Your own personality is the one big thing for you. Learn to appreciate its strong points and its weak ones, its possibilities for doing the right thing and the wrong, and its probable effect on others. Get it well in hand through practicing self-control, and make it work intelligently in accordance with your wishes. You will make mistakes--the best men do. The point is to have sense enough to recognize the mistake, to correct it and try to avoid repeating it. You watch yourself and you watch others, asking in each case if the best thing was done to get the desired result. There is generally one best thing to say or do, and at least a dozen wrong ones. The chances are largely in favor of using the wrong one, but by giving it thought you learn to pick the right until in the end it becomes quite instinctive for you to do so. We can sum it all up in just about this: that you begin to think seriously about yourself in your job, and determine that you are going to be natural, genuine, fair and self-controlled; that you realize that your instruments are human beings and that you have got to control them through _your own_ personality; and that therefore you determine to study your personality and your tools so you may use them intelligently. Observation and personal application of its results are the great things. No two leaders may act exactly alike, for each must use his own personality. One may be naturally cold, short-spoken and stern, the other suave and gentle, yet both be equally good leaders. But when you analyze their treatment of their men you will find that both observe the same fundamental principles of justice, fairness and regard for their individual development. And as the personalities of leaders must differ, so even more will those of the men. To control them you must have a working knowledge of human nature--for while all mankind respond more or less alike to well-known instincts and habits, there are times when you have to consider the individual. Here is where observation, experience and thinking about it prepare you to act intelligently. As a good horseman soon comes to handle a thoroughbred or a cold blood with equal assurance and success, so the leader of men gets to know instinctively what touch to give the reins or spurs in order to get the result he wants. And if in any given case you are not sure what to do, think what would make you respond cheerfully if you were in his place, and what would make you "buck." Let this decide what you will do. It will generally be the right thing, for at bottom we are all pretty much the same.