Think not of yourself as the architect of your career but as the sculptor. Expect to have to do a lot of hard hammering and chiselling and scraping and polishing.
—B. C. Forbes
Topics: Career
It is not a case of whether we want to wash our hands of Europe or want to help her to regain her feet. The troubles of Europe have been laid on our doorstep, so to speak, and will plague us, if we do nothing to cure them, whether we like it or not.
—B. C. Forbes
Topics: Politics
Which class is happiest, the rich, the middle class or the poor? A very successful executive of a large organization touches upon this vital subject in a long letter to all his salesmen. He uses as his text a passage from Robinson Crusoe which included this: “My Father bid me observe it, and I should always find that the calamities of life were shared among the upper and lower part of mankind; but that the middle station had the fewest disasters, and were not exposed to so many vicissitudes as the higher or lower part of mankind”.
—B. C. Forbes
Topics: Class
The way to make a true friend is to be one Friendship implies loyalty, esteem, cordiality, sympathy, affection, readiness to aid, to help, to stick, to fight for, if need be. The real friend is he or she who can share all our sorrows and double our joys Radiate friendship and it will return sevenfold.
—B. C. Forbes
Topics: Friendship
A big league baseball manager declares that he would have the public feel extremely doubtful early in the season regarding the chances of his team to win the championship. Cocksureness, he implies, could not fail to have a bad effect upon his players, whereas public skepticism acted upon them as a challenge. There is wisdom in this for business concerns. The man who is smugly confident that he has arrived is ripe for the return trip. A measure of self-confidence is an asset when you are battling your way to the top. But cocksureness is not an asset but a liability. It tends to dull the edge of effort. Also, it breeds arrogance that is distasteful.
—B. C. Forbes
Topics: Beliefs
Every time I see an Erie Railroad engine bearing the name of its faithful driver a thrill goes through me, for I know that the man guiding it has won this rare honor by many years of the most loyal and efficient service. Who will argue that only public men and corporation heads are entitled to have their names emblazoned on the scroll of honor? All workmen care about is money, you say? Wrong. Workers are made of exactly the same stuff as generals or senators or presidents or governors or industrial leaders. It is just as fitting to honor the worthiest of our wage earners as it is to honor others.
—B. C. Forbes
Topics: Pride
The British have their own conception of what constitutes the typical American. He must have a flavor of the Wild West about him. He must do spectacular things. He must not be punctilious about dignity, decorum and other refinements characteristic of the real British gentleman. The Yankee pictured by the Briton must be a bustler. If he is occasionally flagrantly indiscreet in speech and action, then he is so much more surely stamped the genuine article. The most typical American the British ever set their eyes on was, in their judgment, Theodore Roosevelt.
—B. C. Forbes
Topics: America
Triumph often is nearest when defeat seems inescapable.
—B. C. Forbes
Topics: Endurance, Resolve, Perseverance
Turn resolutely to work, to recreation, or in any case to physical exercise till you are so tired you can’t help going to sleep, and when you wake up you won’t want to worry.
—B. C. Forbes
Topics: Managing Worries, Worry
Pity the human being who is not able to connect faith within himself with the infinite He who has faith has … an inward reservoir of courage, hope, confidence, calmness, and assuring trust that all will come out well—even though to the world it may appear to come out most badly.
—B. C. Forbes
Topics: Belief, Faith
Whenever possible, I like to have the supreme head of a company show me over the works. It is extremely illuminating to note the attitude of workers towards their boss, and equally interesting to note the attitude towards the workers. It is tragic to notice how many chief executives of large concerns are absolutely unknown, even by sight, to the rank and file of their workers.
—B. C. Forbes
Accuse American businessmen of being responsible for radicalism and they would indignantly deny the accusation. Yet, in one fundamental sense, they are responsible. They are responsible in the sense that they have utterly neglected to take part in the work and the organization which precede the choosing of candidates for political office. Local political organizations all over the land are conducted and controlled, as a rule, by politicians…. Businessmen have shirked such responsibilities, leaving an untrammeled field to others less capable of carrying on the administration of government.
—B. C. Forbes
Topics: Politics
To become an earner, be a learner.
—B. C. Forbes
Topics: Education
Diamonds are only lumps of coal that stuck to their jobs.
—B. C. Forbes
Topics: Wealth, Resolve, Perseverance, Jobs, Endurance, Persistence
History has demonstrated that the most notable winners usually encountered heartbreaking obstacles before they triumphed. They won because they refused to become discouraged by their defeats.
—B. C. Forbes
Henry Ward Beecher, so the story goes, was once asked by a young preacher how he could keep his congregation wide awake and attentive during his sermons. Beecher replied that he always had a man watch for sleepers, with instructions, as soon as he saw anyone start nodding or dozing, to hasten to the pulpit and wake up the preacher. Aren’t you and I usually less sensible? Would we not be inclined to have the watcher wake up not ourselves but the fellows caught sleeping? In other words, aren’t we disposed always to blame others?
