Quotes from Andrew Carnegie.

A few months ago I read "The Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie", and my dad suggested that I write down some of my favorite quotes from the book. I thought it might be a good idea to post them on this blog.

• A sunny disposition is worth more than fortune. Young people should know that it is cultivated; that the mind like the body can be moved from the shade into sunshine. Laugh trouble away if possible, and one usually can if he be anything of a philosopher.
• You can choose to be happy; provided that self-reproach comes not come from your own wrong doing. That always remains. Hence the grand rule of life which Burns gives: “Thine own reproach alone do fear.”
• I have not attributed my success to what I have known or done myself, but to the faculty of knowing and choosing others who did know better than me.
• I tried to understand the more complicated piece of machinery: Man.
• A hero can be a strong guide if you ask yourself the question; what would he or she have done in this situation?
• A word, an accent, may affect the destiny not only of individuals, but of nations. He is a bold man who calls anything a trifle. The young should remember that upon trifles the best gifts of God often hang.
• “He asked me how soon I could come, and I said that I would come now if wanted.” And, looking back over the circumstance, I think that answer might well be pondered by young people.
• It is a great mistake not to seize the opportunity.
• Wise men are always looking out for clever boys.
• The fundamental advantage of a library is that it gives nothing for nothing. Youth must acquire knowledge themselves. There is no escape from this. 
• Whenever one learns to do anything he has never to wait long for an opportunity of putting his knowledge to use.
• Knowledge is sure to prove useful in one way or another.
• A few rules for speaking are: 1. Make yourself perfectly at home before your audience.2. Simply talk to them, not at them; never orate until you can’t help it.3. Just say what you feel like saying.4. Be yourself. It is trying to be other than one’s self that unmans one.5. Remember that your audience are people.
• I have never believed in being too hard on a young man, even if he does commit a dreadful mistake or two.
• Our experience was that young women were more to be relied upon than young men.
• If it came out all right, it was all right; if it came out all wrong, the responsibility was mine.
• The battle of life is already half won by the young man who is brought personally in contact with high officials.
• The great aim of every boy should be to do something beyond the sphere of his duties – something which attracts the attention of those over him.
• I felt I had gone too far, but having taken the step, I informed him of what I had done. I hid nothing.
• Light and certain punishment, when necessary, is most effective.
• It was only the truth that could make us free, and the truth, the whole truth, we should pursue.
• An investment: it gave me the first penny of revenue from capital – something I had not worked for with the sweat of my brow. “Eureka! Here is the goose that lays the golden eggs.”
• Even in my teens I was a scribbler for the press.
• The pen was getting to be a weapon with me.
• Our air castles are often within our grasp late in life, but by then they have lost their charm.
• Men at first argued about the constitutional rights. It made all the difference in the world when the flag was fired upon.
• Slight attention or a kind word to the humble often brings back rewards as great as it is unlooked for. No kind word is ever lost.
• His manners were perfect because they were natural. His attentions were not graduated; they were the same for all.
• If we truly care for others we need not be anxious about their feelings for us.
• I all our dealing we only used the best material and enough of it.
• We were our severest inspectors, and would build a safe structure or none at all.
• Instead of objecting to inspectors they should be welcomed to all establishments.
• A high standard of excellence is easily maintained, and men are educated in the effort to reach excellence.
• The surest foundation of a company is quality.
• If you want a contract, be on the spot when it is let. An opportunity might show.
• And if possible stay on hand until you can take the written and signed contract home in your pocket.
• Whatever is worth doing is worth doing well.
• I insisted upon such a system of accounting being introduced throughout our work, so that we would know what our costs where for every process and especially what each man was doing, who saved time and money, who wasted it, and who produced the best results. This is a key principle to having success in manufacturing.
• A man must necessarily occupy a narrow field who is at the beck and call of others. Even if he becomes president of a great corporation he is hardly his own master, unless he holds control of the stocks. The ablest presidents are hampered by the boards of directors and shareholders, who can know but little of the business.
• Those who can create something out of nothing have great cause of self-congratulation.
• Whatever I engage in I must push inordinately; therefore should I be careful to choose that life which will be the most elevating in its character.
• I have adhered to the rule never to purchase what I did not pay for, and never to sell what I did not own.
• Most troubles of humanity are imaginary and should be laughed out of court. It is folly to cross a bridge until you come to it. All is well till the stroke falls, and even then it is often less than anticipated. A wise man is the confirmed optimist.
• Many men can be trusted but a few need watching.
• It is essential to permanent success that a house should obtain a reputation for being governed by what is fair rather than what is merely legal.
• I believe the true road to preeminent success in any line is to make yourself master of that line.
• I have no faith in the policy of scattering one’s resources, and in my experience I have rarely if ever met a man who achieved pre-eminence in moneymaking who was interested in many concerns.
• The men who have succeeded are men who have chosen one line and stuck to it.
• There is no way of making a business successful than can vie with the policy of promoting those who render exceptional service.
• My experience has been that no partnership of new men gathered promiscuously from various fields can prove a good working organisation as at first constituted. Changes are required. 
• Upon no account could two men be in the same works with equal authority.
• An army with two commanders-in-chiefs, a ship with two captains, could not fare more disastrously than a company with two men in command upon the same ground, even though in two different departments. 
• When I wrote, I wrote for my friends.
• What one does easily one does well. 
• One vital lesson I learned was the necessity of owning raw materials and finishing the completed article ready for its purpose. It would not do to depend on others for anything essential to the company. 
• Here lies the advantage of a partnership over a corporation. The president of the latter would have had to consult a board of directors and wait several weeks and perhaps months for their decision. 
• We trod on sure grounds with our experts at as our guides.
• The main root of trouble is ignorance, not hostility.
• Anything can be done with men who have this feeling of loyalty with them. They only need to be treated fairly.
• By not opposing them directly, and instead using a counter stroke, I was able to get what I wanted while not leaving them an excuse to oppose me.
• “I resolved to stop accumulating and began the infinitely more serious and difficult task of wise distribution.”
• Money is a very powerful tool; and as most tools it can be used for good purposes or for bad purposes. The more money you have, the greater the effect of what you do.
• A man may have all the good intentions in the world but if he does not know how to use the tools he has he will end up doing more bad than good. A powerful fool with good intentions can be worse than a weak but cunning man with bad ones.
• Using money is easy; using it wisely is what is hard.
• After I chose what to do, God sent me opportunities to do so.
• True heroes think not of reward. They are inspired and think only of their fellows endangered; never of themselves.
• “What good am I doing in this world to deserve all these mercies?”
• We only hate those whom we do not know.
• There are times in most men’s lives that test whether they are dross or pure gold. It is the decision made in the crisis which proves the man.
• He that cannot reason is a fool. He that will not is a bigot. He that dare not is a slave.

