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: Worry, Managing Worries
Work is the meat of life, pleasure the dessert.
—B. C. Forbes
Topics: Work
As I steamed into New York this month, exactly 20 years after first landing in America, the thought uppermost in my mind after visiting Europe was this: How mightily the United States has progressed in wealth and power, and how Europe has failed to keep step. America has exhibited qualities of a strong, industrious, generous-hearted, enthusiastic youth. Europe has exhibited signs of age…. America, the Youth, has not been eaten up with jealousies and bitterness and strife. Europe, the veteran, has.
—B. C. Forbes
Topics: America
A business like an automobile, has to be driven, in order to get results
—B. C. Forbes
Topics: Business
Vacations for wage earners have proved both popular with workers and profitable for employers. Unfortunately, the majority of large employers have not yet followed the example set by a number of progressive corporations. I don’t know of a single company that has abandoned vacations for wage earners after having tried the experiment. But I do know many that are delighted with the fruits they have gathered. Under some of the plans vacations with pay must be earned by good behavior, punctuality, etc…. The best results have come where the treatment has been regarded as most liberal.
—B. C. Forbes
For my part, I rather distrust men or concerns that rise up with the speed of rockets. Sudden rises are sometimes followed by equally sudden falls. I have most faith in the individual or enterprise that advances step by step. A mushroom can spring up in a day; an oak takes 50 years or more to reach maturity. Mushrooms don’t last; oaks do. The real cause for an enormous number of business failures is premature over-expansion, attempting to gallop before learning to creep. Sudden successes often invite sudden reverses.
—B. C. Forbes
Topics: Success
Don’t you feel disgusted when you see some fellow strutting along with the air of a peacock? Doesn’t the pompous gentleman cause you to laugh-or swear? Isn’t vanity the essence of childishness? I have been trying to analyze in my own mind whether more or fewer of our so-called big men are obsessed with pride today than 20 years ago. I believe that more of our leaders are now democratic, approachable, likeable fellows than was the case in the earlier years of this century…. The press and the people have abundantly brought it home to the rich that their riches do not entitle them to any special deference or homage. … .
—B. C. Forbes
Topics: Vanity
Do too many executives still indulge in the short-sighted habit of issuing orders without taking the slightest pains to explain to those responsible for carrying them out the whyfor and wherefor of the orders? Where employees come in daily and hourly contact with the public, surely it is important that care be taken to fit them to reply intelligently to courteous questions. “Because them are orders” isn’t a satisfying reply-even less satisfactory to the management than to the public.
—B. C. Forbes
The real friend is he or she who can share all our sorrow and double our joys.
—B. C. Forbes
Topics: Friendship, Sharing
Life is just an endless chain of judgements…. The more imperfect our judgement, the less perfect our success.
—B. C. Forbes
Topics: Decisions
How we love to blame others for our misfortunes! Almost every individual who has lost money in stock speculation has on the tip of his tongue an explanation which he trots out to show that it wasn’t his own fault at all … Hardly one loser has the manliness to say frankly, “I was wrong”.
—B. C. Forbes
Topics: Blame, Confidence, Responsibility, Self-reliance
A happy man or woman, said Robert Louis Stevenson, “is a better thing to find than a five-pound note. He or she is a radiating focus of good will and their entrance into a room is as though another candle has been lighted”. Learn to be cheerful and you will come near being happy. Life’s race can best be run with a light heart and a buoyant countenance. Cheerfulness will open a door when other keys fail.
—B. C. Forbes
Topics: Happiness
Many concerns now make part or the whole of their dividends from by-products that formerly went to waste. How do we, as individuals, utilize our principal by-product? Our principal by-product is, of course, our leisure time. Many years of observation forces the conclusion that a man’s success or failure in life is determined as much by how he acts during his leisure as by how he acts during his work hours. Tell me how a young man spends his evenings and I will tell you how he is likely to spend the latter part of his life.
—B. C. Forbes
Topics: Leisure, Success
Many men who do creditable things refuse to let it be known. This is a mistake. While we all admire modesty, nevertheless there is a great national need to do everything possible to bring home to the rank and file of the people that all employers and all wealthy men are not grinding, mercenary, selfish skinflints, but that many of them take delight in doing helpful things for others … Shortcomings of employers are constantly paraded. Why not let the public become acquainted with the better side which most present-day employers possess?
—B. C. Forbes
It is when things go hardest, when life becomes most trying, that there is greatest need for having a fixed goal. When few comforts come from without, it is all the more necessary to have a fount to draw from within.
—B. C. Forbes
Topics: Goals, Aspirations
Difficulties should act as a tonic. They should spur us to greater exertion.
—B. C. Forbes
Topics: Adversity, Difficulties, Difficulty
Without self-respect there can be no genuine success. Success won at the cost of self-respect is not success? For what shall it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his own self-respect.
—B. C. Forbes
Topics: Self-respect, Self Respect
The men who have done big things are those who were not afraid to attempt big things, who were not afraid to risk failure in order to gain success.
—B. C. Forbes
Topics: Success, Failure, Risk
The man of fixed ingrained principles who has mapped out a straight course, and has the courage and self-control to adhere to it, does not find life complex. Complexities are all of our own making.
—B. C. Forbes
Topics: Simplicity, Simple Living
To become an earner, be a learner.
—B. C. Forbes
Topics: Education
The incontestable truth is that America has been built up by optimists, not by pessimists, but by men possessing courage, confidence in the nation’s destiny, by men willing to adventure, to shoulder risks terrifying to the timid.
—B. C. Forbes
Topics: Optimism
Don’t forget until too late that the business of life is not business, but living.
—B. C. Forbes
Topics: Business
Ambition means longing and striving to attain some purpose. Therefore, there are as many brands of ambition as there are human aspirations.
—B. C. Forbes
Topics: Goals, Aspirations
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
The bell of public opinion is today making the Morgan-Rockefeller-Vanderbilt class jump. Nor are the strongest of our corporations immune. The railroads have had to jump pretty lively, and certain gigantic industrial combinations are also being put through their paces.
—B. C. Forbes
Topics: Opinions
When the snow and the ice were inches deep at home I was able to journey southwards where there was no snow and plenty of sunshine. How I revelled in my leisure during the first few days…. Gradually, however, my zest for play subsided. Even golf began to savor of monotony and work. By the end of two weeks I was eager to return to the daily grind. I found, too, that men and women who had nothing to do… were a rather dissatisfied, peevish lot. Work, even too much work, is preferable to too much play. Play can become harder work than work.
—B. C. Forbes
Topics: Work
How you start is important, very important, but in the end it is how you finish that counts. It is easier to be a self-starter than a self-finisher. The victor in the race is not the one who dashes off swiftest but the one who leads at the finish. In the race for success, speed is less important than stamina. The sticker outlasts the sprinter in life’s race. In America we breed many hares but not so many tortoises.
—B. C. Forbes
Topics: Perseverance
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: Endurance, Success, Resolve, Role models, Perseverance
You have no idea how big the other fellow’s troubles are.
—B. C. Forbes
Topics: Opportunities, Reality
It is well for civilization that human beings constantly strive to gain greater and greater rewards, for it is this urge, this ambition, this aspiration that moves men and women to bestir themselves to rise to higher and higher achievement. Individual success is to be won in most instances by studying and diagnosing the kind of rewards human hearts seek today and are likely to seek tomorrow.
—B. C. Forbes
Topics: Achievements
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