I had a sales organization with approximately one hundred people. And I required every salesman to have all of your books. That was a must.”
I felt pretty good. As I started out, there were two very nice-looking young ladies standing on the sidewalk giving out election literature. As I passed by, one of them said, “Aren’t you Napoleon Hill?”
I turned around and bowed. I said, “Yes, I am. Who are you?”
“I was at a woman’s club about two years ago when you delivered an address, and this is my cousin. Both of our husbands are very successful now due to the fact they have read your books.”
I went on over to my car, and the policeman was making out a ticket. I had put a penny in there, thinking that twelve minutes would be all I would be in there, but all of the nice conversations I was getting into made it take much longer.
When I got to my car, this policeman was making out the ticket; he had it about halfway made up.
I walked up to him and said, “Now you wouldn’t do that to Napoleon Hill, would you?”
“Who?”
“Napoleon Hill.”
“No,” he said, “I wouldn’t do that Napoleon Hill, but I certainly would do it to you.”
I introduced myself, took out my credit card, and handed it to him, along with my driver’s license.
The policeman said, “I’ll be a monkey’s uncle.” He took the tab, tore it up, and said, “We’ll just forget about that. You may be interested in knowing that I’m on the Glendale police force as a result of reading your book Think and Grow Rich.”
I got in my car and went home as fast as I could. I was afraid that if I stayed down there any longer, I’d run into somebody else who would start selling me this philosophy.
It makes no difference how successful you become or how much recognition you get: I don’t think any normal person ever gets to the point at which he doesn’t appreciate honest and sincere commendation. I know I do, and I hope I’ll never get to the point when I won’t appreciate it.
This is a great lesson because it’s the action producing portion of this philosophy. It wouldn’t make much difference whether you understood all of the other principles or not if you didn’t do something about it; why would it? In other words, the value that you’re going to get out of this philosophy will not consist of anything that I will say in these lessons. The important thing is what you will do about all of this—the action you will take to start using this philosophy on your own personal initiative.
There are certain attributes of initiative and leadership, and I want you to start in and grade yourself on them. There are thirty-one of them. The grading may range all the way from 0 to 100 on each of these points. When you finish, add them up and divide by 31, and you will get your general average on personal initiative. Incidentally, this grading of yourself on these qualities will be the first step toward making them your own.
1. Definite Major Purpose
I don’t need to make much comment on having a definite major purpose, because obviously if you don’t have an objective in life, an overall purpose, you haven’t very much personal initiative.
That’s one of the most important steps to take: to find out what you want to do. If you’re not sure what you want to do over a lifetime, let’s find out what you’re going to do this year, or the remainder of this year. Let’s set our goal not too high, perhaps, not too far in the distance.
If you’re in a business or a profession or a job, your definite major purpose certainly could be to step up your income from your services, whatever they may be. At the end of the year, you can review your record, reestablish your definite major purpose, and step it up to something bigger, maybe to another one-year plan, or maybe to a five-year plan. But the starting point of personal initiative is to find out where you’re going, why you’re going there, what you’re going to do after you get there, and how much you’re going to get out of it financially.
The majority of people in this world could be very successful if they would just make up their minds how much success they want and on what terms they want to evaluate success. There are a lot of people in this world who want a good position and plenty of money, but they’re not quite sure just what kind of a position, how much money, or when they want to get it. Let’s do a little thinking on that subject and grade ourselves on number one.
2. Adequate Motive
Number two: an adequate motive to inspire continuous action in pursuit of the object of one’s definite major purpose.
Study yourself carefully and see if you have an adequate motive or motives. It will be much better if you have more than one motive for attaining the object of your major purpose or your immediate purpose.
Again, nobody ever does anything without a motive. Let me restate that: no one outside of the insane asylum ever does anything without an adequate motive. A person who is in an insane asylum or off-balance may do a lot of things without any motive whatsoever, but normal people move only on motive. The stronger the motive is, the more active they become and the more apt they are to act upon their own personal initiative.
You don’t have to have a lot of brains in this world; you don’t have to be brilliant. You don’t have to have a wonderful education in order to be an outstanding success, if you will only take what little you have, whether it’s little or much, and start using it, putting it into operation, and doing something about it and with it. And of course that calls for initiative.
3. A Master Mind Alliance
Number three is a Master Mind alliance: friendly cooperation through which to acquire the necessary power for noteworthy achievement.
Take the initiative now and find out just how many friends you have that you could call on if you were in need of cooperation. Make a list of the people that you really could turn to if you needed some favor: an endorsement, an introduction, maybe a loan of money.