A Heart at Peace and Success

By Patrick van Duyse,

   In "The Anatomy of Peace" the Arbinger institute implies two ways of being in the world towards a person; either we see him as an object/obstacle/tool, or we see him as an equal person. They described this as having a heart at peace (person) or a heart at war (object) towards someone. In this paper I will give three obvious points and will try to derive from each point why having a heart at peace and seeing others as people is essential to having success.

1.      Success is hard if you can't evaluate a situation clearly.

2.      Success is hard if people don't trust you.

3.      Success is hard if you are promoting what you don’t want.

   I will now dive into the first one of these:

1. Success is hard if you can't evaluate a situation clearly.

"People whose hearts are at war towards each others can't consider others' objections and challenges enough to be able to find a way through them." (The Anatomy of Peace)

   If you are arguing or negotiating with someone and you think of him as a tool or obstacle, will you be able to consider his point of view? Now, have you ever argued with someone who thinks he is wrong? I know that for me I haven’t. So if both of you  think you are right, neither of you are willing to consider the other side’s point of view and both your hearts are at war with each other, it might gets very similar to how The Anatomy of Peace described a similar situation:

"When they spoke, it was a kind of verbal wrestling match, each of them trying to anticipate the other's moves; searching for weaknesses they could then exploit to force the other into submission. With no actual mat into which to press the others flesh, these verbal matches always ended in a draw: each of them clamed hollow victory while living with ongoing defeat." 

