It might sound familiar to you, especially if you've read the Wall Street Journal's story of the Two Young Men. Not surprising, really, since Barton wrote the original that was based upon: The story of two young men who returned from the war. (I'll put that up sometime).
As with all Bruce Barton articles I've published, this was written in the 1920s.
Here's the article:
A man named Brown and a man named Black graduated from high school and entered business in New York at the same time. Both made rapid progress. At twenty five each of them was drawing $2,500 a year.
"Coming men," said their friends."If they are so far along at twenty-five, where will they be at fifty?"
Black went on.
At fifty he is president of his company, with an income of $25,000 a year.
But something happened to Brown.
He never fulfilled the large promise of his youth: at fifty he had hardly advanced beyond his thirty mark.
What was it that happened to these two men, of equal education and so far as the world could judge equal ability?
I will tell you.
Brown became satisfied.
He ceased to study: which means that he ceased to grow.
Black has told me that when he reached $5,000 a year he said to himself: "I have made a good start. Nothing can stop me if I keep my health and keep growing. I must study, study, study: I must be the best informed man on our business in the United States."
There is the difference. One stayed in school: one did not.
The position you attain before you are twenty-five years old is of no particular credit to you. You gained that simply on the education your parents gave you education that cost you no sacrifice.
But the progress you make in the world after twenty-five that is progress that you must make by educating yourself. It will be in proportion to the amount of study you give to your work in excess of the amount the other man gives.
Analyze any successful man and you will find these three great facts:
He had an aim:
Lord Campbell wrote to his father, as an excuse for not coming home over the holidays: "To have any chance of success, I must be more steady than other men. I must be in chambers when they are at the theater: I must study when they are asleep: I must, above all, remain in town when they are in the country."
He worked:
"I have worked," said Daniel Webster," for more than twelve hours a day for fifty years."
He studied:
Vice-President Henry Wilson was born in the direst poverty.Good question.
"Want sat by my cradle," he says. "I know what it is to ask my mother for bread when she had none to give. I left home when ten years of age, and served an apprenticeship of eleven years, receiving one month's schooling each year, and at the end of eleven years of hard work a yoke of oxen and six sheep, which brought me $84."
Yet in those eleven years of grueling labor he found time to read and study more than one hundred books.
Really big men check themselves up each autumn, at the beginning of a new business year.
"This year," they say, "I am going to master one new subject. I am going to pursue such and such studies, which will increase my ability and earning power."
The bigger they are, the longer they keep themselves in school. Gladstone took up a new language after he had passed seventy.
Have you left school?
As a matter of fact, did you grow mentally last year at all? What definite subject are you planning to devote your evenings to this year?
"As a rule," said Disraeli, "the most successful man in life is the man who has the most information."
How much will you increase your stock of useful information in the next business year?
If you want to increase your stock of useful information... the type that could bring loads more moola into your business... click here and check out what Drayton Bird has to offer.
I did that in 2009. And I haven't looked back since.
Best,
Rezbi
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www.commonsensedirectmarketing.com
