One thing it taught me was that I must not confuse the apparent with the real. Thereafter, whenever a man said anything to me, I remembered that there was a motive at the back of what he said, and that if I was going to understand other people I must understand the motive which impelled their action. For instance, I knew that, when a man came in to buy a saw from me, he had a reason for buying that saw. The more I knew of his reason for buying it, the more able I was to sell him just what he wanted. If a man put up a business proposition to me which looked good for me I remembered that it was not for me that he was doing it. I was not the reason which impelled him to give me a good deal. It was something which he eventually was going to get out of it himself. So I said to myself, "Why does he want to do this for me?" And if I could not find a good logical reason I left it alone until I could. "Dawson," said Charlie, after dinner--he had got to calling me Dawson outside of business--"Do you know why I have been working for you for the last few months?" "Why, no, unless you've just wanted to do something." "I never do anything just because I want to fill in some spare time," he smiled. "My business training has taught me that I cannot afford to make a lot of waste motions. I came to your store because I wanted a small-store experience." "We're not so small," I protested. "Well, let's say small compared to Bon Marche in Paris, or Selfridges in London, or Marshall Field in Chicago, or such young concerns. However, I think I know more about small-store conduct than I did before, now that I've had some experience. You see, I studied retail merchandising, but that was only half the battle, you know. All I learned there was no use whatever until I found whether I could actually apply it. "As you know," he continued, "I went to Detroit and studied the automobile business--not from the manufacturing end, but from the distribution end--because Fred Barlow and I had a hunch that there was a big future in automobile selling, if we could discover it." "I should think there was a big 'present,'" I remarked. "Yes, there is a big present for the manufacturers, and some few distributors make a fine thing out of it. But the distribution end struck us as being very inadequate." "Fancy you two young fellows deciding that the big bucks up in Detroit don't know how to sell automobiles!"