—B. C. Forbes
Topics: Blame
A nation’s economic salvation does not lie in the amount of money its rich inhabitants can squander recklessly. A nation’s economic salvation lies in the amount of money its inhabitants can save and invest after providing themselves with all the necessaries and all the reasonable comforts of life.
—B. C. Forbes
Topics: Wealth
Frank W. Woolworth once told me that the turning-point in his career did not come until he was thrown flat on his back by illness. He was sure that his business would go to pieces during his long, enforced absence. Instead, he discovered that he had in his employ men who could overcome difficulties when given power to exercise initiative. After that Woolworth left many problems and difficulties to be solved by subordinates and turned his attention to big things.
—B. C. Forbes
Search and you will find that at the base and birth of every great business organization was an enthusiast, a man consumed with earnestness of purpose, with confidence in his powers, with faith in the worthwhileness of his endeavors.
—B. C. Forbes
Topics: Assurance, Confidence
There is more genuine joy in climbing the hill of success, even though sweat may be spent and toes may be stubbed, than in aimlessly sliding down the path to failure. If a straight, honorable path has been chosen, the gaining of the summit yields lasting satisfaction. The morass of failure, if reached through laziness, indifference or other avoidable fault, yields nothing but ignominy and sorrow for self and family and friends.
—B. C. Forbes
Topics: Success
The victors of the battles of tomorrow will be those who can best harness thought to action. From office boy to statesman, the prizes will be for those who most effectively exert their brains, who take deep, earnest and studious counsel of their minds, who stamp themselves as thinkers.
—B. C. Forbes
Topics: Action
Call the roll in your memory of conspicuously successful (business) giants and, if you know anything about their careers, you will be struck by the fact that almost every one of them encountered inordinate difficulties sufficient to crush all but the gamest of spirits. Edison went hungry many times before he became famous.
—B. C. Forbes
Topics: Resolve, Perseverance, Role models, Success, Endurance
I played golf some time ago with John D. Rockefeller. The other day, I played with Charles M. Schwab…. Both played exactly the same. Neither overreached (or) tried to do more than he was capable of…. Most golfers, like most businessmen, swat the ball with all their might and trust more or less to luck as to the result…. Now, both Rockefeller and Schwab hit a straight ball nine times out of ten. In fact, in the first 17 holes I played with Schwab, he didn’t foozle a single shot. I could drive a ball 25 to 50 yards further than he, but quite often it flew wild. The result was that Schwab licked me decisively.
—B. C. Forbes
Topics: Sports
The world seems to have forgotten that, finally, business must be settled almost wholly by barter. Certainly, American bankers, investment bankers and promoters overlooked this basic fact when they joyfully proceeded to lend hundreds of millions and even billions to almost every foreign country on the face of the earth after the World War and before the collapse of our speculative boom. They never stopped to ask how the overseas borrowers could settle the colossal sums advanced to them…. The world had drifted too far away from the A.B.C. truth that trade and commerce must necessarily represent barter.
—B. C. Forbes
Topics: Business
White-heat enthusiasm melts many a cold prospect.
—B. C. Forbes
Topics: Passion
The majority of America’s colossal fortunes have been made by entering industries in their early stages and developing leadership in them…. Think of what opportunities the present and the future contain in such fields as ship-building and ship-owning, aircraft, electrical development, the oil industry, different branches of the automotive industry, foreign trade, international banking, invention, the chemical industry, moving pictures, color photography, and, one night add, labor leadership.
—B. C. Forbes
Topics: Opportunities
The man who works 52 weeks in the year does not do his best in any one week of the year, Daniel Guggenheim, onetime head of the greatest smelting and mining family in America, impressed upon me. Real recreation quickens aspiration. The true purpose of recreation is not merely to amuse, not merely to afford pleasure, not merely to kill time, but to increase our fitness, enhance our usefulness, spur achievement.
—B. C. Forbes
Topics: Leisure
A certain ultra-dignified gentleman of unusual prominence carried himself so stiffly that nobody felt free to call him by his first name. He quarreled with a friend of earlier days and from then on the two never spoke. The day the friend died an associate found the ultra-dignified gentleman staring through the window. When he came out of his reverie, he soliloquized with a sigh, “He was the last to call me John”. Is any man really entitled to regard himself a success who has failed to inspire at least a goodly number of fellow mortals to greet him by his first name?
—B. C. Forbes
Topics: Friendship
Money, or even power, can never yield happiness unless it be accompanied by the goodwill of others.
—B. C. Forbes
Topics: Money, Success, Happiness
Any business arrangement that is not profitable to the other person will in the end prove unprofitable for you. The bargain that yields mutual satisfaction is the only one that is apt to be repeated.
—B. C. Forbes
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