For life is the mirror of king and slave.
‘Tis just what you are and do;
Then give to the world the best you have,
And the best will come back to you ~ MADELINE BRIDGES.
The old adage that “He
profits most who serves best” is no mere altruism.
Look around you. What
businesses are going ahead? What men are making the big successes? Are they the
ones who grab the passing dollar, careless of what they offer in return? Or are
they those who are striving always to give a little greater value, a little
more work than they are paid for?
When scales are balanced
evenly, a trifle of extra weight thrown into either side overbalances the other
as effectively as a ton.
In the same way, a little
better value, a little extra effort, makes the man or the business stand out
from the great mass of mediocrity like a tall man among pigmies, and brings
results out of all proportion to the additional effort involved.
It pays—not merely
altruistically, but in good, hard, round dollars—to give a little more value
than seems necessary, to work a bit harder than you are paid for. It’s that
extra ounce of value that counts.
For the law of attraction
is service. We receive in proportion as we give out. In fact, we usually
receive in far greater proportion. “Cast thy bread upon the waters and it will
return to you an hundred-fold.”
Back of everything is the
immutable law of the Universe—that what you are but the effect. Your thoughts
are the causes. The only way you can change the effect is by first changing the
cause.
People live in poverty and
want because they are so wrapped up in their sufferings that they give out
thoughts only of lack and sorrow. They expect want. They open the door of their
mind only to hardship and sickness and poverty. True—they hope for something
better—but their hopes are so drowned by their fears that they never have a
chance.
You cannot receive good
while expecting evil. You cannot demonstrate plenty while looking for poverty.
“Blessed is he that expecteth much, for verily his soul shall be filled.”
Solomon outlined the law when he said:
“There is that scattereth, and increaseth yet more;
And there is that withholdeth more than is meet,
but it tendeth only to want.
The liberal soul shall be made fat;
And he that watereth shall be watered also himself.”
The Universal Mind
expresses itself largely through the individual. It is continually seeking an
outlet. It is like a vast reservoir of water, constantly replenished by
mountain springs. Cut a channel to it and the water will flow in
ever-increasing volume. In the same way, if you once open up a channel of
service by which the Universal Mind can express itself through you, its gifts
will flow in ever increasing volume and YOU will be enriched in the process.
This is the idea through
which great bankers are made. A foreign country needs millions for development.
Its people are hard working, but lack the necessary implements to make their
work productive. How are they to find the money?
They go to a banker—put their
problem up to him. He has not the money himself, but he knows how and where to
raise it. He sells the promise to pay of the foreign country (their bonds, in
other words) to people who have money to invest. His is merely a service. But
it is such an invaluable service that both sides are glad to pay him liberally
for it.
In the same way, by opening
up a channel between universal supply and human needs—by doing your neighbors
or your friends or your customer’s service—you are bound to profit yourself. And
the wider you open your channel— the greater service you give or the better
values you offer—the more things are bound to flow through your channel, the
more you are going to profit thereby.
But you’ve got to use your
talent if you want to profit from it. It matters not how small your
service—using it will make it greater. You don’t have to retire to a cell and
pray. That is a selfish method—selfish concern for your own soul to the
exclusion of all others. Mere self-denial or asceticism as such does no one
good. You’ve got to DO something, to USE the talents God has given you to make
the world better for your having been in it.
Remember the parable of the
talents. You know what happened to the man who went off and hid his talent,
whereas those who made use of theirs were given charge over many things.
That parable, it has always
seemed to me, expresses the whole law of life. The only right is to use all the
forces of good. The only wrong is to neglect or to abuse them.
“Thou shalt love the Lord
thy God. This is the first and the greatest Commandment.” Thou shalt show thy
love by using to the best possible advantage the good things (the “talents” of
the parable) that He has placed in your hands. “And the second is like unto it.
Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” Thou shalt not abuse the good things
that have been provided you in such prodigality, by using them against your
neighbor. Instead, thou shalt treat him (love him) as he would treat you. Thou
shalt use the good about you for the advantage of all.
If you are a banker, you’ve
got to use the money you have in order to make more money. If you are a
merchant, you’ve got to sell the goods you have in order to buy more goods. If
you are a doctor, you must help the patient you have in order to get more
practice. If you are a clerk, you must do your work a little better than those
around you if you want to earn more money than they. And if you want more of
the universal supply, you must use that which you have in such a way as to make
yourself of greater service to those around you.
