The Magic of Thinking Big, page 4
For stickability is 95 percent of ability.
At a homecoming celebration last year I met a college friend whom I had not seen for ten years. Chuck was a very bright student and was graduated with honors. His goal when I last saw him was to own his own business in western Nebraska.
I asked Chuck what kind of business he finally established.
“Well,” he confessed, “I didn’t go into business for myself. I wouldn’t have said this to anyone five years ago or even one year ago, but now I’m ready to talk about it.
“As I look back at my college education now, I see that I became an expert in why a business idea won’t work out. I learned every conceivable pitfall, every reason why a small business will fail: ‘You’ve got to have ample capital;’ ‘Be sure the business cycle is right;’ ‘Is there a big demand for what you will offer?’ ‘Is local industry stabilized?’—a thousand and one things to check out.
“The thing that hurts most is that several of my old high school friends who never seemed to have much on the ball and didn’t even go to college now are very well established in their own businesses. But me, I’m just plodding along, auditing freight shipments. Had I been drilled a little more in why a small business can succeed, I’d be better off in every way today.”
The thinking that guided Chuck’s intelligence was a lot more important than the amount of Chuck’s intelligence.
Why some brilliant people are failures. I’ve been close for many years to a person who qualifies as a genius, has high abstract intelligence, and is Phi Beta Kappa. Despite this very high native intelligence, he is one of the most unsuccessful people I know. He has a very mediocre job (he’s afraid of responsibility). He has never married (lots of marriages end in divorce). He has few friends (people bore him). He’s never invested in property of any kind (he might lose his money). This man uses his great brainpower to prove why things won’t work rather than directing his mental power to searching for ways to succeed.
Because of the negative thinking that guides his great reservoir of brains, this fellow contributes little and creates nothing. With a changed attitude, he could do great things indeed. He has the brains to be a tremendous success, but not the thought power.
Another person I know well was inducted into the Army shortly after earning the Ph.D. degree from a leading New York university. How did he spend his three years in the Army? Not as an officer. Not as a staff specialist. Instead, for three years he drove a truck. Why? Because he was filled with negative attitudes toward fellow soldiers (“I’m superior to them”), toward army methods and procedures (“They are stupid”), toward discipline (“It’s for others, not me”), toward everything, including himself (“I’m a fool for not figuring out a way to escape this rap”).
This fellow earned no respect from anyone. All his vast store of knowledge lay buried. His negative attitudes turned him into a flunky.
Remember, the thinking that guides your intelligence is much more important than how much intelligence you have. Not even a Ph.D. degree can override this basic success principle!
Several years ago I became a close friend of Phil F., one of the senior officers of a major advertising agency. Phil was director of marketing research for the agency, and he was doing a bang-up job.
Was Phil a “brain”? Far from it. Phil knew next to nothing about research technique. He knew next to nothing about statistics. He was not a college graduate (though all the people working for him were). And Phil did not pretend to know the technical side of research. What, then, enabled Phil to command $30,000 a year while not one of his subordinates earned $10,000?
This: Phil was a “human” engineer. Phil was 100 percent positive. Phil could inspire others when they felt low. Phil was enthusiastic. He generated enthusiasm; Phil understood people, and, because he could really see what made them tick, he liked them.
Not Phil’s brains, but how he managed those brains, made him three times more valuable to his company than men who rated higher on the IQ scale.
Out of every 100 persons who enroll in college, fewer than 50 will graduate. I was curious about this so I asked a director of admissions at a large university for his explanation.
“It’s not insufficient intelligence,” he said. “We don’t admit them if they don’t have sufficient ability. And it’s not money. Anyone who wants to support himself in college today can do so. The real reason is attitudes. You would be surprised,” he said, “how many young people leave because they don’t like their professors, the subjects they must take, and their fellow students.”
The same reason, negative thinking, explains why the door to top-flight executive positions is closed to many young junior executives. Sour, negative, pessimistic, depreciating attitudes rather than insufficient intelligence hold back thousands of young executives. As one executive told me, “It’s a rare case when we pass up a young fellow because he lacks brains. Nearly always it’s attitude.”
Once I was retained by an insurance company to learn why the top 25 percent of the agents were selling over 75 percent of the insurance while the bottom 25 percent of the agents sold only 5 percent of total volume.
Thousands of personnel files were carefully checked. The search proved beyond any question that no significant difference existed in native intelligence. What’s more, differences in education did not explain the difference in selling success. The difference in the very successful and the very unsuccessful finally reduced to differences in attitudes, or difference in thought management. The top group worried less, was more enthusiastic, had a sincere liking for people.
We can’t do much to change the amount of native ability, but we can certainly change the way we use what we have.
Knowledge is power—when you use it constructively. Closely allied to intelligence excusitis is some incorrect thinking about knowledge. We often hear that knowledge is power. But this statement is only a half-truth. Knowledge is only potential power. Knowledge is power only when put to use—and then only when the use made of it is constructive.
