nine o’clock, a group of us played cards or engaged in idle chatter that would often last past midnight. Now I go home and enjoy the evening with my family. I get a good night’s sleep. I have more time to read self-help books.
“Sports–sometimes I used to go to ball games or play golf during selling time. I hate to think of the income lost during this valuable earning time.
“Family duties–I’d take time to run chores for the family during business hours, instead of using my time profitably to do the job expected of me as a wage earner.
‘When I looked back, I found that in many respects I was a social success during business hours. But when I developed my Social Time Recorder, I realized:
“If a business day is a social success, it has been a business failure.”
So George completed his Social Time Recorder daily. The officials of his company were amazed. For the records indicate that after inventing his Social Time Recorder, George accomplished wonders:
He wrote over four million dollars’ worth of life insurance in a single year.
He established a company record by submitting over a million dollars’ worth of new business in one day.
“He consistently sold enough life insurance to become a life member of the Million Dollar Round Table–an achievement every life insurance man seeks, but relatively few attain.
With justifiable pride, George said, “I began to pay off my debts, and eventually, when these were paid, I started a savings account. Finally, I had saved $6,000. A friend of mine and I each invested $6,000 in an enterprise that our bank helped us finance. Within a year, we each received $50,000 out of this project. This was a big step forward in acquiring wealth.”
Would you like to see a facsimile of George Severance’s Social Time Recorder? Read a detailed report on how it works? Develop a time recorder for your own special use?
You’ll have your opportunity when you get to Chapter 19: “The Success Indicator Brings Success.” But it takes will power to begin the habit–to take inventory of yourself daily. And an inspirational self-help book will help.
Power of Will
Authors of Portraits and Principles and other self-help books inspired George Severance. Power of Will helped me. (Frank Channing Haddock, Ralston Publishing Co., Cleveland, Ohio)
Perhaps when you read of my experience cold-canvassing in the Dime Bank Building in the last chapter, you may have questioned how a teenage salesman on his first assignment built sales techniques based on the functioning of the human mind when older and more experienced salesmen in all fields often failed to do this.
But don’t sell the teenager short. As a high school freshman, I had problems that motivated me to purchase Power of Will, by Frank Channing Haddock. For one thing, I wanted to develop will power. In addition, I was president of the Debating Club at Senn High, where we debated such topics as, “Is the will free?” It was necessary to engage in research, and Power of Will is a good reference book for such a subject.
This training in debating and public speaking gave me self-assurance and confidence. And the necessity to develop quick and convincing rebuttal arguments made effective rebuttal arguments in sales come naturally to me, for the principles are the same. Debater or salesman, you must think logically and be sensitive to every statement that you can turn to your advantage. You must be persuasive to win.
I have often wondered why schools don’t expose teenagers to self-help books. They’re at the age where they are seeking truths and personal help. The Constitution prohibits the teaching of religion in public schools, but there is nothing in the Constitution that prohibits the teaching of the proper attitude toward work, honesty, courage, the building of a noble life, thinking good thoughts, and doing good deeds.
You Reach the Soul Through the Mind
The history of man has taught us that the best thoughts that are very new are the best thoughts that are very old. That’s the way another friend of mine, Nate Lieberman, expresses it. Countless persons have thought good thoughts and done good deeds to build a noble life through the influence of the church. The moral teachings of the church are to be found in the Bible and other religious writings. In seeking self-improvement, expose yourself to religious philosophy and go to the Bible–the self-help book that has inspired more persons to desirable action than any book written. And when you read the Bible, be encouraged, even though you don’t at first have the know-how of relating, assimilating, and using its principles. For know-how is the product of experience.
Through the Bible and the influence of your church, you reach your soul through your mind. And because of the importance of a healthy mind and the curative powers of religion, ministers of all denominations are beginning to recognize the need for cooperation between the minister and the psychiatrist to obtain most effective results in providing individuals with physical, mental, and moral health.
For 25 years, Dr. Smiley Blanton and the Reverend Dr. Norman Vincent Peale have proved the value of the psychiatrist and the minister working as partners while fulfilling their separate vocations. But most of all, through the American Foundation of Religion and Psychiatry (which they established) with headquarters in New York City, they have trained ministers of all denominations in many parts of the world to better fulfill the mission to which they are dedicated.
I mention this philosophy because, as a sales manager, I have taken men who have failed with other companies and, by motivating them to become self-builders, have prepared them for outstanding success. Anyone who wishes to be a self-builder can achieve his objectives by constantly striving to develop physical, mental, and moral health, provided he doesn’t build unseen walls.
Tear Down the Unseen Walls
In the third century B.C., Chin Shih Huang Ti, the first emperor of the China Dynasty, built two walls–the famous Great Wall of China and, simultaneously, an “unseen wall.”
The Great Wall, with its 25,000 watchtowers, stretched 2500 miles. For more than 2000 years, it prevented the barbarians from coming in and the world’s oldest civilization, with its advanced knowledge and culture, from getting out.
In the third century B.C., China was self-sufficient; it didn’t need the rest of the world. But the rest of the world needed what China had to share with it: the art of printing, the use of coal, water clocks, bronze casting, gunpowder, astronomical instruments, the naval compass, drugs, spices...and more.
As the centuries passed, the barbarians gained inspiration, knowledge, and know-how and advanced their civilization so far beyond that of Chin Shih Huang Ti that China today is primitive by comparison.
For like the leaders of nations who fear the freedom of religion, education, and the press, and who have built bamboo or iron curtains around their peoples, the Emperor stultified progress by destroying whatever literature did not correspond to his ideas, concepts, and philosophy.
Now you may not appear to be an emperor, king, or leader in the eyes of others, but you are an absolute monarch when it comes to the control of what you think, feel, believe, and try to do. And the literature that you don’t explore is as useless to you as if it were burned or destroyed.
So now may be the time to ask yourself: “What unseen walls have I built?
“Since leaving school, have I exposed myself to ideas, concepts, and philosophies that are different from those I had at the time?
“Am
