The one important thing for you to remember all the time is not to forget. It’s easier for a boss to do a thing himself than to tell some one twice to do it. Petty details take up just as much room in a manager’s head as big ideas; and the more of the first you store for him, the more warehouse room you leave him for the second. When a boss has to spend his days swearing at his assistant and the clerks have to sit up nights hating him, they haven’t much time left to swear by the house. Satisfaction is the oil of the business machine.
Some fellows can only see those above them, and others can only see those under them, but a good man is cross-eyed and can see both ends at once. An assistant who becomes his manager’s right hand is going to find the left hand helping him; and it’s not hard for a clerk to find good points in a boss who finds good ones in him. Pulling from above and boosting from below make climbing easy.
In handling men, your own feelings are the only ones that are of no importance. I don’t mean by this that you want to sacrifice your self-respect, but you must keep in mind that the bigger the position the broader the man must be to fill it. And a diet of courtesy and consideration gives girth to a boss.
Of course, all this is going to take so much time and thought that you won’t have a very wide margin left for golf—especially in the afternoons. I simply mention this in passing, because I see in the Chicago papers which have been sent me that you were among the players on the links one afternoon a fortnight ago. Golf’s a nice, foolish game, and there ain’t any harm in it so far as I know except for the balls—the stiff balls at the beginning, the lost balls in the middle, and the highballs at the end of the game. But a young fellow who wants to be a boss butcher hasn’t much daylight to waste on any kind of links except sausage links.
Of course, a man should have a certain amount of play, just as a boy is entitled to a piece of pie at the end of his dinner, but he don’t want to make a meal of it. Any one who lets sinkers take the place of bread and meat gets bilious pretty young; and these fellows who haven’t any job, except to blow the old man’s dollars, are a good deal like the little niggers in the pie-eating contest at the County Fair—they’ve a-plenty of pastry and they’re attracting a heap of attention, but they’ve got a stomach-ache coming to them by and by.
I want to caution you right here against getting the society bug in your head. I’d sooner you’d smoke these Turkish cigarettes which smell like a fire in the fertilizer factory. You’re going to meet a good many stray fools in the course of business every day without going out to hunt up the main herd after dark.
Everybody over here in Europe thinks that we haven’t any society in America, and a power of people in New York think that we haven’t any society in Chicago. But so far as I can see there are just as many ninety-nine-cent men spending million-dollar incomes in one place as another; and the rules that govern the game seem to be the same in all three places—you’ve got to be a descendant to belong, and the farther you descend the harder you belong. The only difference is that, in Europe, the ancestor who made money enough so that his family could descend, has been dead so long that they have forgotten his shop; in New York he’s so recent that they can only pretend to have forgotten it; but in Chicago they can’t lose it because the ancestor is hustling on the Board of Trade or out at the Stock Yards. I want to say right here that I don’t propose to be an ancestor until after I’m dead. Then, if you want to have some fellow whose grandfather sold bad whiskey to the Indians sniff and smell pork when you come into the room, you can suit yourself.
Of course, I may be off in sizing this thing up, because it’s a little out of my line. But it’s been my experience that these people who think that they are all the choice cuts off the critter, and that the rest of us are only fit for sausage, are usually chuck steak when you get them under the knife. I’ve tried two or three of them, who had gone broke, in the office, but when you separate them from their money there’s nothing left, not even their friends.
I never see a fellow trying to crawl or to buy his way into society that I don’t think of my old friend Hank Smith and his wife Kate—Kate Botts she was before he married her—and how they tried to butt their way through the upper crust.
Hank and I were boys together in Missouri, and he stayed along in the old town after I left. I heard of him on and off as tending store a little, and farming a little, and loafing a good deal. Then I forgot all about him, until one day a few years ago when he turned up in the papers as Captain Henry Smith, the Klondike Gold King, just back from Circle City, with a million in dust and anything you please in claims. There’s never any limit to what a miner may be worth in those, except his imagination.