Inventory, Egotism

Evening Round-Up
by William Crosbie Hunter

(Page 7 of 10)

Inventory

A Necessary Practice to Bring Efficiency

Every year the business man goes over his stock, tools, fixtures, and accounts, and prepares a statement of assets and liabilities so as to get a fairly accurate understanding of his profit and loss.

If he didn't take this inventory his net worth would be guess work.

This inventory deals with money and things which are mixed more or less with the human element and affected more or less by conditions or trade, crops, competition, supply and demand.

The business man takes all these conditions into consideration in preparing for the coming year. He red flags the mistakes and green flags the good plans.

The business man should carry the inventory further. Every month or so he should take a careful inventory of himself, putting down his assets of health, initiative, patience, ability to work, smiles, honesty, sincerity, and the like. So also he must put down in the debit side the pull backs, hindrances and other business killers in the list of liabilities. These items are smoothness, untruth, unfairness, grouchiness, impatience, worry, ill health, gloom, meanness, broken word, unfulfilled promises and the like.

In making up the inventory pay particular attention to your habits: smoking, drinking, over-eating, useless display, useless social functions and other useless things that pull on your nerves and your pocket book.

Then check up department A, which is your family. How have you dealt with your family and children?

Department B is friends; how do you stand in your treatment of them?

Department C, all other persons. Did you lie to, cheat, steal from or defraud any one? How much cash profit did you make? How much less a man did the act make you?

Go over your self-respect account. Does it show profit or loss.

Check up your employees' account. What has your stewardship shown? Have you drawn the employees closer, or driven them further from you?

Analyze your spiritual account. Is your religious belief a sham or conviction? Do you sing on Sunday, "we shall know each other there," or do you make it a point to know and love your brother here, seven days a week.

Be fair in your inventory. Write down the facts in the two columns "good" and "bad," then go over the list and put a red danger flag on the bad. Keep the list until next inventory and see whether you have made a gain or loss in your net moral standing.

Don't read this and say, "a good idea." Do the thing literally.

Take a clean sheet of paper and write your personal assets and liabilities down in the two columns marked "good" and "bad."

If this inventory doesn't help then you may call me a false prophet.

I know the plan is a good one. I know it will help you. If it helps you, you will thank me. There can be no harm in trying, because it's a worth-while thing to test.

The business man who never takes inventory is likely to go bump some day.

Egotism

Those Who Decry It Most Have It Most

The ego is in us. It is good to have, but egotism needs the soft pedal when we speak or do things.

Many people are unconscious of their egotism yet they suggest between lines in their conversation, "even I who am superior to the herd would do this or that."

For instance, two persons were arguing about the merits of an inexpensive automobile. Parenthetically I may say one belonged to the Ford class and the other to the can't afford class. A can't afford snob came to the rescue of the Ford champion by saying, "that's a good car; why, I wouldn't mind owning one of them myself," and he beamed at the party with the consciousness of having settled the matter and removed the stigma from the Ford car.

The egotism crops out often when one shows a group picture in which he appears. He doesn't wait for you to find him; he pokes his arm over your shoulder and says, "that's me."

To each of us in the manner of things the I is the center of our world. We see things always through our I's.

If we wish to get along without friction we must remember that the other fellow has his I's also, and when we try to make him see things through our I's it makes trouble.

The hall mark of education, refinement and character in the broad sense is the ability to exclude the personal so far as possible from our conversation. And be big enough to grant to others their undoubted right to see and think from their own standpoint.

Argument develops egotism more than most any other thing will.

How often have you convinced another in an argument?

How often have you been convinced in an argument?

The world is big, there are millions of others in it and our job is a big one if we 'tend pretty well to our own knitting'.

Published by Hunter Service Kansas City, Mo., USA
Copyright 1915 by WM. C. Hunter