How to Analyze People on Sight by Elsie Lincoln Benedict (epub read online books txt) 📕

manufactured in such things.

We convinced him that his wife was not the only woman who would appreciate these step-saving, work-reducing, leisure-giving conveniences. He finally believed it enough to patent some of his inventions, and today he is a rich man.

Of "Your Own Accord"

¶ One more question will shed much light on the matter of your talents. Here it is:

Self-Question 3—Do I tend to follow, of my own accord, for the sheer joy of it, the kinds of activity demanded by this vocation which I am contemplating?

If you do not you will never succeed in this line of work.

Thought it Would Do Him Good

¶ One incident will serve to illustrate the foregoing test. A young man asked us if he could succeed as a public speaker. He had decided to become a lecturer and had spent two years studying for that work.

"Do you enjoy talking? Do you like to explain and expatiate? When out with others do you furnish your share of the conversation or a little more?" were the questions we put to him.

To all of the questions he answered "No."

"But I thought this was just the line of work I ought to go into," he explained, "I have always been diffident and I thought the training would do me good."

Life Pays the Producer

¶ Expecting the world to pay you handsomely while remaking you is short-sighted, to say the least. The public schools are free, like life's education, but you don't get a salary for attending them.

To be a success you must PRODUCE something out of the ordinary for the world. And you will produce nothing unusual save what your particular organism was built to produce. To know what this is, classify the kind of activities you "take to" naturally. You can be a star in some line that calls for those activities. You will never succeed in any calling which demands the opposite kinds of activities or reactions.

The Worst Place for Her

¶ A few years ago, in San Francisco, a young woman came to us for vocational advice. She had decided to find an opening in a silk-importing establishment, for none of whose duties she was qualified. When asked how she happened to hit upon the thing for which she unquestionably had no ability, she said:

"I thought it would give me a world outlook (which I need); compel me to learn fabrics (something I think every woman ought to know); force me to attend to details (which I have always hated but which I must learn to master); and because it would bring me into contact with people (I dislike them but think I should learn to deal with them)."

When Considering a Position

¶ When a position is being considered the questions an applicant should be asking himself are, "What must I do in this position? Am I qualified? Can I make good? Do I like the activities demanded by this position?"

But ninety-nine out of every hundred applicants for a vacancy ask no question of themselves whatever, and only one of anybody else. That question is to the employer and it is only four words: "What does it pay?"

He overlooks the fact that if the salary involved is large enough to be attractive he will soon be severed from it unless he makes good. He also forgets that if the salary is small he can force it to grow if he is big enough himself.

If the particular task he is considering does not warrant a large salary, his employers will find one for him that does if he shows he has ability.

Every business in the world is looking for people who can do a few things a trifle better than the mass of people are doing them today, and whenever they find them they pay them well—because it pays THEM in the long run.

The Big-Salaried Men

¶ Don't be afraid that you may develop ability and then find no market for it. The only jobs that have to go begging are the big-salaried ones, because the combination of intelligence and efficiency is not easy to find. The men who are drawing from $10,000 to $50,000 a year are not supermen. They are not very different from anybody else. But they found a line that fitted their particular talents, and they went ahead cultivating those talents without asking for everything in advance.

Looking for "Chicken Feed"

¶ While touring through the Rockies last summer we came one day to a log shack perched on the mountain-side near the road. In the back-yard was the owner, just ready to feed his chickens. As he flung out the grain they came from every direction, crowding and jostling each other and frantically pecking for the tiny morsels he threw on the ground. Several dozen flocked around him. But three or four stayed on the outer edge, ready to scamper for the big grains he threw now and then amongst the boulders up on the hillside.

"I do that just to see them use their heads," he explained. "People are just like that. They rush for the little chances where all the competition is, instead of staying out where they can see a big chance when it comes."

Life is full of opportunities for every person who will consult his own capacities and aim for the big chance.

Causes of Misfits

¶ Various influences are responsible for the misfit, chief amongst which are his loving parents. Many fathers and mothers, with the best intentions in the world, urge their children to enter vocations for which they have no natural fitness whatever. These same parents often discourage in their children the very talents which, if permitted to develop, would make them successful.

Such a child has small chance in the world if it happens that his parents are sufficiently well-to-do to hold the purse strings on his training. Not until he has failed at the work they choose for him will such parents desist. When they finally allow him to take to the work he prefers they are usually surprised to see how clever he is.

