Life Success

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There are, however, some people who cannot, unfortunately, rid themselves of a deep-rooted aversion to their present jobs, often despite the attainment of a fair measure of success.

 In order to achieve a full measure of success and happiness it would be wise for those unfortunate persons to consider a change to a more appealing vocation as soon as practicable. The ideal vocationally is, of course, for everyone to be engaged in work for which he is suited by talent, skill, temperament and training. This is the objective of our present-day vocational guidance agencies.

 This problem of vocational change, though serious, can be solved smoothly and happily without loss of prestige and financial security, if intelligently planned and executed. It is amazing what miracles can be wrought if serious thought and intelligent action are applied to the problems of life.

 I know, from personal experience, how very true this is. Change can be made successfully at any time of life, though it does naturally become more and more difficult with increasing age.

 I made my most important vocational change just three months short of my forty-seventh birthday, and despite my age this change turned out to be the wisest and most rewarding decision I have ever made. Briefly, my experience developed as follows.

 From early childhood I was always interested in selling something during my spare time — pictures, magazines, books, etcetera. Selling was fun!

 During the summer following graduation from college, I sold The People’s War Book and Atlas — priced at eight dollars and seventy-five cents — averaging a profit of $32 a day; and during my graduate-school days at Harvard, I enjoyed a brief but successful career in selling investment stocks.

My regular business career, however, started on January 2, 1924, at the home office of The Aetna Life Insurance Company at Hartford, Connecticut. After a year of training and successful selling — averaging over a million dollars in life insurance sales — I established the sales training department of the company. I wrote the first history of the Aetna Life, wrote its first correspondence course, established and conducted its first field training school in the company’s leading agencies throughout the country. The whole program was outstandingly successful.

 After addressing the company’s first General Agents’ Convention at The Homestead in October of that same year, I received and accepted many invitations to address meetings of Life Underwriter Associations all over the country. I enjoyed my work immensely, and a lifetime career at the home office seemed self-evident.

 In December of that first year, however, while in Philadelphia to address a meeting of the Life Underwriters Association, the company’s successful and widely respected general agent in that city, after complimenting me highly on my work, advised me to seek five to ten years of field experience as a general agent as soon as possible in order to insure a permanent career in home office work. Managerial experience, he emphasized, was essential for a successful career in the agency department of the home office.

 I thought his advice was good and immediately talked the matter over with my vice president, who agreed, and promised to give me an appointment when an agency was available.

 A year and a half later the opportunity came, and I was appointed general agent of the company’s Columbus, Ohio, agency, with the understanding that I was eventually to return to home office work. As the years rolled on, however, this understanding was forgotten, and I remained in general agency work for about sixteen years, five years for the Aetna Life, and eleven years at Toledo, Ohio, for New England Mutual Life Insurance Company of Boston, Massachusetts.

 During my early years as a general agent I never lost interest in my original plan to return to home office work.

And as time went on, the conviction grew stronger and stronger that I would never find real happiness in managerial work.

 It was early in 1940 that I reached the definite decision to make a change, either to home office work or to another vocation for which I was qualified by nature and experience and inclination. In order to make an intelligent decision to that end, I decided to have a scientific analysis made of my aptitudes and talents, and accordingly made an appointment for that purpose with the Boston branch of Stevens Institute of Technology Human Aptitudes Laboratory.

 This examination turned out to be one of the most important steps I have ever taken. The report, which I received a few weeks later, gave me scientific guidance of inestimable value in planning my future work. It revealed my natural talents and aptitudes, my shortcomings and weaknesses, and pointed out the type of work for which I was especially qualified. I knew, then, the direction in which I should steer my course, and I began immediately with great enthusiasm to plan for the future.

As the next step in building for the future I enrolled in the evening college of Toledo University for the ensuing academic year. There were a number of courses which I had felt the need of for many years; furthermore, I believed that the process of learning would in itself be stimulating.

 During that year in the evening college of Toledo University, I studied business law, statistics, and advertising. These courses were tremendously interesting, and have been invaluable to me ever since. Besides, I learned to my life-long benefit that nothing builds morale faster and better than a constant flow of useful facts and ideas into the human mind.

 Meanwhile, in order to move from a position of strength — and this is vital — I determined to achieve an outstanding success-record for the year 1941. I knew I could do it if I put my mind and heart and will into a final great effort to set up an attractive stage for my vocational change. To this end I decided to achieve 1941’s three-fold quota for my agency, set jointly by the home office and myself. It was a real challenge!

Immediately, I planned the year’s work thoughtfully and in detail. My blueprint of the job was broken down into daily objectives, and from the very beginning of 1941, day after day, until the very end of the year; the plan was carried out faithfully. I was fully confident that strict adherence to the daily schedule of work would achieve the goal in the end. And though the early months were certain to lag behind quota, I believed firmly that the cumu- lative effort would produce the desired results for the year as a whole. I was confident that the law of average would work for me, if I gave it a fair chance.

 My confidence was not in vain. When 1941 came to an end, I had achieved my objective in every category, and my agency led all company agencies in percentage of annual quotas attained. It was a proud record, and proved to me conclusively that at least for a time it is possible to achieve a superlative record even if one does dislike his work — if he will but apply himself to the task to the very best of his abilities.

