"It was rough, Mr. Haldane," he said, "but no rougher on me than the rest of the fellows. We used to say that if a job lasted ten weeks, it was permanent. When I finally did get a job in a furniture factory that looked good for life, I was so grateful I didn't even mind hating the job. I'd still be there if I hadn't been drafted."
World War II caught up Albert and his depression-conditioned friends, and tossed them into four more years of chaos. They had job-security, but life-security was lacking. Four years of that, from North Africa to Berlin under fire most of the way and then, in 1946, Albert was turned loose with millions of other survivors in what was the biggest, most fantastic scramble for jobs in history.
"It was any port in a storm," said Albert. "I got a job in this department store as an extra during the 1946 spring sale. When they asked me to stay on as a regular after the sale at thirty-five a week, I could hardly believe my ears."
During the next ten years he had risen to become floor manager at $95 a week, so he could not be considered a failure. In his own mind, however, he was what he called a "successful flop." The storm that had blown him into the port had long since blown over, but he was still there, afraid to venture out. "I'm doing what the company wants me to do," he said. "Not what I want to do." Was it wise, he wondered, to change courses in mid-stream?
"Certainly," I assured him. "What course do you have in mind?"
He didn't know. Furthermore, faced with the fact that a change was possible, he wasn't sure he wanted to make it. Cold doubt began to replace hopeful ambition. His memories of his years of insecurity, when even his life was in jeopardy, suddenly conspired to make his present job and pension plan look very good after all.
"I guess I was dreaming," he said finally. "At my age I can't afford to start over. Not in competition with all the young fellows coming out of college."
A perfect illustration of a man boxing himself in. But at least he had dared dream for a while, which was encouraging. I had another reason for being interested. Only the week before one of my clients had enthusiastically reported finding his course to success in a department store much like Albert's. This man, recently retired from the Army where he had achieved great success as a Post Exchange officer, claimed his new job- was "exciting, stimulating, something new every minute." His buoyant enjoyment of his "new life" was as positive as Albert's resigned acceptance of his fate was negative. I knew from experience that it was now or probably never- there can be no irrevocable "never" placed on any man's career-with Albert.
I suggested that he tell me something about himself, things he enjoyed doing-and I am betraying no professional secrets when I say that is the best way to let the client hear some firsthand information about himself. (Oh, yes, I know about those who talk about themselves all the time, but those are the ones who lack the ability to listen.) The story came out hesitantly and in piecemeal, and that's fine, as long as it comes out. Reassembled in chronological order he revealed to me, and himself, that his grandfather had been a gunsmith and his father an expert tool maker. In the way of achievements he recalled that at the age of four, coached by his grandfather, he had taken apart a Springfield rifle, cleaned and oiled it, and put it together again. And, oh yes, at the age of ten his father had raised him to a dollar a week because he worked so hard in the basement metal-working shop his father ran as a side-line.
Nothing more? "No. When the depression hit, my father lost his job, I had to quit business school where I was studying accounting, and you know the rest. Anything I could get to help out, and not a good job in the lot. No achievements there. Just defeats."
And he was still defeating himself. He realized that as soon as I did and said defensively, "But I'll tell you one thing, I've got a metal working shop in my basement-my wife says I spend more on it than I do on the family-where I can make anything from a model locomotive to more machine tools for my shop-" and once off on that subject, he became a man transformed. This was no resigned floor manager before me now but a creative machinist who exulted in his work.
"But what good does that do me?" he asked, his original defeatist attitude descending again.
I suggested he do some more thinking on the subject, and return the following week with a list of more achievements. He returned with ten. Only ten achievements after 43 years of living, or should I say surviving. Included among them was the time during the war when he got a disabled tank back into action by machining a part himself, a system he had developed for keeping inventory records of the merchandise on his floor, and- the source of his last raise-the designing of some display racks that presented his merchandise to better advantage in less space. "Nothing to amount to shucks," he said.
Yet what a reservoir of unused talents those achievements revealed. Mechanical aptitude, a keen awareness of the flow of materials, an insistence upon clean efficiency, and an appreciation of the value of inventory records, to name but a few.
"Have you ever thought about combining these achievements?" I asked.