The story is told that the great scientist Einstein was once asked how many feet are in a mile. Einstein’s reply was “I don’t know. Why should I fill my brain with facts I can find in two minutes in any standard reference book?”
Einstein taught us a big lesson. He felt it was more important to use your mind to think than to use it as a warehouse for facts.
One time Henry Ford was involved in a libel suit with the Chicago Tribune. The Tribune had called Ford an ignoramus, and Ford said, in effect, “Prove it.”
The Tribune asked him scores of simple questions such as “Who was Benedict Arnold?” “When was the Revolutionary War fought?” and others, most of which Ford, who had little formal education, could not answer.
Finally he became quite exasperated and said, “I don’t know the answers to those questions, but I could find a man in five minutes who does.”
Henry Ford was never interested in miscellaneous information. He knew what every major executive knows: that the ability to know how to get information is more important than using the mind as a garage for facts.
How much is a fact man worth? I spent a very interesting evening recently with a friend who is the president of a young but rapidly growing manufacturing concern. The TV set happened to be turned to one of the most popular quiz programs. The fellow being quizzed had been on the show for several weeks. He could answer questions on all sorts of subjects, many of which seemed nonsensical.
After the fellow answered a particularly odd question, something about a mountain in Argentina, my host looked at me and said, “How much do you think I’d pay that guy to work for me?”
“How much?” I asked.
“Not a cent over $300—not per week, not per month, but for life. I’ve sized him up. That ‘expert’ can’t think. He can only memorize. He’s just a human encyclopedia, and I figure for $300 I can buy a pretty good set of encyclopedias. In fact, maybe that’s too much. Ninety percent of what that guy knows I can find in a $2 almanac.
“What I want around me,” he continued, “are people who can solve problems, who can think up ideas. People who can dream and then develop the dream into a practical application; an idea man can make money with me; a fact man can’t.”
Three Ways to Cure Intelligence Excusitis
Three easy ways to cure intelligence excusitis are:
1. Never underestimate your own intelligence, and never overestimate the intelligence of others. Don’t sell yourself short. Concentrate on your assets. Discover your superior talents. Remember, it’s not how many brains you’ve got that matters. Rather, it’s how you use your brains that counts. Manage your brains instead of worrying about how much IQ you’ve got.
2. Remind yourself several times daily, “My attitudes are more important than my intelligence.” At work and at home practice positive attitudes. See the reasons why you can do it, not the reasons why you can’t. Develop an “I’m winning” attitude. Put your intelligence to creative positive use. Use it to find ways to win, not to prove you will lose.
3. Remember that the ability to think is of much greater value than the ability to memorize facts. Use your mind to create and develop ideas, to find new and better ways to do things. Ask yourself, “Am I using my mental ability to make history, or am I using it merely to record history made by others?”
3. “It’s No Use. I’m Too Old (or Too Young).”
Age excusitis, the failure disease of never being the right age, comes in two easily identifiable forms: the “I’m too old” variety and the “I’m too young” brand.
You’ve heard hundreds of people of all ages explain their mediocre performance in life something like this: “I’m too old (or too young) to break in now. I can’t do what I want to do or am capable of doing because of my age handicap.”
Really, it’s surprising how few people feel they are “just right” age-wise. And it’s unfortunate. This excuse has closed the door of real opportunity to thousands of individuals. They think their age is wrong, so they don’t even bother to try.
The “I’m too old” variety is the most common form of age excusitis. This disease is spread in subtle ways. TV fiction is produced about the big executive who lost his job because of a merger and can’t find another because he’s too old. Mr. Executive looks for months to find another job, but he can’t, and in the end, after contemplating suicide for a while, he decides to rationalize that it’s nice to be on the shelf.
Plays and magazine articles on the topic “Why You Are Washed Up at 40” are popular, not because they represent true facts, but because they appeal to many worried minds looking for an excuse.
How to Handle Age Excusitis
Age excusitis can be cured. A few years ago, while I was conducting a sales training program, I discovered a good serum that both cures this disease and vaccinates you so you won’t get it in the first place.
In that training program there was a trainee named Cecil. Cecil, who was forty, wanted to shift over to set himself up as a manufacturer’s representative, but he thought he was too old. “After all,” he explained, “I’d have to start from scratch. And I’m too old for that now. I’m forty.”
I talked with Cecil several times about his “old age” problem. I used the old medicine, “You’re only as old as you feel,” but I found I was getting nowhere. (Too often people retort with “But I do feel old!”)
Finally, I discovered a method that worked. One day after a training session, I tried it on Cecil. I said, “Cecil, when does a man’s productive life begin?”
He thought a couple of seconds and answered, “Oh, when he’s about twenty, I guess.”
“Okay,” I said, “now, when does a man’s productive life end?”
Cecil answered, “Well, if he stays in good shape and likes his work, I guess a man is still pretty useful when he’s seventy or so.”
“All right,” I said, “a lot of folks are highly productive after they reach seventy, but let’s agree with what you’ve just said, a man’s productive years stretch from twenty to seventy. That’s fifty years in between, or half a century. Cecil,” I said, “you’re forty. How many years of productive life have you spent?”