 As a result of 1941’s fine record, and my previous experience as manager of sales training at the Aetna’s home office, I received a number of offers of home office jobs from other companies. Several of these positions were under serious consideration when suddenly at Christmastime 1942, out of a clear sky, I was invited to the home office of The National Underwriter Company, Cincinnati, Ohio — world’s largest insurance publishers — and offered the position of Associate Editor of the Diamond Life Bulletins, an eleven volume sales service for life underwriters.

I realized immediately that this was the one great opportunity I had been waiting and preparing for during all the previous years in the life insurance business. It seemed almost miraculous to me that everything I had done and experienced, including the courses I had taken in evening college the previous year, should now turn out to be so pertinent to the work I was about to undertake.

 I accepted the new position with great enthusiasm and complete dedication. Once again I felt the stimulating challenge of opportunity. And I was not disappointed.

 Change of vocation for me, though dangerously late, turned out to be the open sesame to success and happiness.

 It can be the same for you, too, if you will plan it carefully, prepare for it intelligently, and then enter into your new work with enthusiasm and complete dedication.

Today there are altogether too many people who expect success and happiness for a small price or nothing at all. So many seem to think that the “good life” is every American’s birthright. So few seem to understand that God meant the good things of life to be earned by the “sweat of your brow.” Most people today lack a deep-down desire to achieve a worthwhile life by their own efforts, through the full development and use of their own abilities. And so, glibly and thoughtlessly, they alibi their own mediocrity by blaming others, or circumstances, for lack of opportunity to reveal and utilize their talents. George Bernard Shaw, the immortal Irish playwright, put it this way: “People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don’t believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can’t find them, make them.”

 Others whine: “If only I liked my work, then I would be successful!” Well, that is self-deceit at its very worst. Only the self-indulgent fool can believe that work must be “play” to bring success. The lives of countless men and women bear witness to the truth that man can be master of his circumstances.

 On February 8, 1957, for example, Judge Simon Ross left the First District Court of Appeals in Cincinnati after almost twenty-eight years of distinguished service on the bench, confiding that he would rather have been an electrical engineer than a judge. “I never really enjoyed law practice,” he said. “As a judge, you’re not actually a participant in anything; you’re just a referee. I’ve always envied those men who are constructive, building and creating things. I always tried to be conscientious and do my best though.”

 Success is achieved by doing the best you can with “what you’ve got,” and how well the 73-year-old jurist — dean of Ohio’s thirty Appellate Court judges — succeeded was shown by a stack of letters from colleagues all over Ohio. They congratulated him on his long career and wished him well in retirement. One associate, Judge Arthur A. Doyle of Akron, wrote: “You’re the most respected judge in the state.”

Work is work! And there isn’t a vocation in the world that is entirely free of at least a few distasteful tasks. The judge must “referee.” The dairy farmer must clean his barn. The salesman must keep his records, and so on ad infinitum. The disagreeable must be taken along with the pleasant — that is part of living a realistic and rewarding life. And when you take the bad with the good, lo and behold, the work that seemed so tedious and uninspiring becomes endurable, often stimulating and satisfying.

 To make a go-of-it where you are — even if today you think your job is the most boring occupation in the world and unworthy of your talents — is the first and foremost challenge in the pursuit of a successful and a happy life.

 And then — if perchance you are in truth outrageously miscast — there will follow, as day follows night, undreamed-of opportunities to graduate into other and more enticing fields of enterprise.

 In further pursuance of this vital problem of job satisfaction, careful investigation revealed this inspiring fact, that the attainment of success in one’s work — assuming, of course, that it is honorable work — almost without exception means satisfaction with the job itself. Acknowledgement was well-nigh unanimous that success, even if only in a modest measure, dissipates most if not all serious gripes, which are usually nothing more or less than face-saving alibis for lack of commendable achievement.

 It is failure to achieve a reasonable measure of success that creates, in most instances, dislike for the work one is doing, and consequently so often ends in mediocrity, sometimes in utter failure.

 It is true, however, that work is easier and more satisfying if it is work for which one has a natural inclination. But the fact remains that you can succeed, at least for a while, in your present work, no matter how boring and distasteful it may be, if you will resolutely make up your mind to do it, pull yourself together mightily, buckle down to hard work, and utilize every one of your God-given talents to the fullest. Resolute action works miracles!

 During the terrible depression of the early thirties I saw many courageous men and women accept whatever jobs were available — no matter how little natural talent they seemed to have for the work, and often despite utter aversion and personal humiliation — in order to provide for the simplest needs of their loved ones, and to get a new start in life. I knew men who had been top executives — several of whom had lost fortunes in the stock market crash of 1929 —who came into the life insurance business in order to make a livelihood for their families. And though these men had never before sold anything and frankly admitted dislike of selling as a vocation, they studied and trained earnestly, worked day and night, and achieved commendable success in the life insurance business.

I saw artists dig ditches, and cultured women clean offices, during those difficult times, and they did their work gallantly and well.

 Better days with better opportunities came eventually to these people, as they always do come to those who are willing to do their very best and persevere under the most trying circumstances.