Dollars and Sense | Page 2

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 in the drawer, and resorts to extreme measures, trying to beat the races, or to win money by gambling on stocks or grain.
One day he finds he is in a dickens of a fix. He sees no way out of it. He takes more money and skips out, only to be caught later on and made to suffer, and all this because he could not say No to temptation.
Learn to say No. Set your