Unless you have all the money that you need, the time might come when you need a loan. Wouldn’t it be nice to know someone that you could turn to and get it? You can always go to a bank: all you have to do is to give four for one security, and you can get all the money you want. But there are times when you want medium-sized sums or other comparable favors, and you need somebody to turn to for favors.
Above all, if you are aiming at anything above mediocrity, you need to have a Master Mind alliance of one or more people besides yourself who not only will cooperate with you, but will go out of their way to help you and also have the ability to do something that will be of benefit to you.
It’s up to you to take the initiative to build those Master Mind allies. They don’t just come along and join you because you’re a good fellow. You have to lay out a plan, you have to have an objective, and you have to find the people suitable for your alliance. Then you have to give them an adequate motive for becoming a Master Mind ally of yours.
Incidentally, I happen to know that the vast majority of people do not have a Master Mind alliance with other people. Don’t be afraid to grade yourself zero on this one if you don’t have one, but next time you come to grade yourself, grade higher than that. The only way you can do that is to start in and find at least one Master Mind ally that you can attach yourself to right now.
4. Self-Reliance
Number four: self-reliance in proportion to your major purpose. Find out just exactly how much self-reliance you have. You may need some help from other people, from your wife, your husband, your closest friend, or somebody who knows you well.
You may think you have self-reliance. How can you tell? Go back up to number one. Carefully evaluate your definite major purpose and see how big it is. If you don’t have one, or if it’s not above anything that you’ve attained up to the present, then you don’t have much self-reliance, and you should grade yourself low on that. If you have the proper amount of self-reliance, you step your definite major purpose up way beyond anything you have ever achieved before, and you’ll become determined to attain it.
5. Self-Discipline
Number five: self-discipline sufficient to ensure mastery of the head and the heart and to sustain one’s motives until they are realized.
When do you need self-discipline most? When you’re on the way up and when things are going well and you’re succeeding? No. You need self-discipline when the going is rough, when the outlook is not favorable.
At that point you need a positive mental attitude. You need discipline over your mind to the extent that you know where you’re going, you know that you have a right to go there, and you know that you’re determined to go there regardless of how hard the going may be or how much opposition you might meet with. You’ll need at least enough self-discipline to sustain you through the period when the going is hard instead of quitting or complaining.
6. Persistence
Number six is persistence based on the will to win. Do you know how many times the average person has to fail before he quits or decides he wants to do something else? Once? Did you ever hear of the fellow who fails before he starts because he knows that there’s no use in starting, because he knows he can’t do anything? That cuts it down below one.
The vast majority of people fail before they start. They actually never make a start. They think of things that they might do, but they never do anything about them. The vast majority of those who do start quit at the first opposition or allow themselves to be diverted to something else.
Frankly, my outstanding asset happens to be persistence. I have persistence, the will to win, and the self-discipline to stick to things all the harder when the going is hard. Those are my outstanding qualities; they always have been and always will be. Without those traits, I never would have completed this philosophy, and I never would have been able to have it introduced as widely as it has been.
Is persistence something you’re born with, or is it something that you can acquire? Well, if you couldn’t acquire it, there’d be no use in talking about this lesson, would there?
Certainly you can acquire it, and it’s not very difficult. What is it that causes a person to be persistent, by the way?
Motive, burning desire. Burning desire in back of a motive makes people persistent.
I never think of persistence and a burning desire without thinking of my courtship. I remember that I put more persistence and burning desire into my courtship than anything else in my life.
Don’t you think you could transmute that emotion into something else, pulling it back of your business, your profession, or your job and have just as much emotional feeling about attaining success as you could about selling yourself to the one of your choice? Don’t you think you could do that?
You know what that word transmute means, by the way. If you haven’t tried, start trying it. The next time you feel moody or discouraged, try to change that over into an emotion of courage and faith. See what a marvelous thing happens to you. Activate the whole chemistry, the whole brain and your whole body. You’ll be much more effective.
7. Imagination
Number seven is a well-developed, controlled, and directed faculty of imagination. Imagination that is not controlled and directed might be very dangerous. I wanted to make a survey, an analysis, of all of the men in the federal penitentiary of the United States; I did that for the Department of Justice. The majority of the men in the penitentiary were there because they had too much imagination, but it was not controlled or constructively directed.
Imagination is a marvelous thing, but if you don’t have it under control and if you don’t direct it to definite and constructive ends, it may be very dangerous to you.
8. Decision Making
Number eight: the habit of making definite and prompt decisions. Do you do that? Do you form definite and prompt decisions when you have all of the facts in hand with which to make decisions?