“Whosoever shall be great
among you,” said Jesus, “shall be your minister, and whosoever of you will be
the chiefest, shall be servant of all.” In other words, if you would be great,
you must serve. And he who serves most shall be greatest of all.
If you want to make more
money, instead of seeking it for yourself, see how you can make more for
others. In the process you will inevitably make more for yourself, too. We get
as we give— but we must give first.
It matters not where you
start— you may be a day laborer. But still you can give—give a bit more of
energy, of work, of thought, than you are paid for. “Whosoever shall compel
thee to go a mile,” said Jesus, “go with him twain.” Try to put a little extra
skill into your work. Use your mind to find some better way of doing whatever
task may be set for you. It won’t be long before you are out of the common
labor class.
There is no kind of work
than cannot be bettered by thought. There is no method that cannot be improved
by thought. So give generously of your thought to your work. Think every minute
you are at it—”Isn’t there some way in which this could be done easier,
quicker, better?” Read in your spare time everything that relates to your own
work or to the job ahead of you. In these days of magazines and books and
libraries, few are the occupations that are not thoroughly covered in some good
work.
Remember in Lorimer’s
“Letters of a Self-Made Merchant to His Son,” the young fellow that old Gorgan
Graham hired against his better judgment and put in the “barrel gang” just to
get rid of him quickly? Before the month was out the young fellow had thought
himself out of that job by persuading the boss to get a machine that did the
work at half the cost and with a third of the gang. Graham just had to raise
his pay and put him higher up. But he wouldn’t stay put. No matter what the
job, he always found some way it could be done better and with fewer people,
until he reached the top of the ladder.
There are plenty of men
like that in actual life. They won’t stay down. They are as full of bounce as a
cat with a small boy and a dog after it. Thrown to the dog from an upper
window, it is using the time of falling to get set for the next jump. By the
time the dog leaps for where it hit, the cat is up the tree across the street.
The true spirit of business
is the spirit of that plucky old Danish sea captain, Peter Tordenskjold.
Attacked by a Swedish frigate, after all his crew but one had been killed and
his supply of cannon balls was exhausted, Peter boldly kept up the fight,
firing pewter dinner- plates and mugs from his one remaining gun.
One of the pewter mugs hit
the Swedish captain and killed him, and Peter sailed off triumphant!
Look around YOU now. How
can YOU give greater value for what you get? How can you SERVE better? How can
you make more money for your employers or save more for your customers? Keep
that thought ever in the forefront of your mind and you’ll never need to worry
about making more for yourself!
A Blank Check
There was an article by
Gardner Hunting in a recent issue of “Christian Business,” that was so good
that I reprint it here entire:
“All my life I have known
in a vague way that getting money is the result of earning it; but I have never
had a perfect vision of that truth till recently. Summed up now, the result of
all my experience, pleasant and unpleasant, is that a man gets back exactly
what he gives out, only multiplied.
“If I give to anybody
service of a kind that he wants I shall get back the benefit myself. If I give
more service I shall get more benefit. If I give a great deal more, I shall get
a great deal more. But I shall get back more than I give. Exactly as when I
plant a bushel of potatoes, I get back thirty or forty bushels, and more in
proportion to the attention I give the growing crop. If I give more to my
employer than he expects of me, he will give me a raise— and on no other
condition. What is more, his giving me a raise does not depend on his
fair-mindedness - he has to give it to me or lose me, because if he does not
appreciate me somebody else will.
“But this is only part of
it. If I give help to the man whose desk is next to mine, it will come back to
me multiplied, even if he apparently is a rival. What I give to him, I give to
the firm, and the firm will value it, because it is teamwork in the
organization that the firm primarily wants, not brilliant individual
performance. If I have an enemy in the organization, the same rule holds; if I
give him, with the purpose of helping him, something that will genuinely help
him, I am giving service to the organization. Great corporations appreciate the
peacemaker, for a prime requisite in their success is harmony among employees.
If my boss is unappreciative, the same rule holds; if I give him more, in
advance of appreciation, he cannot withhold his appreciation and keep his own
job.
