Dollars and Sense | Page 2

study these pages.
The writer has "been at it" for 32 years. He has had successes, failures,
joys, sorrows, and experienced the passions, the problems, the
difficulties you have experienced.
Since the age of ten years he has been upon his own resources and the
32 years since then have been years of study, working and playing, all
blended into a happy life.
The jolts, set backs, sorrows, worries, fears and discouragements are
the things which made him strong. They were experiences.
Smooth sailing doesn't bring out the stuff one is made of. It takes
shadows to make sunlight appreciated.
It takes reverses to make success. It takes hard knocks to polish you.
This is a book of experiences, not one of theories.
There is no attempt to make this a literary effort. All the writer hopes
for or cares to do is to truthfully state facts and experiences in plain
language. Study the thought rather than the expression.
It is Sense the writer wants to express rather than nonsense.
The writer is happy to say that the previous editions sold rapidly and
his friends not only read, but pass the word along.
The way to get happiness is to make others happy and the present of
one of these books to a friend or employe is a quick way to get
happiness.
Let us go along together and consider some of the problems which we
all have to face in our business as well as our social life. A volume
could be written on each chapter. But volumes are tiresome and herein
you will find net values which are the result of boiling down.
So now we have the groundwork of this book. We understand each
other. Simply take these truths for their evident worth. You won't agree

with the writer in all things, of course not. If, however, you get one
truth that will help you, then you have been repaid for reading this book
and the writer has been repaid for writing it.

Learn to Say No.
Look over the history of the thousands who have failed in business, and
you will find in nearly every instance the failure was due to an inability
to say No.
People come to us under various guises and ask us to do things which
in our better judgment we had rather not do, and too many have not the
backbone to say No.
We are led to invest in mining stocks and to embark in precarious
enterprises because we cannot say No.
We endorse notes and go security for our friends, not because we want
to but because we cannot say No.
There is a class of "good fellows" who are after us to join them in
physical pleasures, the foregoing of which would be better for us
physically, financially and mentally. Too many join them because they
cannot say No.
It is rarely a man goes off deliberately and gets drunk. The lone drunk
is usually the result of sorrow, sudden financial blow or a hard jolt of
some sort.
The man who gets drunk generally does so because he cannot say No
when bibulous friends press him to take a drink.
The ability to say No, to refrain from going with the crowd, to decline
to go down stream is, more than any other one thing in this life, the
mark of a strong character.
The one who can say No is going to succeed. Temporarily he may feel

ashamed; he may find it hard to withstand the jibes and jeers and
criticism of his friends for refusing to join them in things he should not
do.
Our old friend--the law of compensation--comes in here, for in
proportion as a man has the ability to say No, who has the courage of
his convictions, whose duty is to his body and his family before the
temptations that surround him, so in proportion as there are few such
individuals these individuals stand out as marked successes.
The manager of one of the biggest breweries in the United States has
not tasted liquor of any kind in the last twenty years. Surely this man
shows his courage, for his action in face of his occupation is a supreme
test of backbone and ability to say No.
The embezzler does not start out to do wrong. Some friends want to
borrow money or someone needs financial aid temporarily, and, either
at the request of friends or because the individual has something he
wishes to purchase and has not the patience to wait, he borrows from
the firm by means of "the ticket in the drawer" plan. He repeats the
operation frequently until his conscience is dulled, and he gets the habit.
Some day he wakes up to find he has several tickets