If, when all of the facts are in, you do not have the habit of making clear-cut decisions promptly and definitely, you are loafing on the job, you’re procrastinating, and you’re destroying this vital thing called personal initiative.
One of the finest places to start practicing personal initiative is to learn to make decisions firmly, definitely, and quickly once you have all of the facts available. Now I’m not talking about snap judgments or opinions based upon half-baked evidence. I’m talking about having all the facts on a given subject, which are in your hands and available. You should then do something with those facts; you should make up your mind exactly what you’re going to do and not dillydally around as so many people do. If you do that, the first thing you know, you will be in the habit of dillydallying with everything. In other words, you will not be a person who acts upon his own personal initiative.
9. Basing Opinions on Facts
Next is the habit of basing opinions on facts instead of relying on guesswork. Do you recognize how many times you’re acting on guesswork in comparison with the number of times you’re acting upon facts in forming your opinions? I wonder if you recognize the importance of making it your duty to get facts before you form an opinion about anything. Did you know that you have no right to an opinion about anything at any time, anywhere, unless it’s based upon facts, or what you believe to be facts? It’s because you don’t want to get into trouble; you don’t want to fail.
Of course you can have opinions, and we all do—a bunch of them. You can even give them to somebody else without their asking for them, and we do that right along. But before you can really and safely express an opinion, or have one, you must do a certain amount of research and base your opinion upon facts, or what you believe to be facts. If you don’t take enough initiative to do that, you are not going to be an expert teacher of this philosophy.
10. Enthusiasm
Now we come to number ten: the capacity to generate enthusiasm at will.
Do you know how to generate enthusiasm at will? You can act enthusiastically. But how can you do that? You have to feel the emotion of it. Your mind has to be alerted by some definite objective, purpose, or motive, and then you do something about that motive. You do it with words, with the expression on your face, or by some other form of action. The word action is inseparable from the word enthusiasm. You can’t separate the two.
There are two kinds of enthusiasm. There’s passive enthusiasm, which you feel but give no expression of whatsoever. There are times when you need that kind, because if you don’t, you will disclose what goes on in your mind when you don’t want that to happen.
A great leader, a great executive, may have a tremendous amount of enthusiasm, but he’ll display it to whomsoever he pleases and under whatsoever circumstances he pleases. He will not just turn it on and go off and leave it. But that’s the way the majority of people do it. When they have enthusiasm, they just turn it on and blubber over it, and they accomplish nothing.
Controlled enthusiasm—enthusiasm turned on at the right time and turned off at the right time—is an important thing, and your initiative is the only thing that can control that. If you took that one subject alone—how to turn enthusiasm on and off—and got the art down fine, you could become a marvelous salesman of anything you might want to sell; you really could.
Did you ever hear of anybody selling anything who didn’t have enthusiasm for what he’s trying to sell? Did you ever sell anything when you didn’t have that feeling of enthusiasm over what you were trying to do for the other fellow? You may have thought you did, but you didn’t. If you didn’t have that feeling of enthusiasm, and on your own initiative, then you didn’t make a sale. Somebody may have bought something from you because he needed it, but you had very little to do with it unless you imparted that feeling to him.
How do you impart the feeling of enthusiasm to another person? How do you do that when you’re selling, for instance? You must be sold on it yourself. In other words, it starts inside of your own emotional makeup. You must feel that way.
If you open your mouth to speak, you must speak with enthusiasm. You must put enthusiasm into the expression on your face: you must put on a smile, a good, broad one, because nobody speaks with enthusiasm with a frown on his face. Those two don’t go together.
There are a lot of things that you must learn about expressing enthusiasm if you’re going to make the most of it, and all of them involve your personal initiative. You’ve got to do it. Nobody can do it for you. I can’t tell you how to be enthusiastic. I can tell you what the parts of enthusiasm are and how to express it, but after all, the job of actually expressing it is up to you.
Number eleven: a keen sense of justice under all circumstances. I’m not going to comment on that, because I suppose that all of us feel we deal honorably with people and move with a keen sense of justice under all circumstances. If we don’t, we should at least feel that way about it.
12. Tolerance
Let’s move on to number twelve: tolerance. Open-mindedness. We shouldn’t have any attitude toward anybody under any circumstances unless it’s based upon something to justify that attitude, or at least what we believe to justify it.
Do you have any idea how much value do you deprive yourself of all the way through life just because you close your mind against somebody you don’t like, when that person might be the most beneficial person in the world to you?
