If you like people, if you seek contact with them rather than hiding yourself in a corner, if you study your fellow men sympathetically, if you try consistently to contribute something to their success and happiness, if you are reasonably generous with your thoughts and your time, if you have a partial reserve with everyone but a seeming reserve with no one, if you work to be interesting rather than spend to be a good fellow, you will get along with your superiors, your subordinates, your orderly, your roommate and the human race. It is easy enough to chart a course for the individual who is wise enough to make human relationships his main concern. But getting the knack of it is sufficiently more difficult that it is safe to say more talk has been devoted to this subject than to any other topic of conversation since Noah quit the Ark. From Confucius down to Emily Post, greater and lesser minds have worked at gentling the human race. By the scores of thousands, precepts and platitudes have been written for the guidance of personal conduct. The odd part of it is that despite all of this labor, most of the frictions in modern society arise from the individual's feeling of inferiority, his false pride, his vanity, his unwillingness to yield space to any other man, and his consequent urge to throw his own weight around. Goethe said that the quality which best enables a man to renew his own life, in his relation to others, is that he will become capable of renouncing particular things at the right moment in order warmly to embrace something new in the next. That is earthy advice for any member of the officer corps. For who is regarded as the strong man in the service--the individual who fights with tooth and nail to hold to a particular post or privilege? Not at all! Full respect is given only to him who at all times is willing to yield his space to a worthy successor, because of an ingrained confidence that he can succeed as greatly in some other sphere. For a fresh start in this study of getting along with people, we could not do better than quote what was published some time ago in the United States Coast Guard Magazine. Under the title "_Thirteen Mistakes_," the coast guardsmen raised their warning flares above the 13 pitfalls. It is a mistake: 1. To attempt to set up your own standard of right and wrong. 2. To try to measure the enjoyment of others by your own. 3. To expect uniformity of opinions in the world. 4. To fail to make allowance for inexperience. 5. To endeavor to mold all dispositions alike. 6. Not to yield on unimportant trifles. 7. To look for perfection in our own actions. 8. To worry ourselves and others about what can't be remedied. 9. Not to help everybody wherever, however, whenever we can. 10. To consider impossible what we cannot ourselves perform. 11. To believe only what our finite minds can grasp. 12. Not to make allowances for the weakness of others.