Keeping the Mind Alert and Active

1. Are you careful to see that your mind is in the main stream of ideas, where it can be continually stimulated?

"When I want to discover something," says Thomas A. Edison, "I begin by reading up everything that has been done along that line in the past. I see what has been accomplished at great labor and expense in the past. I gather the data of many thousands of experiments as a starting point, and then I make thousands more."

In other words, Mr. Edison in evolving those new projects which have made him world-famous as an inventor nourishes his mind in the accumulated experience of other men. He does not go it alone, a hermit shut away in some remote cave.

2. Are you open-minded, ready to receive a good idea from whatever source it may come?

"There is a principle which is a bar against information, which is proof against all arguments, and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance," says Herbert Spencer; "this principle is contempt prior to examination."

3. Do you talk with men who stimulate you?

The ideas upon which John Jacob Astor laid the foundations of his great fortune were gained from an American furrier with whom as an immigrant he talked on shipboard.

The young executive will find talking with bigger men than he a continual stimulus and source of inspiration. Join a trade club or engineers' club where men of affairs gather-be a good listener and a pertinent questioner. Absorb ideas relating to your job and never miss an opportunity to study and understand the men higher up in your own concern.

4. Do you read the trade papers—and books?

The story of Astor's career as written in Irving's "Astoria" fired the imagination of a steamship clerk, James J. Hill, and the boundless stretch of fertile and untilled land in the northwest became his life theme.

5. Do you use an idea file?

The philosopher Hobbes took his own intellectual processes with all seriousness. "He walked much," says his friend Aubrey, "and contemplated and he had in the head of his staffe a pen and inke horne, carried always a note-book in his pocket, and as soon as a thought darted, he presently entered it into his book, or otherwise he might perhaps have lost it."

President Patterson of the National Cash Register Company is in this respect a worthy follower of Hobbes. His brain works day and night—and he sees to it that its ideas do not escape him. Even at his bedside he has a pencil and pad to which he commits ideas the instant they enter his head. Every morning he dictates to a secretary dozens of orders to be transmitted to the various heads of departments.

"All the great orators of the world have planned out their creation to the smallest details," says Clarence M. Woolley, President of the American Radiator Company, "all great achievements have first existed in the mind of some man." One of these great achievements may germinate within your mind today. Welcome it. Jot it down, dictate it in a memo to yourself, file it; by all means do not let that idea escape for it is stuff out of which profits are made.

6. Do you meditate upon what you have heard and read? Each person is unique, with a life purpose all his own; and an

TWENTY SPECIFIC
INSTANCES

IN EACH CASE THE
PROFIT WAS MADE
AS FOLLOWS

THESE VARIOUS WAYS
FOR MAKING PROFITS
REDUCE THEMSELVES TO

Test Chart 12. How Profits are Being Made in My Field

idea from outside is not really his and ready to meet his needs until it has passed through the crucible of his own thought. Meditation accomplishes this. Such meditation is purposeful, not the mere wondering about what may happen, over which so much time is consumed. "Our most useful cogitations are not pure reveries, absolute driftings," says James, "but revolve about some central interest or topic to which most of the images are relevant, and toward which we return promptly after occasional digressions." This constitutes fruitful thinking.

7. Are you giving to creative work the time it justly deserves? Ideas are intangible, and in an age of machinery and materialism their significance is, no doubt, obscured. Yet ideas are true assets, the real basis of profit, and they can be produced systematically.

These questions open the way to profits with a realness which unless you fill out Test Chart 12 you cannot appreciate.

This exercise provides you certain general principles and concrete suggestions which will increase your own profit-making power. Does it not convince you that conspicuous gains are associated with new enterprises and new methods?

CHAPTER XII

THE FEASIBLE PROJECT

It is surprising how many bright business men go into important undertakings with little or no study of the controlling conditions they risk their all upon.-JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER.

The Commercial Instinct

The man of creative ability, the possessor of initiative and vision as these qualities have been discussed in the preceding chapter, runs the risk of becoming so captivated by the ideas which flash through his brain that he develops nothing systematically. A creature of enthusiasm, he perhaps lacks practical sense and, in the more pronounced cases, while in want himself, sees the fruits of his inventions enrich the more prosaic but better balanced men by whom these inventions were commercialized.

Such a man was Charles Goodyear, an inventor who believed in the then useless india-rubber as a saint believes in heaven. His friends regarded him as a monomaniac. In spite of poverty, family sickness, loss of friends, ridicule, and a series of disastrous experiments, he kept on for years testing different methods of manufacture, even dressing himself in clothes made of his samples in the hope of proving its durability and of securing some advertising. He was certainly an odd figure and in his appearance quite justified. the remark of one of his friends who, upon being asked how Mr. Goodyear could be recognized, replied: “If you see a man with an india-rubber coat on, india-rubber shoes, an india-rubber cap, and in his pocket an india-rubber purse, with not a cent in it, that is Goodyear."

After having firmly established the merits of india-rubber, he was still too thoroughly an inventor and too little the man of business to protect himself from schemers who plundered him of the profits of his invention. The United States Commissioner of Patents, in 1858, thus spoke of his losses:

"No inventor, probably, has ever been so harassed, so trampled upon, so plundered by that sordid and licentious class of infringers known in the parlance of the world, with no exaggeration of phrase, as 'pirates.' The spoliation of their incessant guerrilla warfare upon his defenceless rights has, unquestionably, amounted to millions."

Notwithstanding the epoch-making character of his invention, which brought millions to others, Goodyear himself died insolvent and left his family heavily in debt.

The long career of Thomas A. Edison, on the other hand, so richly and variously productive, is evidence of what can be achieved when originality is directed by the sense of what is practical. An experience of his suggests the value of the early "hard knock" which earnest men have so frequently turned to good account.

Mr. Edison's first invention was a device for registering votes promptly and automatically; each legislator had only to press a button and in a flash the final result "Aye" and "No" was set forth. The proud young inventor demonstrated the machine before a committee of the National House, in the full expectation that its merit would at once be appreciated.

An experienced legislator with two sentences dismissed the device over which the young man had toiled for months: "Young man, if there is any invention on earth that we don't want down here, it is this. One of the biggest weapons in the hands of a minority to prevent bad legislation is filibustering on votes, and this instrument would prevent it."

The idea was unique, but not wanted.