One of the costliest things in an industrial or business organization is the closed minds of the people. Their minds are closed toward one another, toward opportunities, toward the people they serve, and toward themselves.
When you speak of intolerance, you often think of somebody who doesn’t like the other fellow because of his religion or his politics. That doesn’t even scratch the surface of the subject. Intolerance extends to almost every human relationship. Unless you form the habit of maintaining an open mind on all subjects, toward all people at all times, you will never be a great thinker, you will never have a great, magnetic personality, and you certainly will never be very well liked.
You can be very frank with people whom you don’t like and who do not like you if they know that you’re sincere and you’re speaking with an open mind. The one thing that people will not tolerate is to recognize that they’re talking to somebody whose mind is already closed and that what they’re saying has no effect whatsoever, regardless of how much value or truth there is to it.
Every now and then somebody comes along and wants to get this philosophy into the public schools or universities. Perish the idea. I butted my brains out for a long time, and I finally quit because there are too many closed minds in that field. That’s one thing that’s wrong with our educational system: too many closed minds and not enough teaching of how to maintain open minds.
13. Doing More than You’re Paid For
Number thirteen is always the habit of doing more than you’re paid for. That’s something in connection with which you certainly have to move on your personal initiative. Nobody’s going to tell you to do that; nobody’s going to expect you to do it. That’s entirely within your own prerogative. But it’s probably one of the most important and most profitable sources through which you can exercise your own personal initiative. If I had to pick out the circumstance under which you could make your personal initiative most beneficial, undoubtedly it would be in rendering more and better service than you are paid to render, because you don’t have to ask anybody for the privilege of doing that.
If you follow that habit—not just doing it once in a while, which is not so effective—sooner or later the law of increasing returns begins to pile up dividends for you, and when the dividends come back, they come back greatly multiplied. In other words, the service that you render in going the extra mile always pays off by giving you back very much more than you gave out.
I served the great R.G. LeTourneau Company for a year and a half, and I indoctrinated their two thousand employees with this philosophy. They paid me for that service, and paid me well. But years after I left the service of the company, I received a very substantial check. One half of it was donated by contributions from those two thousand employees, and the other half was matched by the company, mainly because of the value of this principle of going the extra mile. They wanted to emphasize to me the importance of keeping on talking about it in my public classes and otherwise, as I had talked about it there.
In all of my experience, I have never heard of a man getting a bonus check years after he left the service of a company. It was one of the most unexpected things in my whole life.
When you start living by this principle of going the extra mile, you can expect unusual things to happen to you, and they’ll all be pleasant, every one of them.
14. Tactfulness
Why is it worth the time it takes to be tactful? Because if you are, you get the cooperation of others more easily. If you come in and tell me that I’ve got to do something, I’ll say, “Just a minute. Maybe not. Maybe I have to do something.” If you put it to me that way, I’m going to set up some resistance right away. But if you come in and say to me, “I would very greatly appreciate it if you would do something” when you knew in the first place that you had the right to demand on it, you will get very different results.
As I said, one of the most impressive things that I learned from Andrew Carnegie was that he never commanded anybody to do anything. No matter who the man was, he never commanded. He always asked him: “Would you please do a certain thing?”
It’s surprising, the amount of loyalty that Mr. Carnegie had from his men. They would go out of their way for him anytime of the day or night because of his tactfulness in dealing with them. When it was necessary for him to discipline one of them, he usually invited him out of the house, gave him a nice, five- or six-course dinner—really put on the dog. After dinner, the showdown came when they went over to the library, and he started asking questions.
One of Mr. Carnegie’s chief secretaries was scheduled to become a member of his Master Mind group. This boy found out that he was scheduled for promotion, and it went to his head. He commenced to run around with a bunch of high flyers in Pittsburgh—people who throw cocktail parties and such. In just a little while, he was taking too much liquor and staying out too late. His eyes were hanging out on his cheeks when he came in in the morning.
Mr. Carnegie let this go on for about three months and then invited the young man to dinner one evening. After dinner was over, they went into the library. Mr. Carnegie said, “Now I’m sitting over there in my chair and you’re sitting over here in your chair, I want to know what you would do if you were in my place—if you had a man scheduled for an important promotion, and all of a sudden it seemed to have gone to his head. He started running around with fast company, staying out late at night, drinking too much liquor, paying too much attention to everything except his job. What in the world would you do in that case? I’m anxious to know.”
This young man said, “Mr. Carnegie, I know you’re going to fire me, so you might as well start and get it over with.