Albert lost a lot of confidence in me then. "They aren't even related," he said. "How can you 'combine them?"
"Maybe they weren't related when you were a boy," I said, "but they are now. Have you ever heard of production controls-the business of getting the right parts to the right machines at the right time to keep the assembly line going? It isn't even a job any more-it's an art."
"So what chance does a floor manager have in a job like that?" he asked, still boxing himself in, but brightening considerably.
"Not as a floor manager, no," I agreed. (I was not forgetting my ex-Post Exchange officer who had now risen to floor manager and was going great guns. The point is that the job that was for him was not for Albert.) "But as a man who knows machines, who can keep the materials flowing, and is a demon for efficiency-well, figure it out for yourself."
The details will be filled in later, when you learn more about using your own achievements, but for the moment I'll assure you that Albert is the best production control manager, at twice his floor manager's salary, his machine-tool company has ever had.
In ranging through your achievements, sort of trying them on for size for the first time, you will find yourself saying, "Oh, no, not that one. I felt good about it at the time, but now I realize it was really pretty small stuff." When you do that, evaluating a previous experience in the light of what you know now, you are boxing yourself in. Each achievement must stand on its own in terms of what it meant to you at the time. This calls for recreating the period in which the event took place, and then looking at it in as much detail as is possible through the eyes of the person that was you at the time.
When Albert Wilkins first mentioned as an achievement his machining of a part that restored a tank to action during World War II he was inclined to minimize it. It was a small part linking two treads together, and compared to the work he was doing now in his basement shop, it was crude to the point of being childish. Then he began living that day over again.
It began with a dawn, strafing attack, with the German planes coming in low over the hedgerows. One lucky shot through the treads, and a tank was crippled. In a demolished French garage he found an old engine lathe, but there was no electricity to power it. To turn the ancient belt-and-pulley system he had to recruit manpower, and then, jerkily, proceed to turn out the link. By the time he had relived that experience, smelling again the reek of the high explosives that had demolished the garage, and hearing again the blue language of the soldiers who blistered their hands turning his lathe, he could see that his achievement was not to be judged by the size of the .part he had made, but its importance, and the resourcefulness he had used in getting it made.
In going through your achievements, don't hesitate to use those that are freshest in your memory, but don't stop there. Go back as far as memory permits. Einstein's interest in magnetism, which in turn led to his discovery of the theory of relativity, was revealed at the age of four. In like manner Indira Gandhi, the great political leader in India, lined up her dolls as a captive audience when she made her first speeches at the same tender age.
No period of your life should be neglected in your search for your achievements, nor should any one period be over-emphasized. When tradition says that the child is father of the man, it is stating a half-truth only. For centuries the boy who showed signs of becoming a good farmer-having little opportunity to show signs of becoming anything else-usually ended up as a good farmer, and so on through the other trades to which boys were apprenticed early in life. Then the boy was indeed the father of the man, and the belief was strong that a man's career was "settled for life" before he was 21. There was a saying to describe men who shifted about, hunting for something more congenial: "A jack-of-all-trades, and master of none."
The major break with that tradition arrived after World War I, announced by, of all things, a popular ditty that went: "How you gonna keep 'em down on the farm, after they've seen Paree?" Nor were farm boys the only ones influenced by that war. Men taken from all walks of life were exposed to influences they had never anticipated, and gone forever was the theory that the child had sired his own career and was stuck with it.
A theory had been seriously challenged for the first time, but nothing constructive had been offered to take its place. What of the child whose achievements promised to sire a highly successful career? For instance, one of my clients listed as his first achievement the fact that at seven he had stayed in the saddle of a run-away horse. No one can say how many children, confronted with a like emergency, clung to their saddle's like leeches rather than take a header, but we can be sure most of them were more terrified than thrilled. This man, now a successful breeder of Arabian horses, could never get the enjoyment of that wild ride out of his mind. Always after that he had longed to be with horses, raising them and breaking them in himself. Of course he had other achievements that have aided him in becoming a successful horse breeder, but this we can state with finality: If he hadn't thrilled to his first achievement, if, instead, he had found horses to be terrifying creatures, he would not be in his present business today.
