Ten Rules for my Sons

Title

Language

English

Year

1939

Rights

In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted

Fulltext

TEN RULES FOR MY SONS 1. LEARN HOW to speak in public. Accept every chance you can to do this. There is no quicker way to self-reliance and to clear. factual thinking. If you are in busi~ess. and are well trained in the art. it will help you sell yourself, sell goods, or dominate a conference. In your social life, you can impress your personality on a group by your conversation. Leaders of men are skilled speakers. 2. Learn to Write. The tongue and the pen are your two best means of self-expression. For this purpose, build your vocabulary. Mark the words in your reading that you don't know. Look them up in a dictionary. If you find a word you may want to use later on, write the word, the definition and a sample sentence in a notebook you will keep all your life. Educators have proved a man's intelligence is in direct proportion to his vocabulary. If you have a small vocabulary you will have a small IQ, whether you like it or not. 3. With All This, don't be a hermit. Mix. The culture and wisdom to be had from books is priceless. But human beings, also, are books to be 60 read. And no one can climb to the top with his own two hands and his single mind, unaided. So, if you want to head up a business some day. mix. Learn how to get along with people. How to handle human beings. I sometimes think an executive is merely a person who is able to make queer folk work together for a common end. 4. If You Can Do So, gather into the circle of your acquaintances individuals with fine minds. Their companionship will be stimulating to you. Their ideas may be invaluable. Have a doctor and a lawyer as your friends if possible. I don't mean this cynically. In the hierarchy of friendship none are more delightful than these. In times of trouble few are more loyal and helpful. 5. Life Passes Swiftly. Plan your days and stick as close to your schedule as you humanly can. There is plenty of time in your life for a career within a career. The lack of time was never a good excuse for anything. If you don't like the job you have, prepare yourself, in your spare moments, for one you will like. Use your minutes while others waste them. PANORAMA You will find very little competition in this game. If you write, write not less than a page a day--only 400 words--and you will have a book by the end of a year. When you read, read at least twenty minutes a day and you can soon make yourself an authority on any subject you choose. Dreambut dream with a plan in your mind that will make your dreams come true. 6. If You Make Money, nobody is going to worry about protecting it except you. You alone will have to learn to take care of it, and this requires experience, study and consummate skill, and don't you think it doesn't. Listen, of course, to the advice of the boys who know, but make your own decisions, and don't ever send good money after bad. If you've made a mistake in an investment, cut and cut quick. Take your loss at once, and forget about it. If you have a reasonable profit, cash it. Let somebody else have the rest. More people have lost fortunes, large and small, by being piggish, than in any other way. Remember, if you have money the pack will be after it with fancy schemes. There is nothing so tempting as a chance for high interest rates or quick, unusual [ARcu, 1939 profits. And there is nothing rarer than profiting by these chances. 7. Be Patient. If you are intelligent, prepared and alert, your time will come. In most lives, opportunity knocks again and again. But you've got to be there to open the door fast. Get ready for the breaks, take advantage of them, and persons who don't know any better will call you "lucky." 8. Give Your Health the consideration you would a fine car. It's merely stupid not to, and to me stupidity is the one high crime in world. Dishonesty, lying. thievery and such are merely stupid. 9. Be As Mode st as you like. But be sure to develop an underlying concrete base of self-confidence. When at last you get out in the world you won't find people as smart as you thin_k they are. "Trust thyself.'' said Emerson. "Every heart vibrates to that iron string." And, if you are ambitious, make a note of this. That rare thing, the socalled genius, got there, not by inspiration, but by blood-letting, sweating, and crucifying work. "Genius," said Thomas A. Edison, "is 1 % inspiration and 99 % perspiration." "Genius," said Thomas Carlyle, "is merely the capacity for taking 61 infinite pains." These two are accredited geniuses. They ought to know. 10. And Don't Every Forget that life is too important to take too seriously. You'll muff your shots if you get too tense and intense about things. Relax. Play. Easy does it.-Wilfred J. Funk, from Yowr Life. • • • 6ndorsing @e/ebrilies I DON'T care what kind of soap the glamor .girls use; and I don't object to the glamor girls endorsing so-and-so's soap-if what they say is the truth. But what I do object to are the half-truths, the outright untruths, and the subtle suggestions which lead to incorrect inferences, As one advertising executive put it: There is nothing we can do, of course, about correcting some of the "screwy'' individual copy appeal of so many advertisers, appeals which are downright silly. Cosmetics, patent medicines, and foods which promise beauty, health, and happy living to all and sundry are nailing themselves to the cross. Cigarettes which will help your digestion, reduce acidity, and, by none too subtle inference, make an opera singer, a baseball star, or a great lover of the office boy, are heading their products straight into the furnace of public contempt. And what of the celebrities themselves? There is reason to beli~ve that many of them are in the position of the well-known opera star who, after selling his endorsement to a certain brand of cigarettes, and later being questioned concerning his endorsement, said in substance: "Of course . • . cigarettes don't irritate my throat. I never use them." But just when we have reached the point of complete discouragement there comes relieving news. The New York Times reports that: The famous Corrigan grin disappeared for a while as he spoke of what some beer company had done. They used his photograph in such a way as to imply that he endorsed their beer, he said. As a matter of fact, he neither drinks nor smokes and he is going to endorse only the fuel and other things he actually has used, he said. A leading tobacco firm in America is said to have received the following answer from Son Henie: "I do not smoke. I will not accept your $2,500.00. I am shamed of women who smoke. It is a disgraceful, dirty, and degenerating habit. Goodbye." If these reports be correct, we say: Congratulations to Douglas Corrigan and Sonja Henie, and many others like them. We like honest celebrities and honest advertising.-Richard L. E'Oa1&11, condensed from The Improvement Era. 62 PANORAMA

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