Mr. Carnegie said, “Oh, no. If I’d wanted to fire you, I wouldn’t have given you a nice dinner, and I wouldn’t have brought you out to my house. That could get done in the office. No, I’m not going to fire you. I’m just going to have you ask yourself a question, and see whether or not you’re in a position to fire yourself. Maybe you are. Maybe you’re closer to it than you realize.”
That man turned right around. He became one of Mr. Carnegie’s Master Mind group and became a millionaire later on. Mr. Carnegie’s tactfulness saved him from himself.
Mr. Carnegie’s tactfulness was out of this world. He knew how to handle men. He knew how to get them to examine themselves. It doesn’t do much good for me to examine you, but it might do a lot of good if you examined yourself in connection with your faults and your virtues.
Self-analysis is one of the most important forms of personal activity that you can possibly engage in. I never let a day go by when I don’t examine myself to see where I have fallen down, where I’m weak, where I can make improvements, what I could do to render more and better service. I examine myself every day. Believe you me, this has been going on for a great number of years, and even today, I can always find someplace where I can improve or I can do something better or something more.
It’s a very healthy form of personal initiative, because you finally get down to where you will be honest with yourself. Do you have any idea how many people there are who are dishonest with themselves? It’s the worst form of dishonestly that I know: creating alibis in your mind to support your acts and your thoughts instead of examining yourself, finding out where you’re weak, and then bridging those weaknesses or getting somebody in your Master Mind alliance to bridge them for you.
Which would you rather have? Would you rather have an outsider criticize you and point out your failures? Or would you rather criticize yourself and find them?
If you do the latter, you can be confidential about it. You don’t have to publicize these weaknesses, and you can correct them before anybody else finds out about them. But if you wait until somebody else has to call them to your attention, then they become public property, and they may embarrass you; they may hurt your pride. It may even cause you to build up an inferiority complex if you wait for the other fellow to point out your weaknesses.
That’s personal initiative too: finding out your weak spots. What causes you to be disliked by other people? Why aren’t you getting ahead as well as some other people when you know you’ve got just as much brains, or even more, than they have?
Another marvelous place to take personal initiative is to compare yourself with other people who are succeeding beyond your level. Make comparisons and analyses, and see what they have that you don’t have. You’ll be surprised to find out how much you can learn from the other fellow, maybe even from the fellow you don’t like very well. You can learn something from him, if he’s ahead of you, if he’s doing better than you are.
Believe you me, you can always learn something from the man who’s doing better than you’re doing. Sometimes you can learn something from the fellow who’s not doing as well as you’re doing. It works both ways. You may find out why he’s not doing as well.
15. Listening
Do you listen more than you talk? Have you ever thought of the importance of taking the initiative on that? Have you ever thought of the importance of learning to ask intelligent questions and let the other fellow do the talking so he reveals what’s in his mind and you don’t need to necessarily reveal everything that is in your mind? Do you see any value in that?
You learn by listening and observing. I’ve never yet heard of anybody learning anything while he’s talking except that maybe he might learn to not talk so much.
The vast majority of people do a lot more talking than listening, and they seem dead set on telling the other fellow off instead of listening to see what he has to say that they might profit by.
I had the privilege last evening of addressing a very large group of executives in Los Angeles. When my talk was over, I said, “Now I’m going to reverse the rule. I’m going to have an open forum, and I’m going to let you ask me questions and do the talking while I do the listening.”
I asked them three questions, one of which brought forth answers that are of vital importance to the Napoleon Hill Associates, to the distribution of this philosophy, and to the future of every teacher that’s engaged in or will be engaged in teaching that philosophy.
One of those questions was, if you had the directorship of this philosophy, how would you go about introducing it into the business organizations of this country so that the key men and women of these organizations would have it?
I asked two other questions, and I came away loaded with ideas. And I got myself invited to make the speech that I have been wanting to make for the last ten years. I got myself invited to address the Million Dollar Round Table club next year, which is made up of the big men in insurance from all over the country.
The chairman of the meeting, who had me in mind, is the chairman of the Round Table group next year. He had me in mind, he’d read my books, he’d heard lots of things about me, but he couldn’t take a chance on having a dud. He wanted to hear me himself. I was on trial and didn’t know it until the speech was over. It’s a peculiar thing about life: oftentimes you’re under surveillance, and the big opportunities are right there, ready to grab you if you do or say the right thing, or to run away from if you do or say the wrong thing.
The second question I asked that night was, if you were in my place and had the privilege of giving the world its first practical philosophy of individual achievement, what would you do to further the distribution of that philosophy throughout the world? I got around twenty different answers on that one. The third question was not very important. The main one that I wanted to have answered was the first one that I asked.
