by George Horace Lorimer

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Advice packed into a exchange of letters of a successfull father to his son.

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1) It isn’t so much knowing a whole lot, as knowing a little and how to use it that counts. 2) Putting off an easy thing makes it hard, and putting off a hard one makes it impossible. 3) A good wife doubles a man’s expenses and doubles his happiness, and that’s a pretty good investment if a fellow’s got the money to invest. (While this is a bit old-fashioned, it is true. The right friends and company really multipy your happiness. Happiness = Enjoyment of your company x Enjyoment the action brings itself. Doing boring stuff with your best friend is still fun.)

Education

• You’ll find that education’s about the only thing lying around loose in this world, and that it’s about the only thing a fellow can have as much of as he’s willing to haul away.
• The first thing that any education ought to give a man is character, and the second thing is education.
• I know a young fellow with the right sort of stuff in him preaches to himself harder than any one else can, and that he’s mighty often switched off the right path by having it pointed out to him in the wrong way.
• Education’s a good deal like eating — a fellow can’t always tell which particular thing did him good, but he can usually tell which one did him harm.
• College doesn’t make fools; it develops them. It doesn’t make bright men; it develops them. A fool will turn out a fool, whether he goes to college or not, though he’ll probably turn out a different sort of a fool.
• Some men learn all they know from books; others from life; both kinds are narrow. The first are all theory; the second are all practice.

Money

• The sooner you adjust your spending to what your earning capacity will be, the easier they will find it to live together.
• Pay day is always a month off for the spend-thrift, and he is never able to realize more than sixty cents on any dollar that comes to him. But a dollar is worth one hundred and six cents to a good business man, and he never spends the dollar. It’s the man who keeps saving up and expenses down that buys an interest in the concern.
• Poverty never spoils a good man, but prosperity often does. It’s easy to stand hard times, because that’s the only thing you can do, but in good times the fool-killer has to do night work.

Group Pressure

• The boy who does anything just because the other fellows do it is apt to scratch a poor man’s back all his life.

Health

• It’s not what a man does during working-hours, but after them, that breaks down his health.
• A clear mind is one that is swept clean of business at six o’clock every night and isn’t opened up for it again until after the shutters are taken down next morning.
• On travel: Seeing the world is like charity — it covers a multitude of sins, and, like charity, it ought to begin at home.
• With most people happiness is something that is always just a day off. But I have made it a rule never to put off being happy till tomorrow.
• It is courtesy without condescension; affability without familiarity; self-sufficiency without selfishness; simplicity without snide.

Communcating

• Have something to say. Say it. Stop talking.
• Big talk means little knowledge.
• In the office your sentences should be the shortest distance possible between periods.
• Say less than the other fellow and listen more than you talk; for when a man’s listening he isn’t telling on himself and he’s flattering the fellow who is.
• But it isn’t enough to be all right in this world; you’ve got to look all right as well, because two-thirds of success is making people think you are all right.

On Business

• the only way to show a fellow that he’s chosen the wrong business is to let him try it.
• I want to say right here that the easiest way in the world to make enemies is to hire friends.
• It looks to me as if you were trying only half as hard as you could, and in trying it’s the second half that brings results.
• When you make a mistake, don’t make the second one—keeping it to yourself. Own up. The time to sort out rotten eggs is at the nest.
• Be slow to hire and quick to fire. But when you find that you’ve hired the wrong man, you can’t get rid of him too quick. Pay him an extra month, but don’t let him stay another day.