“The more you think about
this law, the deeper you will see it goes. It literally hands you a blank
check, signed by the Maker of Universal Law, and leaves you to fill in the
amount—and the kind—of payment you want! Mediocre successes are those that obey
this law a little way—that fill in the check with a small amount—but that stop
short of big vision in it. If every employee would only get the idea of this
law firmly fixed in him as a principle, not subject to wavering with
fluctuating moods, the success of the organization would be miraculous. One of
my fears is apt to be that, by promoting the other fellow’s success, I am
sidetracking my own; but the exact opposite is the truth.
“Suppose every employee
would look at his own case as an exact parallel to that of his firm. What does
his firm give for the money it gets from the public? Service! Service in
advance! The better the service that is given out, the more money comes back.
What does the firm do to bring public attention to its service? It advertises;
that is part of the service. Now, suppose that I, as an employee, begin giving
my service to the firm in advance of all hoped for payment. Suppose I advertise
my service. How do I do either? I cannot do anything constructive in that
firm’s office or store or plant or premises that is not service, from filing a
letter correctly to mending the fence or pleasing a customer; from looking up a
word for the stenographer, to encouraging her to look it up herself;
demonstrating a machine to a customer or encouraging him to demonstrate it
himself; from helping my immediate apparent rival to get a raise, to selling
the whole season’s output. As for advertising myself, I begin advertising
myself the moment I walk into the office or the store or the shop in the
morning; I cannot help it. Everybody who looks at me sees my advertisement.
Everybody around me has my advertisement before his eyes all day long. So has
the boss—my immediate chief and the head of the firm, no matter where they are.
And if I live up to my advertising, nobody can stop me from selling my goods—
my services! The more a man knocks me, the more he advertises me; because he
calls attention to me; and ill am delivering something better than he says I
am, the interested parties—my employers—will see it, and will not be otherwise
influenced by what he says.
“More than that, I must
give to every human being I come in contact with, from my wife to the bootblack
who shines my shoes; from my brother to my sworn foe. Sometimes people will
tell you to smile; but the smile I give has got to be a real smile that lives
up to its advertising. If I go around grinning like a Cheshire cat, the Cheshire-cat
grin will be what I get back— multiplied! If I give the real thing, I’ll get
back the real thing—multiplied! If anybody objects that this is a selfish view
to take, I answer him that any law of salvation from anything by anybody that
has ever been offered for any purpose, is a selfish view to take. The only
unselfishness that has ever been truly taught is that of giving a lesser thing
in hope of receiving a greater.
“Now, why am I so sure of
this law? How can you be sure? I have watched it work; it works everywhere. You
have only to try it, and keep on trying it and it will prove true for you. It
is not true because I say so, nor because anybody else says so; it is just
true. Theosophists call it the law of Karma; humanitarians call it the law of Service;
businessmen call it the law of common sense; Jesus Christ called it the law of
Love. It rules whether I know it or not, whether I believe it or not, whether I
defy it or not. I can’t break it! Jesus of Nazareth, without reference to any
religious idea you may have about Him, without consideration as to whether He
was or was not divine, was the greatest business Man that ever lived, and he
said: ‘Give and ye shall receive—good measure, pressed down, shaken together,
running over!’ And this happens to be so—not because He said it—but because it
is the Truth, which we all, whether we admit it or not, worship as God. No man
can honestly say that he does not put the truth supreme.
“It is the truth—the
principle of giving and receiving—only there are few men who go the limit on
it. But going the limit is the way to unlimited returns!
“What shall I give? What I
have, of course. Suppose you believe in this idea—and suppose you should start
giving it out, the idea itself, tactfully, wisely, and living it yourself in
your organization.
How long do you think it
will be before you are a power in that organization, recognized as such and
getting pay as such? It is more valuable than all the cleverness and special
information you can possibly possess without it. What you have, give—to
everybody. If you have an idea, do not save it for your own use only; give it.
It is the best thing you have to give and therefore the thing best to give—and
therefore the thing that will bring the best back to you. I believe that if a
man would follow this principle, even to his trade secrets, he would profit
steadily more and more; and more certainly than he will by holding on to
anything for himself. He would never have to worry about his own affairs
because he would be working on fundamental law. Law never fails—and it will be
easy for you to discover what is or is not law. And if law is worth using part
of the time, it is worth using all the time.
“Look around you first,
with an eye to seeing the truth, and then put the thing to the test. Through
both methods of investigation you will find a blank check waiting for you to
fill in with ‘whatsoever you desire,’ and a new way to pray and to get what you
pray for.”
By Robert Collier – Secret
of the Ages
www.AsAManThinketh.net
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