At the outset of every undertaking you are confronted with two ways of attacking it. One is with doubt and uncertainty; the other is with courage and confidence.
Two Ways of Attacking Business Problems
The first of these mental attitudes is
purely negative. It is inhibitory. It is made up of mental pictures of yourself in direful situations, and these mental pictures bring with them depressing emotions and muscular inhibitions.
The second attitude is positive. It is inspiring. It is made up of mental pictures of yourself bringing the affair to a triumphant issue, and these mental pictures bring with them stimulating emotions and the impulses to those bodily activities that will realize your aims.
You have only to start the thing off with the right mental attitude and hold to it. All the rest is automatic. Think this over.
Put this same idea into your business. Analyze your business with reference
to its mental attitude. Of course, you know all about its organization, its various departments, its machinery and equipment, its methods, its cost system, its organized efficiency. But what about its mental attitude? Every store, every industrial establishment has an air of its own, an indefinite something that distinguishes it from every other. This is why you buy your cigars at one place instead of at another.
Cutting into the Quick
Look behind the methods and the systems and all the wooden machinery of your business and you come to its throbbing life. There you find the characteristic quality that governs its future. There you find the attitude, the mental attitude, that pulls the strings determining the conduct of clerks and