Being An Account of How One Business Man Made the Little Things Count. Do You?
My business (rubber goods) was in a bad way. Somehow I couldn't seem to make it return enough to pay my income tax with. My wife and I were frankly upset.
At last one morning she came to me and said: "Fred, the baby will soon be seven months old and will have to have some sort of vocational training. What are we to do?"
That night was the bluest night I have ever spent. I thought that the end had come. Then, suddenly, the thought struck me: "Why not try character-selling?"
This may sound foolish to you. That is because it is foolish. But it did the trick.
I began to sell my personality. Every man that came into my store I took aside and showed him different moods. First, I would tell him a funny story, to prove to him that I was more than a mere business automaton. Then I would relate a pathetic incident I had seen on the street a week or two ago. This disclosed my heart. Then I did a fragment of a bare-foot dance and sketched a caricature of Lloyd George, to let him see that I was a man of the world. After this, I was ready to sell him what he came in for, and he would go away carrying a very definite impression of my personal characteristics--and some of my goods, in a bundle.
A week of selling rubber-goods in this manner, and I was on the vaudeville stage, earning $250 a week. How much do _you_ earn?
Some day, if you ever happen to be in Little Falls, turn to your right and you will see a prosperous-looking establishment run by Ira S. Whip, known throughout Little Falls as the newt king. Starting in with practically nothing but two congenial newts, Mr. Whip has, in the past ten years, raised no less than 4,000 of these little lizard-like animals, all of which had to be thrown away, as there is practically no market for pet newts except for incidental rôles in gold-fish tanks. But Mr. Whip did what he set out to do, and that counts for a lot in this life. Can you say as much?
Lorrie Wetmore sat disconsolately in the fountain in Madison Square Park. He was lonely. He was a failure.... Yes, he was. Don't contradict me. He was a terrible failure. And, as I said before, early in this story, he was lonely.