A writer in the Detroit Free Press said not long ago that “there are some occupations which compel those who follow them to be orderly and methodical. There are none in which these qualities, where they have been neglected, can not be cultivated to good advantage. Deficiency in them is far from being a token of genius. It signifies something of indolence and much that is slipshod. Every man knows whether or not he is as orderly and methodical as he should be. If he is not, unless he is too old to attempt the task, he should endeavour to improve in these respects. There is no danger of his carrying it to that excess which marks persons who have a passionate love of order, but there is a likelihood that he will materially lighten his work, or find that he can do much more than he has been in the habit of doing.”
It seems to the Criterion that this is the keynote of a business man’s success. No man who conducts his business in a slipshod manner can expect to achieve desirable results. He should determine to be orderly and methodical at the very commencement of his career. Order soon becomes a habit with a business man, and by its observance he is enabled to do a hundred things that it would be impossible to accomplish if he did not go at them in the handiest and most effective manner.--[Grocers’ Criterion.
One secret of success in business--the secret, in fact, of success on a large scale--is to conceive of it as a matter of principles, not merely as a series of transactions. There are great merchants as there are great statesmen, and there are small merchants as there are small politicians, and the difference is very much the same in both professions. The small politician works by the day, and sees only the one small opportunity before him, the small merchant does the same thing--he is looking for the next dollar. The statesman, on the other hand, is master of the situation, because he understands the general principles which control events; this knowledge enables him to deal with large questions and to shape the future. The great merchant does the same thing, his business is not a mere money-getting affair, not a mere matter of barter, but a science and an art; he studies the general laws of trade, watches the general condition of the country, investigates present needs, foresees future wants, and adapts his business to the broad conditions of time and place. He puts as much brains into his work as does the statesman, and he ends by being not a money getter, but a large minded and capable man. An eminently successful business man, of statesmanlike quality, said the other day that the more he understood of life the more clearly he saw that it was all done on business principles. By which he meant, not only that the universe stands for the dollar, but that the universe is governed by unvarying laws, that promptness, exactness, thoroughness and honesty are wrought into its very fibre. On these business principles all life is conducted, if not by men, at least by that power which is behind man. It ought to be the ambition of every young man to treat his business from the point of the statesman, and not from that of the politician.