But comparisons are irrelevant and I am not willing to back down from my good opinion of American human nature in business and admit that men who prosper by making people want telephones, or things they have not wanted, are the business superiors of men who prosper by just piling up on people more and more and better--things they want already. The superior business man is the man who has a superior knowledge of himself, who searches out and uses the gift he is born with in himself and who gets other people to use theirs. Because it happens that I am an inventor, or what is called an artist, and because though I cannot remember, without the slightest doubt, I began, to advertise that I was here, or about to be here, before I was born, and because I would be bored to death handing out to people things I know they want, or presenting to people truths they merely believe already, it would be shallow for me to say that the men in American business who do not make people want things, and who just heap up on them what they want, are not successful men, are not equally important, equally essential to the state and are not doing for themselves and others just what the country, if it was a wise country and was around asking people to do things, would ask them to do. On the other hand, I believe that in the present new tragic economic crisis with which all kinds of business men, whatever they are like, are being brought sharply face to face at a time when new brain tracks in business are especially called for--a time when practically millions of people have got to have them and use them whether they want to or not, I have thought it would be to the point to consider in the chapters that follow, what new brain tracks are like, how they work, and what people who have been accustomed not to have new brain tracks or to find them awkward, can do to get them and to make them work. BOOK III TECHNIQUE FOR A NATION'S GETTING ITS WAY I BIG IN LITTLE A nation, in order to be a safe nation for itself, or safe for other nations in this world, must have a technique for getting and for getting a world to want it to get--its own way. I am interested in a technique for a nation's getting its way and deserving to get its way because I want to get mine, and because being human and having quite a good deal of human nature taken out of the same stuff--out of the same mixed hot and cold ingredients as other people's, I have quite naturally come to think that what works for me, if I cut down to the quick and am honest with myself, in getting what I want, will probably, with proper shadings, of course, work for anybody. I have thought I would see if I could not work out in this book, a technique which could be used modestly by one man, tried out in miniature as it were--a technique for getting and deserving to get one's own way.