   They describe going from a heart at peace to a heart at war as a self-betrayal; you get a feeling that you should do something, and then you betray it by not doing it. Because you didn’t do what you felt you should have done you feel the need to justify yourself. For me, my most common way of justifying myself is by blaming or diminishing my “opponent” into an object or by painting him as “bad” or “not as good as me”. So after I justified myself my view of the world became distorted and wrong. The very way I thought of others became a falsehood.

   If your view of the world is distorted and you can’t consider others’ point of view, can you evaluate a situation clearly? Can you make a good choice, or deal a good negotiation? Will you be successful? I know that for me, the answer to those questions are no.

2. Success is hard if people don’t trust you.

   Stephen M.R. Covey wrote in his book “The Speed of Trust” of 4 necessary cores to having people trust you: Integrity, Intent, Capability, and Experience. I will try to expound on the precept of Intent. The way I interpreted his meaning of intent was that, if people think you have a hidden agenda or motive, they will not trust you. He said something similar to this:

“If people don’t think you care about them, their feelings, their problems, and their difficulties then, they will not like you and they will probably not trust you either.”

   Does this remind you of anything? I know it made me think of hearts at war and hearts at peace. Think about it. Now tell me, could you really, genuinely care about someone, and still have a heart at war towards that person? Would it be genuine? Or would it be just an act? I think that if you really care about someone it means that you think of him as a person.

   If someone was treating me like an object, and didn’t care how his actions affected me, do you think I would trust him? Do you think I would want to interact with him? To put it logically, if you see someone as an object, then you won’t care about that person, and if you don’t care about him then he will generally tend to not trust you and to not like you. Now you might be thinking, why is the fact that others trust me so important to my success?

   Here I will introduce another principle from “The Speed of Trust”; the trust tax. The trust tax is really the cost of mistrust; it is often composed of lost time and lost money. An example that Stephen uses is airports. It is easy to see which airport is more trusting by comparing the security areas in the different airports. Less trust leads to longer security; this is obvious. Now we can say that the trust tax for airports with less trust is of lost time from passengers and lost money from the airport. This is only one example of many found in “The Speed of Trust”. It is easy to see, and it applies to almost all situations.

   I will wrap up this section with a few questions: If your heart is at war with someone will he trust you? Would it be easy for you be successful if people didn’t want to interact with you? What if those who did interact with you just didn’t trust you? I would say the answers to these questions are also a resounding no.

3. Success is hard if you are promoting what you don’t want.

  Now you may be thinking, how is having a heart at war related to promoting things that we don’t want?

Well look at it this way, if I am arguing with someone, and both our hearts are at war, would I be inviting him to agree with me? No. Chances are that I would be doing the opposite; who would want to agree with a guy who doesn’t care what you think. As I wrote earlier during this argument I would probably be being blind to my opponent’s point of view.

   Now if we go from an argument to a negotiation we can see that this would probably also apply in this type of a situation. If the other party sees that I have no consideration for them and that my only goal in this negotiation is to get as much as I can out of the deal, then they will probably not want to cooperate, and I will probably have to fight through every step of the deal. But if instead my heart was at peace towards the other party, they would recognise this and the deal may end up being better for both sides of the deal.

   The same applies to the argument situation again. If I had a heart at peace I would be open to learn and to see how he might be right. It would be hard for my friend to have any hard feelings towards me, and as long as I didn’t take a stance that is completely opposite to his he would probably become open too. In having a heart at war I was provoking him, and most people would fight back in such a situation. This probably helps you understand why we call them hearts at war or hearts at peace, since one invites quarrels the other invites peaceful agreements. I think that two people can have completely different opinions, but as long as they both keep their hearts at peace, and their minds open, the discussion can always stay on friendly terms, and who knows they might learn something new. So to recapitulate: If I have a heart a war towards someone I am inviting him to fight back at me and to hamper my progress. No one wants to agree with a jerk. So one last time, if my heart is at war, will I be successful?

   I have done my best to prove that treating others as people is important if not essential too having success in your personal life as much as in your business life. I would like to conclude by inviting you all to apply this as you see fit and to wish you luck on your trip on the road of life.

   If you would like some more information on having a heart at peace please read “The Anatomy of Peace” and “Leadership and Self-deception” both by the Arbinger Institute. If you want to know more on the importance of trust then I invite you to read “The Speed of Trust” by Stephen M.R. Covey. Thank you.

A fellow student,

Patrick van Duyse.