THE AMERICAN MAGAZINE
What I Have Made Myself Learn About You
Being An Account of How One Business Man Made the
Little Things Count. Do You?
My business (rubber goods) was in a bad way. Somehow I couldn't seem to make it return enough to pay my income tax with. My wife and I were frankly upset.
At last one morning she came to me and said: "Fred, the baby will soon be seven months old and will have to have some sort of vocational training. What are we to do?"
That night was the bluest night I have ever spent. I thought that the end had come. Then, suddenly, the thought struck me: "Why not try character-selling?"
This may sound foolish to you. That is because it is foolish. But it did the trick.
I began to sell my personality. Every man that came into my store I took aside and showed him different moods. First, I would tell him a funny story, to prove to him that I was more than a mere business automaton. Then I would relate a pathetic incident I had seen on the street a week or two ago. This disclosed my heart. Then I did a fragment of a bare-foot dance and sketched a caricature of Lloyd George, to let him see that I was a man of the world. After this, I was ready to sell him what he came in for, and he would go away carrying a very definite impression of my personal characteristics—and some of my goods, in a bundle.
A week of selling rubber-goods in this manner, and I was on the vaudeville stage, earning $250 a week. How much do you earn?