No greater delusion ever entered a business man’s head than that cheap labor is economy. Trying to cut the pay-roll down to the lowest possible dollar has ruined many a concern. Business men who have been most successful have found that the best workmen, like the best materials, are the cheapest in the end. The breakage, the damage, the losses, the expensive blunders, the injury to merchandise, the loss of customers resulting from cheap labor are not compensated for by low wages.
Any one who tries to get superior results from inferior methods, from cheapness in quality of material or service deludes himself. Cheap labor means cheap product and cheapened reputation. It means inferiority all along the line. The institution run by cheap help is cheapened, and means a cheaper patronage.
Many a hotel has gone down because the proprietor tried to save a few thousand dollars a year by hiring cheap clerks, cooks, and waiters, and by buying cheap food. Just that little difference between the cheap and the best help and the cheap and the best food has made the fortune of many a shrewd hotel-keeper.
Some people never get out of the world of pennies into the world of dollars. They work so hard to save the cents that they lose the dollars and the larger growth—the richer experience and the better opportunity.
Everywhere we see people wearing seedy, shabby clothes, stopping at cheap, noisy hotels or boarding houses, sleeping on uncomfortable beds, riding for days in cramped positions in day coaches in order to save the price of a parlor-car chair or a Pullman seat, sitting up all night to save the expense of a sleeper—practicing all sorts of economies which cost too much for those who can possibly afford better.
If a man is going to do his best work, he must keep up his mental and physical standards. He must keep a clear brain and level head, and be able to think vigorously. He can not think effectively without pure blood, and that requires good food, refreshing sleep, and cheerful recreation.
The men who accomplish the most, who do a prodigious amount of work, and who are able to stand great strains, are very good to themselves. They have the best they can get. They patronize the best hotels; they eat the most nourishing food they can get. They give themselves all the comforts possible, especially in traveling, and the result is that they are always in much better condition to do business. It is pretty poor economy that will lessen one’s vitality and strength and lower the standard of his possible efficiency for the sake of saving a few pennies and putting a little money in his pocket-book.
Of course, we realize that those who haven’t the money can not always do that which will contribute to their highest comfort and efficiency; but most people overestimate the value of a dollar in comparison with their physical well-being. Power is the goal of the highest ambition. Anything which will add to one’s power, therefore, no matter how much it costs, if it is within possible reach, is worth its price.
Generous expenditure in the thing which helps us along the line of our ambition, which will make a good impression, secure us quick recognition, and help our promotion, is often an infinitely better investment than putting money in the savings bank.
Those who are trying to get a start in life must emphasize the right thing, keeping the larger possibility in view instead of handicapping their prospects, killing their opportunities by keeping their eyes fixed on petty economies.
Great emphasis is to-day placed on appearances. Success is not wholly a question of merit. Appearances have a great deal to do with one’s prospects and chances, especially in a large city, where it is so difficult to get acquainted. In a small town, where everybody will soon know you and can quickly judge of your ability and real worth, it is very different, although even there appearances count for a great deal.
There are thousands of young men in our large cities struggling along in mediocrity, many of them in poverty, who might be in good circumstances had they placed the right emphasis upon the value of good clothes and a decent living-place, where they would be associated with a good class of people.
If you want to get on, get in with the people in your line of business, or in your profession. Try to make yourself popular with them. If a business man, associate with the best men in your business; if a lawyer keep in with lawyers. Join the lawyers’ clubs or associations. The very reputation of standing well in your own craft or profession will be of great value to you.
Of course, it will not cost you quite as much to hold yourself aloof from those in the same specialty; but you can not afford the greater loss that will result from your aloofness. The young man who wants to get on must remember that little things have quite as much to do with his achievement as great things.
No one can make the most of himself who does not consider his personal needs. When we are best to ourselves, we radiate a healthy mental attitude of optimism, joy, gladness, and hope. It is a great thing to be a good animal, to maintain mental poise; then we radiate exuberance of life, enthusiasm, buoyancy.
Did you ever realize what splendid capital there is in good health, a strong, vigorous constitution, which is able to stand any amount of hard work, hard knocks? Did you ever think that the very physical ability to stand a long, persistent strain, great physical reserve, has carried many men through hard times and discordant conditions, under which weaker men would have gone down completely?
He who would get the most out of life must be good to himself. Everywhere we see people who have been trying to pinch and save, paying for it in premonitory indications of discomfort. Does this pay? Does it pay to take so much out of oneself for the sake of putting a little more in the bank; to rob one’s life in order to add a little more to one’s savings? We must look at life from a higher plane, a longer range, and ask ourselves at the very outset, “What must I do, how conduct myself, how treat myself in order to make the largest success, the completest life possible?”
Do not take a little, narrow, pinched, cheese-paring view of life. It is unworthy of you, and belittling to your possibilities. It is insulting to your Creator, who made you for something large and grand.
Everywhere we see people with little starved experiences, because they are too small to spend money to enlarge themselves by seeing the world and getting a broader education and larger outlook. They have a little money in the bank, but their mental capital is very weak, so that others who took a larger view of life have completely over-topped them in their fuller manhood and in greater wealth, too.
Nobody admires a narrow-souled, dried-up man who will not invest in books or travel, who will invest in the grosser material property but not in himself, and whose highest ambition is to save so many dollars.
You can always pick out the man who is so overanxious about small savings that he loses the larger gain. He radiates smallness, meanness, limitation. His thoughts are pinched, his ideas narrow. He is the small-calibered man who lacks that generosity and breadth which marks the liberal broad-gauged man.
Many men of this type remain at the head of a little two-penny business all their lives because they have never learned the effectiveness of liberality in business. They do not know that a liberal sowing means a liberal harvest. They know nothing of the secret of the larger success of modern business methods.
There is a vast difference between the economy which administers wisely and that niggardly economy which saves for the sake of saving and spends a dime’s worth of time to save a penny.
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