Let’s get back to listening much and talking only when necessary. Next time you start telling somebody off, remember what I said about listening first. Before you start blowing your top, wait till the other fellow blows his. In circumstances where you want to tell somebody off or say something that might offend, let the other fellow have a chance first. Maybe when he gets through, he’ll condemn himself; you won’t need to say anything to him. Think first and talk less.
Do you feel that you have a keen sense of observation of details? Do you feel that you could walk in front of a department store, and after you got at the end of the block, could give an accurate description of everything you saw in the window?
I once belonged to a class in Philadelphia that was directed by a man who was teaching us the importance of observation of small details. He said it was the little details that made up the successes and failures of life. Not the big ones at all, the little ones—the ones we usually pass aside as not being important or that we do not even want to observe.
As a part of our training, he took us out of the hall and down the street one block. We crossed over the street, came up one block, and went back into the hall. In doing so, we passed about ten stores, one of which was a hardware store. In its window, I would say there were easily five hundred articles. He asked each one of us to take a pad, a paper, and a pencil along—mind you, he was giving us a crutch for our memory—and put down the things that we saw as we passed along that we thought were important.
The greatest number of things that anybody had done was fifty-six. When this man came back—he didn’t have any paper or pencil—he listed 746. He described each one, what window it was in, and what part of the window it was in.
I didn’t accept it. I had to go down after the class was over and backtracked him and checked it. He was 100 percent accurate. He had trained himself to observe details—not just a few of them, but all of them.
A good executive, a good leader, a good anything is a person who observes all things that are happening around him, the good things and the bad, the positives and the negatives. He doesn’t just happen to notice those things that interest him; he notices everything that may interest him or may affect his interest. Attention to details.
The best leaders bounce back from defeat, confident that they are now better equipped to achieve victory.
18. The Capacity to Stand Criticism without Resentment
Do you invite criticism—friendly criticism—from other people? If you don’t, you’re overlooking a big bit. One of the finest things that could possibly happen is to have a regular source of friendly criticism of the thing that you’re doing in life—at least the thing that constitutes your major purpose.
Back in the early days, I used to have six, seven, or sometimes eight, nine, or ten secretaries spotted among the audience who would pick up the conversations—everything that people said. As a matter of fact, they’d start conversations with my audience afterwards, and I found out very quickly where I was falling down and where I wasn’t.
I want to grow; if I’m making a mistake, I want to find it out. That’s why I invite friendly criticism, and if a student or business associate or friend would come up and say, “Dr. Hill, if you just did this one thing a little bit differently, you’d be so much more effective,” I’d think it was wonderful. And I have business associates who do just that.
You think the things that you’re doing daily are all right, or you wouldn’t be doing them, but they may offend other people. Yet you’re going to keep on doing them if somebody doesn’t call them to your attention.
You need a source of friendly criticism. I’m not talking about people who criticize you because they don’t like you. That’s no good. I wouldn’t let that have any effect on me whatsoever. On the other hand, I wouldn’t pay too much attention to the person who gives me friendly criticism just because he loves me. You can do yourself just as much damage that way. I’ve heard it said out in Hollywood that when those stars begin to believe their press agents (and sometimes they do), they’re just about through.
You need to have the privilege of looking at yourself through the eyes of other people. We all need it, because I assure you that when you walk down the street, you don’t look the same way to the other fellow as you think you look. When you open your mouth and speak, what registers in the other man’s mind is not always what you think is registering.
You need criticism. You need analysis. You need people to point out any changes that you ought to make, because we all have to make changes as we go along; otherwise we wouldn’t grow.
Did you know that the majority of people resent any kind of suggestion or criticism whatsoever? They resent anything at all that would change their way of doing things. They do themselves great damage by resenting friendly criticism.
Someone has said that there’s no such thing as constructive criticism. I can’t buy that. I think there is such a thing as constructive criticism. I think it’s absolutely wonderful.
I didn’t think so in the beginning. Back in the early days, when anybody criticized what I was doing, I took offense at it, but you know what cured me? One day I was talking to a kindly gentlemen, who was very much older than me, and I had just heard a very vicious criticism that had been made of something that I had done. I don’t even remember what it was now; maybe it was an editorial that I’d written in the Golden Rule magazine.
I said to this man, “I don’t see how in the world anybody could criticize anything that goes in that magazine, because it’s designed to help people find themselves. There’s nothing negative in it. It’s all constructive.”
