Analyzing Character: The New Science of Judging Men; Misfits in Business, the Home and Social LifeBlackford, Katherine M. H. (Katherine Melvina Huntsinger)
Science
Analyzing Character: The New Science of Judging Men; Misfits in Business, the Home and Social Life
Blackford, Katherine M. H. (Katherine Melvina Huntsinger)
Characters and characteristics; Success
After this our young friend hired a little larger room, laid in a few
cheap dishes and cooking utensils and took two or three of his fellow
students to board. He did the marketing and the cooking and made them help
him wash the dishes. Two were engineering students and the third was a
student in the college of agriculture, all working their way through
college. A few cents saved was a memorable event in their lives. Our young
engineer furnished table board at $1.25 a week, and out of the $3.75 a
week paid him by his boarders was able to buy all of his own food as well
as theirs, and pay his room rent.
THE HARD FIGHT JUSTIFIED
After many troubles of this kind, G---- finished his engineering course
and secured a position in one of the largest corporations in the United
States at a salary of fifty dollars a month. At the time when he went to
work for the big corporation there were probably three or four hundred
other graduate engineers added to the staff. So keen was his mind along
mechanical and engineering lines, and so great were his natural aptitudes,
that within a few months his wages had been increased to $60 a month and
he had been given far more responsible work. Almost as soon as he took up
work with the corporation, he began making improvements in methods,
inventing machinery and other devices, and thinking out ways and means for
saving labor and making short cuts. Within a few weeks after his joining
the force he had invented a bit of apparatus which could be carried in the
coat pocket, and which took the place of a clumsy contrivance which
required a horse and wagon to carry it. In this way he saved the company
the price of horses, wagons, drivers, etc., on a great many operations.
From the very first the young man rose very much more rapidly than any of
the others who had entered the employ of the company at the time he did.
Soon he was occupying an executive position and directing the activities
of scores of men. To-day, only nine years after his leaving school, he
occupies one of the most important positions in the engineering department
of this great corporation, and while he does not have the title, performs
nearly all the duties of chief engineer.
The point of all this story is that this young man, while he had plenty of
mechanical ability and enjoyed machinery, was not fit to be a locomotive
fireman or stationary engine fireman. He had, in addition to his
mechanical sense and great skill in the use of his hands, a very keen,
wide-awake, energetic, ambitious, accurate intellectual equipment, which
did not find any adequate use in his work as a mechanic or fireman. Nor
could he ever have found expression for it unless he had taken the
initiative as a result of wise counsel and secured for himself the
necessary education and training. With all his ingenuity, he would always
have been more or less a slave to the machine to be operated unless he
had trained his mind to make him the master of thousands of machines and
of men.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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