But if he does not succeed at it they should bear in mind that it is doubtless due to their having cheated him out of his priceless youth—the years when the mind is moldable, impressionable and full of inspiration.

Poverty's One Advantage

¶ In this situation alone does the child of poverty-ridden parents have greater opportunities than the child of the well-to-do. He at least chooses his own work, and this is one more little reason why the world's most successful men so often come from the ranks of the poor.

"Ruined by too much mothering and fathering" is a verdict we would frequently render if we knew the facts.

Richard and Dorothy

¶ One instance in which Fate took a hand was very interesting. A New York widow, whose husband had left his large fortune entirely to her, nursed definite ambitions for her son and daughter. Richard, she had decided, should become a stock-raiser and farmer on the several-thousand-acre ranch they owned in Texas. Dorothy should study art in Paris.

But it so happened that Richard and Dorothy disliked the respective vocations laid out for them, while each wanted to do the very thing the other was being driven to do. Richard was small, dark, sensitive, esthetic—and bent on being an artist. Dorothy, who was six feet in her stockings, laughed at art and wanted to be a farmer.

But mother was obdurate and mother held the family purse. So, in the spring of 1914, Dorothy was sent to Paris to study the art Richard loved, and Richard was sent to the Texas ranch that Dorothy wanted.

Then the War broke and Dorothy hurried from Paris to avoid German shells, while Richard enlisted to escape the Texas ranch. Dorothy, in her element at last, took over the ranch (of which Richard had made a failure), turned it into one vast war garden, became a farmerette and is there now—a shining success.

Richard got to Paris during the War and when it closed refused to come home. He wrote his mother that the war had taught him he could earn his own living—an accomplishment he is achieving today with his art. The mother herself is happier than she ever was before, and proud of her children's success.

Three Kinds of Parents

¶ Parents can be divided into three classes—those who over-estimate their children, those who under-estimate their children, and those who do not estimate them at all.

The great majority are in the first group. This accounts for the fact that most fathers and mothers are disillusioned, as their children, one by one, fall short of their cherished hopes.

Those who under-estimate their children are in that small group—of parents who live to be happily surprised at their achievements.

The best parents of all are those who allow their children to follow their natural talents.

Don'ts for Parents

¶ Don't push your child into any vocation he dislikes.

Don't be like the parents we dined with recently. As we sat around the table they pointed out their four children as follows: "There's Georgie—we're going to make a doctor of him. Our best friend is a doctor. We'll make a lawyer out of Johnnie. There's been a lawyer in the family for generations. Jimmie is to be a minister. We thought it was about time we had one of them in the family."

"What about Helen?" we asked.

"Oh, Helen—why, she's going to marry and have a nice home of her own."

Any student of Human Analysis would have recognized that of this quartet of children not one was being directed into the right vocation. He would have seen that the square-jawed Muscular Jimmie would make a much better lawyer than a minister; that little Johnnie should be a teacher or a lecturer; that fat Georgie was born for business instead of medicine; and that Helen had more ability than any of her brothers.

The Woman Misfit

¶ Too many parents have gone on the theory that belonging to the female sex was a sure indication of home-making, mothering, housekeeping abilities.

The commercial world is full of women who have starved, wasted and shriveled their lives away behind counters, desks and typewriters when they were meant for motherhood and wifehood.

The homes of the land are also full of women who, with the brains and effort they have given to scrubbing, washing and cooking, could have become "captains of industry."

The Sealed Parcel

¶ If you are a parent don't allow yourself to set your heart on any particular line of work for your children. Your child is a sealed parcel and only his own tendencies, as they appear during youth, can tell what that parcel really contains.

Allow these traits to unfold naturally, normally and freely. Don't complicate your own problem by trying to advise him too soon. Don't praise certain professions. Children are intensely suggestible. The knowledge that father and mother consider a certain profession especially desirable oftentimes influences a child to waste time working toward it when he has no real ability for it. Every hour of youth is precious and this wastage is unspeakably expensive.

On the other hand, do not attempt to prejudice your child against any profession. Don't let him think, for instance, that you consider overalls a badge of inferiority, or a white collar the mark of superiority. Many a man in blue denim today could buy and sell the collar-and-cuff friends of his earlier years. The size of a man's laundry bill is no criterion of his income.

Popular Misconceptions

¶ Other parents make the equally foolish mistake of showing their dislike of certain professions. Not long ago we heard a father say in the presence of his large family, "I don't want any of my boys to be lawyers. Lawyers are all liars. Ministers are worse;