Personal Development

The comparison reflected no credit upon the first family boys! It is with no feeling of exaltation that I express my gratitude for not having been brought into the world by parents who belonged to the first family class. That, of course, was not a matter of choice with me, and if it had been perhaps I, too, would have selected parents of the first family type.

HERE'S a good joke to play on your employer: Get to your work a little earlier and leave a little later than you are supposed to. Handle his tools as if they belonged to you. Go out of your way to say a kind word about him to your fellow-workers. When there is extra work that needs to be done, volunteer to do it.

Do not show surprise when he gets on to you and offers you the head of the department or a partnership in the business, for this is the best part of the joke. Not long ago I was invited to deliver an address in Boston, Mass.

After my work was finished, a reception committee volunteered to show me the sights of the city, including a trip to Cambridge, where we visited Harvard University.

While there, I observed many sons of first families - some of whom were equipped with Packards. Twenty years ago I would have felt proud to be a student at Harvard, with a Packard car, but the illuminating effect of my more mature years has led me to the conclusion that had I had the privilege of going to Harvard I might have done just as well without the aid of a Packard.

I noticed some Harvard boys who had no Packards. They were working as waiters in a restaurant where I ate, and as far as I could see they were missing nothing of value because they owned no Packards; nor did they seem to be suffering by comparison with those who could boast of the ownership of parents of the first family type. All of which is no reflection upon Harvard University - one of the great universities of the world - nor upon the first families who send boys to Harvard.

To the contrary, it is intended as a bit of encouragement to those unfortunates who, like myself, have but little and know but little, but express what little they know in terms of constructive, useful action. The psychology of inaction is one of the chief reasons why some towns and cities are dying with the dry-rot! Take the city of X, for example.