You can see the "think poor" and "think rich" ideas at work in children. Some boys of the same age want roller skates and others want bicycles. They may want them as aids to playing with friends, aids to making money, or merely because other children have them and they want to "belong." Both may have to work for their equipment. The boy who wants roller skates so it will be easier for him to deliver packages is thinking in a very different way from the boy who wants a bike so he can deliver packages to more people in the same time. One boy is thinking in a limited way, only about himself; the other is "thinking rich," about an expanding world and opportunities to be of service to more people.
The T. Eaton Company of Toronto, one of Canada's great stores, was founded nearly a hundred years ago by one Timothy Eaton, a "think rich" immigrant from Ireland. Young Tim got his merchandising training in the Old Country by getting up at 5 a.m. to light the candles and the stove in the small, gloomy store where he was supposed to work his way up to chief clerk in the course of a lifetime. At 10 p.m., and later on Saturday nights, he could lock the store, blow out the candles, and have the rest of his time to himself. His employer was a man who didn't believe there were enough hours in the day in which to accomplish what had to be done, but he believed in using as many hours as he could.
Tim so thoroughly disagreed with his employer that he hiked himself off for Canada at his first opportunity, and in Toronto opened his own tiny store. But he was thinking rich. He was the first to use coal oil lamps to brighten up the interior" of the store, and the first to use "illuminating" gas, and the first with electricity. And while his competitors continued to stay open until the traditional hour of 10 p.m. to catch the last, late customer, Tim closed at eight, then seven, and finally six, in the meantime paying his ten-hour-a-day clerks what the 16-hour clerks of his rivals were getting. In well-lighted splendor, his well-rested clerks bustled around selling to well-satisfied customers who could see what they were getting and even see to read what was being weighed up on the scales. By thinking rich, by using everything he could get his hands on to increase service and efficiency, he was among the first of the great merchandisers to prove that it wasn't the number of hours in a day that increased sales, but how you used the hours.
Today, in spite of all of our labor-saving devices, we still hear the complaint of Eaton's first boss: "There isn't enough time for everything that has to be done." We are still looking for some magic time-stretcher, and all too often ignoring the time savers we have.
The System That Worked for Him Will Work for You
We still have the same number of hours he had, and on a man-to-man basis each of us can produce eight times as much in a 40-hour week as the best of his clerks could during a 60-hour week. We are better fed, housed, and clothed. Our nightly entertainment, at the flick of a television dial, provides a range of diversions, from grand opera and Shakespeare to slapstick, that Eaton couldn't experience in a lifetime. We have all of this - riches beyond his wildest dreams-and yet as many of us "think poor" today as did in his time. Why?
It is our old enemy, tradition, again. A few decades of progress can't change traditions made "impregnable". By centuries of inherited thought. During the slow centuries in which our dominant traditions were taking shape, our world-changers were a few conquerors, empire builders, philosophers, merchandising and banking princes, and a thin scattering of scientific geniuses. The rest of us were the millions of the great unwashed, unfed, and uneducated. The gulf between the leaders and the masses was so great that no effort was made to bridge it. Instead of trying to bring the people up to their level, the leaders said, "Be content with your lot." "Let well enough alone." "If you want to keep your head, don't stick your neck out." "A penny saved is a penny earned." Etc, etc.
And that kind of "thinking poor" is still with us even though we are now enlightened enough to know that' "thinking poor" is poor thinking. Let's look at some of those world leaders. Alexander the Great conquered the world knowing less about it than a present-day high school senior. The Rothschilds owned vast portions of the world knowing less about international finance than a good accountant. Any person in the United States has available to him through town, city, and state libraries more information than did all the world leaders prior to the 20th Century combined, and just as much as any world leader of today. As for our own industrial giants like Andrew Carnegie, Thomas Edison, John D. Rockefeller, Jim Hill, Henry Ford, and scores of others, they would, were they to return today, find themselves "educationally undesirable" in their own empires.
Compared to us, those men were poorly informed, and what information they had was often poorly organized, and even more often inaccurate. But they "thought rich," and rich thinking helps to create riches.
Here is another reason for "thinking rich": Though the advances of the last quarter of a century have been called "vast," "explosive," and "overwhelming," every survey by academic, commercial, and governmental agencies indicates that greater advances will be made during the next decade than during the previous quarter-of-a-century. Not only will this open new opportunities that didn't exist a few years ago, but it will create a great need for success-oriented people to match the accelerated rate of expansion. Those who get the leading jobs will be the ones who think rich enough to get them.