“Twenty,” he answered.
“And how many have you left?”
“Thirty,” he replied.
“In other words, Cecil, you haven’t even reached the halfway point; you’ve used up only forty percent of your productive years.”
I looked at Cecil and realized he’d gotten the point. He was cured of age excusitis. Cecil saw he still had many opportunity-filled years left. He switched from thinking “I’m already old” to “I’m still young.” Cecil now realized that how old we are is not important. It’s one’s attitude toward age that makes it a blessing or a barricade.
Curing yourself of age excusitis often opens doors to opportunities that you thought were locked tight. A relative of mine spent years doing many different things—selling, operating his own business, working in a bank—but he never quite found what he really wanted to do most. Finally, he concluded that the one thing he wanted more than anything else was to be a minister. But when he thought about it, he found he was too old. After all, he was forty-five, had three young children and little money.
But fortunately he mustered all of his strength and told himself, “Forty-five or not, I’m going to be a minister.”
With tons of faith but little else, he enrolled in a five-year ministerial training program in Wisconsin. Five years later he was ordained as a minister and settled down with a fine congregation in Illinois.
Old? Of course not. He still has twenty years of productive life ahead of him. I talked with this man not long ago, and he said to me, “You know, if I had not made that great decision when I was forty-five, I would have spent the rest of my life growing old and bitter. Now I feel every bit as young as I did twenty-five years ago.”
And he almost looked it, too. When you lick age excusitis, the natural result is to gain the optimism of youth and feel of youth. When you beat down your fears of age limitations, you add years to your life as well as success.
A former university colleague of mine provides an interesting angle on how age excusitis was defeated. Bill was graduated from Harvard in the 1920s. After twenty-four years in the stockbrokerage business, during which time he made a modest fortune, Bill decided he wanted to become a college professor. Bill’s friends warned him that he would overtax himself in the rugged learning program ahead. But Bill was determined to reach his goal and enrolled in the University of Illinois—at the age of fifty-one. At fifty-five he had earned his degree. Today Bill is chairman of the Department of Economics at a fine liberal arts college. He’s happy, too. He smiles when he says, “I’ve got almost a third of my good years left.”
Old age is a failure disease. Defeat it by refusing to let it hold you back.
When is a person too young? The “I’m too young” variety of age excusitis does much damage, too. About a year ago, a twenty-three-year-old fellow named Jerry came to me with a problem. Jerry was a fine young man. He had been a paratrooper in the service and then had gone to college. While going to college, Jerry supported his wife and son by selling for a large transfer-and-storage company. He had done a terrific job, both in college and for his company.
But today Jerry was worried. “Dr. Schwartz,” he said, “I’ve got a problem. My company has offered me the job of sales manager. This would make me supervisor over eight salesmen.”
“Congratulations, that’s wonderful news!” I said. “But you seem worried.”
“Well,” he continued, “all eight men I’m to supervise are from seven to twenty-one years older than I. What do you think I should do? Can I handle it?”
“Jerry,” I said, “the general manager of your company obviously thinks you’re old enough or he wouldn’t have offered you this job. Just remember these three points and everything will work out just fine: first, don’t be age conscious. Back on the farm a boy became a man when he proved he could do the work of a man. His number of birthdays had nothing to do with it. And this applies to you. When you prove you are able to handle the job of sales manager, you’re automatically old enough.
“Second, don’t take advantage of your new ‘gold bars.’ Show respect for the salesmen. Ask them for their suggestions. Make them feel they are working for a team captain, not a dictator. Do this and the men will work with you, not against you.
“Third, get used to having older persons working for you. Leaders in all fields soon find they are younger than many of the people they supervise. So get used to having older men work for you. It will help you a lot in the coming years, when even bigger opportunities develop.
“And remember, Jerry, your age won’t be a handicap unless you make it one.”
Today Jerry’s doing fine. He loves the transportation business, and now he’s planning to organize his own company in a few years.
Youth is a liability only when the youth thinks it is. You often hear that certain jobs require “considerable” physical maturity, jobs like selling securities and insurance. That you’ve got to have either gray hair or no hair at all in order to gain an investor’s confidence is plain nonsense. What really matters is how well you know your job. If you know your job and understand people, you’re sufficiently mature to handle it. Age has no real relation to ability, unless you convince yourself that years alone will give you the stuff you need to make your mark.
Many young people feel that they are being held back because of their youth. Now, it is true that another person in an organization who is insecure and job-scared may try to block your way forward, using age or some other reason.
But the people who really count in the company will not. They will give you as much responsibility as they feel you can handle well. Demonstrate that you have ability and positive attitudes and your youthfulness will be considered an advantage.
In quick recap, the cure for age excusitis is:
1. Look at your present age positively. Think, “I’m still young,” not “I’m already old.” Practice looking forward to new horizons and gain the enthusiasm and the feel of youth.
