The best thing for us workers to do is to let money-making alone. Nine times out of ten when we go into that game we are stung.
Wall Street is strewn with the corpses of lambs who thought they could outwit the cunning old wolves that hunt there.
Many a shopkeeper has been ruined trying to get rich, not realizing that he is not a money-maker, but a money-earner.
And many and many a widow has lost all her insurance money by imagining that, being possessed of a tidy lump sum, she could increase it rapidly by shrewd investment. She does not understand that in speculating in real estate or buying stocks she is pitting her inexperience against genius and trained ability.
Let the natural-born money-makers make money. Let us, you and me, content ourselves with the only thing wherein we have a prospect of sure success—that is, saving money.
Sometimes the money-making faculty is a racial heritage, as among the Hebrews. Sometimes it runs in a family, and sometimes it appears sporadically, and a money-making genius crops out in the most unexpected place, just as a Lincoln, a Napoleon, or a Leonardo comes from a commonplace environment.
The thing for us to remember is that getting rich is but one small way in which human endeavor succeeds; that those who achieve riches are by no means certainly happy, and that their power to acquire luxuries is usually destructive to character.
And to remember also that the money-saver, if he be intelligent and if he have common sense and philosophy, is practically assured of contentment.
THE SUPREME MOMENT
“But Leonardo,” says one writing upon the genius of the incomparable da Vinci, “will never work till the happy moment comes—that moment of bien-etre (feeling just fit) which to imaginative men is a moment of invention. On this moment he waits; other moments are but a preparation or after-taste of it.”