The Young Man in Business

by Edward William Bok

For no success is easily made nowadays. Appearances are tremendously deceptive in this respect. We see men making what we choose to regard and call quick success, because at a comparatively early age they acquire position or means. But one needs only to study the conditions of the business life of to-day to see how impossible it is to achieve any success except by the very hardest work. No young man need approach a business career with the idea that success is easy. The histories of successful men tell us all too clearly the lessons of patience and the efforts of years. Some men compass a successful career in less time than others. And if the methods employed are necessarily different, the requirements are precisely the same. It is a story of hard work in every case, of close application and of a patient mastery of the problem in hand. Advantages of education will come in at times and push one man ahead of another. But a practical business knowledge is apt to be a greater possession.

I know there are thousands of young men who feel themselves incompetent for a business career because of a lack of early education. And here might come in—if I chose to discuss the subject, which I do not—the oft-mooted question of the exact value of a college education to the young man in business. But I will say this: a young man need not feel that the lack of a college education will stand in any respect whatever in the way of his success in the business world. No college on earth ever made a business man. The knowledge acquired in college has fitted thousands of men for professional success, but it has also unfitted other thousands for a practical business career. A college training is never wasted, although I have seen again and again five-thousand-dollar educations spent on five-hundred-dollar men. Where a young man can bring a college education to the requirements of a practical business knowledge, it is an advantage. But before our American colleges become an absolute factor in the business capacities of men their methods of study and learning will have to be radically changed. I have had associated with me both kinds of young men, collegiate and non-collegiate, and I must say that those who had a better knowledge of the practical part of life have been those who never saw the inside of a college and whose feet never stepped upon a campus. College-bred men, and men who never had college advantages, have succeeded in about equal ratios. The men occupying the most important commercial positions in New York to-day are self-made, whose only education has come to them from contact with that greatest college of all, the business world. Far be it from me to depreciate the value of a college education. I believe in its advantages too firmly. But no young man need feel hampered because of the lack of it. If business qualities are in him they will come to the surface. It is not the college education; it is the young man. Without its possession as great and honorable successes have been made as with it. Men are not accepted in the business world upon their collegiate diplomas, nor on the knowledge these imply.

There are a great many young men in business to-day who grow impatient. They are in a position for a certain time; they are satisfactory to their employers, and then, because they are not promoted, they grow restless. These young men generally overlook a point or two. In the first place, they overlook the very important point that between the years of twenty and twenty-five a young man acquires rather than achieves. It is the learning period of life, the experience-gaining time. Knowledge that is worth anything does not come to us until we are past twenty-five. The mind, before that age, is incapable of forming wise judgment. The great art of accurate decision in business matters is not acquired in a few weeks of commercial life. It is the result of years. It is not only the power within him, but also the experience behind him, that makes a successful business man. The commercial world is only a greater school than the one of slates and slate-pencils. No boy, after attending school for five years, would consider himself competent to teach. And surely five years of commercial apprenticeship will not fit a young man to assume a position of trust, nor give him the capacity to decide upon important business matters. In the first five years, yes, the first ten years, of a young man's business life, he is only in the primary department of the great commercial world. It is for him, then, to study methods, to observe other men—in short, to learn and not to hope to achieve. That will come later. Business, simple as it may look to the young man, is, nevertheless, a very intricate affair, and it is only by years of closest study that we master an understanding of it.

The electric atmosphere of the American business world is all too apt to make our young men impatient. They want to fly before they can even walk well. Ambition is a splendid thing in any young man. But he must not forget that, like fire and water, it makes a good servant but a poor master. Getting along too fast is just as injurious as getting along too slow. A young man between twenty and twenty-five must be patient. I know patience is a difficult thing to cultivate, but it is among the first lessons we must learn in business. A good stock of patience, acquired in early life, will stand a man in good stead in later years. It is a handy thing to have and draw upon, and makes a splendid safety-valve. Because a young man, as he approaches twenty-five, begins to see things more plainly than he did five years before, he must not get the idea that he is a business man yet, and entitled to a man's salary. If business questions, which he did not understand five years before, now begin to look clearer to him, it is because he is passing through the transitory state that separates the immature judgment of the young man from the ripening penetration of the man. He is simply beginning. Afterward he will grow, and his salary will grow as he grows. But Rome wasn't built in a day, and a business man isn't made in a night. As experience comes, the judgment will become mature, and by the time the young man reaches thirty he will begin to realize that he didn't know as much at twenty-five as he thought he did. When he is ready to learn from others he will begin to grow wise. And when he reaches that state where he is willing to concede that he hasn't a "corner" on knowledge in this world, he will be stepping out of the chrysalis of youth.

There is another point upon which young men are often in doubt, and that is, just how far it pays to be honest in business. "Does it really pay to be honest in business?" they ask, and they are sincere and in earnest in the question.

Now, the simple fact of the matter is that a business success is absolutely impossible upon any other basis than one of the strictest honesty.

The great trouble with young men, nowadays, is that their ideas are altogether too much influenced by a few unfortunate examples of apparent success which are prominent—too prominent, alas!—in American life to-day. These "successful men"—for the most part identified in some way with politics—are talked about incessantly; interviewed by reporters; buy lavish diamonds for their wives, and build costly houses,—all of which is duly reported in the newspapers. Young men read these things and ask themselves, "If he can do it, why not I?" Then they begin to look around for some "short cut to success," as one young fellow expressed it to me not long ago. It is owing to this practice of "cutting across lots" in business that scores of young men find themselves, after awhile in tight places. And the man who has once had about him an unsavory taint in his business methods rarely, very rarely, rids himself of that atmosphere in the eyes of his acquaintances. How often we see some young man in business, representative of the very qualities that should win success. Every one agrees that he is brilliant. "He is clever," is the general verdict. His manner impresses one pleasantly, he is thoroughly businesslike, is energetic, and yet, somehow, he never seems to stick to one place. People wonder at it, and excuse it on the ground that he hasn't found the right place. But some day the secret is explained. "Yes, he is clever," says some old business man, "but do you know he isn't—well, he isn't quite safe!" "Quite safe!" How much that expresses; how clearly that defines hundreds and hundreds of the smartest young men in business to-day. He is everything else—but he isn't "quite safe!" He is not dishonest in any way, but he is, what is equally as bad, not quite reliable. To attain success he has, in other words, tried to "cut across lots." And rainbow-chasing is really a very commendable business in comparison to a young man's search for the "royal road to success." No success worth attaining is easy; the greater the obstacles to overcome, the surer is the success when attained. "Royal roads" are poor highways to travel in any pursuit, and especially in a business calling.