YOUR PARTICULAR DUTIES
are soon learned. Why is it that the affairs of walking behind a counter and actually knowing what your employer pays for his goods so soon lose the magic there once was in them? It is because the human brain is supple, and comprehends quickly. By the time certain problems are solved others spring up. See that you solve them. The mind should be pacified in its desire for new conquests.
THE SAFE RULE
as to whether or not you are fitted for new endeavors is to find to your own true satisfaction that you can do your duties better than anyone not in daily practice of the same kind of work. If your employer can take hold and do a thing once a week better than you who do it a hundred times a day, then it should still have considerable charm for you, for your mind is strangely unfamiliar with the procedure. When a clerk stays in one position all his life, it is certain to be from
LACK OF BOTH AMBITION AND ABILITY,
and he lacks a good deal of each. Every little while, through the sickness, advancement, or bad judgment of others, a place just a little more responsible than your own is left vacant. Somebody is wanted badly. You are the man, and are put there for the interval. There is the pivotal point. By unusual endeavor you can probably fill the place better than it was filled by the regular occupant. Your employer, expecting less of you, gets more, and praises you. Now, by praising you, he is, somehow or other,
"TAKING STOCK IN YOU."
If he "keeps you down," he shows his poor judgment, and he is not going to do that if he can help it. On the other hand, your comrade is put in the vacant place. The duties are hard and perplexing. He is compelled to go and ask a man for some money. The man is mean. He not only refuses the money, but addresses some personal considerations to your comrade which sicken him to the heart. He returns to your employer with a tale of failure well tinged with his own morbid feelings and wounded vanity. Your employer is irritated, and attributes the fiasco to the ambassador. To satisfy his own views of things, he prophesies that your comrade never will amount to anything, anyhow. Now, to see this prediction verified is, unfortunately for your comrade, just as necessary to your employer's self-love as to see you succeed. The point of the first opportunity, the first impression on your employer, is really central, pivotal. If you get a big iron safe on such a spot, you can turn it with extraordinary ease.
There is no road to practical business so good as practice. You read of clerks being educated by sham forms of business. You might as well read of men gambling with counterfeit money. Business men want clerks who have been private, corporal, sergeant, lieutenant, captain. When a man starts in as captain he is likely to get discharged as private. In the great printing houses
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