George Horace Lorimer - Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son

• No hay nada como un poquito de oro en la etiqueta para que la gente lo quiera.

Real buyers ain’t interested in much besides your goods and your prices.

Never run down your competitor’s brand to them, and never let them run down yours.

Don’t get on your knees for business, but don’t hold your nose so high in the air that an order can travel under it without your seeing it.

You’ll meet a good many people on the road that you won’t like, but the house needs their business.

You’ve got to get up every morning with determination if you’re going to go to bed with satisfaction.

I’ve seen a good many pulls in my time, but I never saw one strong enough to lift a man any higher than he could raise himself by his boot straps, or long enough to reach through the cashier’s window for more money than its owner earned. When a fellow brags that he has a pull, he’s a liar or his employer’s a fool. And when a fellow whines that he’s being held down, the truth is, as a general thing, that his boss can’t hold him up. He just picks a nice, soft spot, stretches out flat on his back, and yells that some heartless brute has knocked him down and is sitting on his chest. A good man is as full of bounce as a cat with a small boy and a bull terrier after him. When he’s thrown to the dog from the second-story window, he fixes while he’s sailing through the air to land right, and when the dog jumps for the spot where he hits, he isn’t there, but in the top of the tree across the street.

When a fellow knows his business, he doesn’t have to explain to people that he does. It isn’t what a man knows, but what he thinks he knows that he brags about. Big talk means little knowledge.

There’s a vast difference between having a carload of miscellaneous facts sloshing around loose in your head and getting all mixed up in transit, and carrying the same assortment properly boxed and crated for convenient handling and immediate delivery.

Tact is the knack of keeping quiet at the right time; of being so agreeable yourself that no one can be disagreeable to you; of making inferiority feel like equality. A tactful man can pull the stinger from a bee without getting stung.

A good salesman is like a good cook-he can create an appetite when the buyer isn’t hungry.

A man can’t do what he pleases in this world, because the higher he climbs the plainer people can see him.

There are two unpardonable sins in this world-success and failure. Those who succeed can’t forgive a fellow for being a failure, and those who fail can’t forgive him for being a success. If you do succeed, though, you will be too busy to bother very much about what the failures think.

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