“All of that is true, my friend,” he said, “but did you ever hear of a man, a very kindly soul, that passed this way some two thousand years ago? He had a wonderful philosophy, but he didn’t get a 100 percent following. Did you ever hear of him? His name was Jesus Christ. If he didn’t get a 100 percent following, who are you to think you can get one? Just remember that no matter what you do, who you are, or how well you do it, you’ll never get 100 percent approval from the crowd. Don’t expect it, and don’t be disturbed if you don’t get it.”
19. Eating, Drinking, and Social Habits
I don’t intend to comment on these here.
20. Loyalty
Number twenty is loyalty to all to whom loyalty is due. Loyalty comes at the top of the list in my list of qualifications of people that I want to be associated with. If you don’t have loyalty to the people who have a right to your loyalty, you don’t have anything. In fact, the more brilliant, the more sharp, smart, or well educated you are, the more dangerous you may be if you can’t be loyal to the people that have a right to your loyalty.
I have loyalty to people that I like, but I also have a sense of obligation to people if I’m related to them in business, professionally, or in the family circle. There are a few people here that I don’t particularly like, but I’m loyal to them because I have their obligation. If they want to be loyal to me, that’s all right, and if they don’t, that’s their misfortune, not mine. I have the privilege of being loyal, and I’m going to live up to that privilege.
I have to live with this fellow—myself. I have to sleep with him. I have to look in the mirror every morning to shave his face. I have to give him a bath every once in a while, and I have to be on good terms with him. You can’t live with a fellow that closely and not be on good terms with him. “To thine own self be true, / And it must follow, as the night the day, / Thou canst not then be false to any man.” Shakespeare never wrote anything more beautiful and more philosophical than that. To your own self, be true: be loyal to yourself, because you have to live with yourself. If you’re loyal to yourself, the chances are you’ll be loyal to your friends and your business associates.
21. Frankness
22. Familiarity with the Nine Basic Motives
These are listed in another lesson. Certainly you recognize that they are the ABCs of understanding the motives that move people into action.
23. Attractiveness of Personality
How about this business of an attractive personality? Is it something you’re born with, or is it something you must bring about on your own initiative?
You can acquire it. There’s only one of the twenty-five factors that go to make up an attractive personality that you’re born with or not born with, as the case may be: personal magnetism, and you can even do something about that. And certainly you can do something about every one of these other twenty-four factors, because they are subject to cultivation through personal initiative.
Of course, you’ve got to do it yourself. First of all, you’ve got to know how you stand on each of these points. You’ve got to know how you stand, and you can’t always take your own word for it. You’ve got to get your wife, your husband, or somebody else to tell you.
Sometimes you make an enemy, and he’ll tell you where you fall down. Did you know that enemies are good things to have once in a while? They don’t pull punches. If you will examine what your enemies say about you, the chances are that you might learn something of value. If nothing else, you will learn at least to see to it that they don’t tell the truth about you. Whatever they say is not correct, because you are going to be so straight in the road that whatever they derogatorily say about you is not going to be true. That’s an advantage, isn’t it?
Don’t be afraid of enemies. Don’t be afraid of people who don’t like you, because they may say things that put you on the track of discovering something that you need to know about yourself.
I had a salesman come in and see me some years ago, and he said he’d been with this company about ten years. He had made a wonderful record, had several promotions, and was up in the big ten. Six months previously, his sales began to go down; customers that used to give him the business began to frown on him. I noticed that he had one of these big Texas ten-gallon hats on. I said, “By the way, how long have you had that hat?”
“I got it about six months ago down in Texas.”
“Listen, fella,” I said, “Are you selling in Texas?”
“No, I don’t make Texas very often.”
“Listen,” I said, “you wear that hat only when you go down in Texas, because I don’t like that hat; it doesn’t look good on you.”
“Well,” he said, “would that make any difference?”
“You’d be surprised what a difference your personal appearance will make. If some people don’t like the way you look, they won’t do business with you.”
Yes, you can do something about your personality. You can find out the traits that you have that irritate other people, and you can correct those traits. You have to make the discovery yourself, or you have to get somebody who’s frank enough to do it for you.
24. Concentration
Number twenty four is the capacity to concentrate your full attention upon one subject at a time. When you start teaching this philosophy and you start to illustrate a point, don’t stop in the midst of it and go off into a beautiful field of wildflowers that have nothing to do with the point you’re making, only coming back later on. When you start to make a point, exploit it right down to its final analysis, bring it to a climax, and then go on to your next point.
Whether you’re selling or speaking in public, don’t try to cover too many points at one time. If you do, you’ll not cover any points at all. It used to be one of my outstanding weaknesses. I used to do that, and I had a man come to me and call it to my attention. No training in public speaking that I ever had was as valuable as that, and it was for free; he didn’t charge me anything. He said, “You have a wonderful command of English, you have a marvelous capacity for enthusiasm, and you have a tremendously big store of interesting illustrations, but you have a bad habit of taking off after something that’s not related to the point you’re making and then coming back to the point later on. In the meantime, it’s gotten cold.”
Grade yourself on the capacity to concentrate full attention upon one subject at a time, whether you’re speaking, thinking, writing, or teaching. Whatever you do, concentrate on one thing at a time.
25. Learning from Mistakes
On the habit of learning from your mistakes: if you don’t learn from your mistakes, don’t make them. I never see a man duplicating a mistake over and over again without thinking of that old Chinese aphorism: “If a man fools me once, shame on the man, but if you fool me twice, shame on me.”
A lot of people should say, “Shame on me,” because they don’t seem to learn from mistakes at all.
26. Taking Responsibility for Subordinates’ Mistakes
If you have subordinates and they make mistakes, it’s you who have failed and not the subordinates. You never can be a good leader or a good executive unless you take this responsibility. If someone under your direction is not doing, or can’t do, the right thing, it’s up to you to take the initiative and do something about it. Either train him to do the thing right or else put him in some other job where you won’t have to supervise him; let somebody else do that. But if the person working under you is subordinate to you, the responsibility is yours.
27. Recognizing Others’ Merits
Don’t try to steal the thunder from the other fellow. If he has done a good job, give him full credit, give him double credit, give him more than he is entitled to rather than less. Another pat on the back has never been known to hurt anybody when you know he has done a good job. Successful people like recognition, and sometimes people work harder for recognition than they will for anything else.
You can overdo that too, you know. However, that depends upon the individual. Some people are incorruptible: you can’t overflatter them, because they know their capacity. If you go beyond that, they begin to be suspicious.
Most people, however, are corruptible when it comes to flattery: you can overflatter them to the point where they commence to believe it. That’s bad for them and for you too.
There was a book that was widely distributed all over this country. The central theme was that if you want to get along in the world, flatter people. But flattery is as old as the world. It’s one of the oldest weapons and also one of the most deadly.
I like approbation. I enjoy it when people happen to know me, compliment me. But if one of them had said, “Oh, Mr. Hill, I appreciate all that you’ve done for me, but would you mind if I came around the house tonight? I’d like to talk to you about a business proposition.” Right away I’d say, “He has flattered me in order that he may get some of my time and get some benefits from it.” Too much flattery, too much commendation, is not good either.
Next is the habit of applying the Golden Rule in all human relationships. One of the finest things you can do is to put yourself in the other fellow’s position when you go to make any decision or engage in any transaction involving the other fellow. Just put yourself in the other fellow’s position before you make a final decision. If you do that, the chances are that you will always do the right thing by the other man.
29. Maintaining a Positive Mental Attitude at All Times
30. Taking Full Responsibility
Number thirty is the habit of assuming full responsibility for any task that you’ve undertaken—not coming back with an alibi. Did you know the one thing at which the majority of people are the most adept in doing? Alibis: creating a reason why they didn’t succeed or didn’t get the job done. If the majority of people who create alibis would put half as much time into doing the thing right that they put into explaining why they didn’t do it, they would get a lot farther in life and be much better off.
Generally speaking, the people who are the most clever at creating an alibi are the most inefficient ones in the whole works. They make a profession of spinning alibis in advance so that when they’re called on the carpet, they already have an answer.
There’s only one thing that counts, and that’s success: results are what count. Success requires no explanations. Failure permits no alibis. If it’s a success, you don’t need any explanations. And if it’s a failure, all the alibis and explanations in the world won’t do any good. It’s still a failure, isn’t it?
31. Keeping the Mind Occupied with What One Desires
Number thirty-one is the habit of keeping the mind occupied with that which one desires and not with that which one does not want.
The vast majority of instances in which people engage in personal initiative are in connection with the things they don’t want. Here is one place where most people don’t have to be taught to take personal initiative. They really work at it; they work at thinking about all the things they don’t want. That’s precisely what they get out of life: the things that they think about, things that they tune their minds to.
Here’s a little place where that word transmute can come into play. Instead of thinking about the things you don’t want, the things you fear, the things you distrust, the things you dislike, think about all the things you like, all the things you want, and all the things you’re determined to get. Train your mind to stay on track in connection with the things that you want. That takes personal ambition.