Last and final excerpt from an old leather-bound book from 1926 called “As A Man Doeth”, that belonged to my grandfather. It’s the collected Monday morning motivational writings of William Danforth, the founder and president of Ralston Purina, of animal feed fame, I found it digging through some stacks.

Do More than Is Required of You; Do Twice as Much

Here’s another Bruce Barton story. He is a perfectly fascinating fellow, and it pays to listen to him.

“I was traveling from Chicago to New York on the Twentieth Century Limited. We were due in the Grand Central Station at nine-forty, a nice leisurely hour, and three of us who were traveling together decided to make a comfortable morning of it. We got out of our berths at a quarter after eight, shaved and dressed, and half an hour later were making our way back to the dining car.

A door to one of the drawing rooms was open, and as we walked by we could hardly keep from looking in. The bed in the room had been made up long since; a table stood between the windows, and at the table, buried in work, was a man whose face the newspapers have made familiar to everyone. He had been Governor of New York, a justice of the Supreme Court, a candidate for the Presidency of the United States, and was at the time, practicing law and reputed to be earning more than a hundred thousand dollars a year.

My companions and I were young men; he was well along in middle life. We were poor and unknown; he was rich and famous. We were doing all that was required of us. We were up and dressed, and would be ready for business when the train pulled in at a little before ten. But this man, of whom nothing was actually required, was doing far more. I thought to myself as we passed on to our leisurely breakfast, ‘That explains him; now I understand Hughes’.”

This is a Monday morning thought which ought to carry through the whole week.

This is great advice for someone, especially early in their career. Develop a reputation for going above and beyond and you will be on everyone’s list to recruit or promote.

This is also one of my favorite interview questions. I am a big fan of “Behavioral Interviewing” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Job_interview#Behavioral_questions) – if it’s not in your arsenal already as an interviewer, it should be. Rather than ask people to theorize about how they’d respond to a hypothetical circumstance in the future, you ask them to relate how they tackled things in the past. It is amazing what kinds of information you get when you insist on a specific answer with real past behaviors (both fantastic answers that sell you on a candidate and awful answers that effectively end the interview).

“Tell me about the last time you went above and beyond what was required. Why motivated you to to do it? What did you learn?”

So, I’m down visiting my parents and helping out by doing a bunch of house cleaning, including rummaging through some old books (my favorite kind of cleaning). As I mentioned yesterday, digging through the piles I found an old leather-bound book from 1926 called “As A Man Doeth”, that belonged to my grandfather. It’s the collected Monday morning motivational writings of William Danforth, the founder and president of Ralston Purina, of animal feed fame. Here’s another fun note he wrote.

Along the magnificent semi-circular harbor of the Mediterranean Sea on the coast of Northern Algeria lies the picturesque little town of Bone. Nearby are some ruins of the ancient city of Hippone, where around 400 A. D. Saint Augustine lived and wrote his “Confessions” and his “City of God.” Some thirty years ago, a farmer was ploughing in the fields close by and his plow kept striking a stone. He decided to remove the stone and started to dig it out. But instead of a stone he found a marble column that dated back 1500 years and was part of an ancient Roman palace. Digging down still farther he discovered priceless mosaic floors of the Fourth Century. Then, his appetite whetted, he dug still deeper and found more mosaic floors of the first century. Still not content, he kept digging and unfolded huge stone piers that had once been a Phoenician embankment built about 800 B. C.

Here’s a discovery we all can make:

That stone or obstacle in our lives may have been put there by Providence to make us dig. Unheeded and unconquered it will worry us all the days of our lives. But if we go after it in a determined way, and dig it out, we will discover hidden wealth underneath.

So dig, Brother Purina Men, dig deep!

I just find it wonderful that a man making “Purina Horse Chow” tells stories about St Augustine and the Roman empire to inspire his workforce.

Curiosity is a powerful force. It’s one of the key traits I interview for when I’m recruiting. Curious people figure things out; incurious people don’t. More generally, I think it is far more important to interview for intrinsic personality traits than skills. Skills can be taught or self-taught. It’s very hard to teach curiosity or passion or work ethic or creativity.

So, I’m down visiting my parents who are ailing a little bit, and helping out by doing a bunch of house cleaning. In addition to the usual cleaning tasks, this also includes rummaging through some old piles of books that need to be put up. If you know me, you know that’s my kind of cleaning 8).

Digging through the piles and run across an old leather-bound book from 1926 called “As A Man Doeth”, that belonged to my grandfather. It’s the collected Monday morning motivational writings of William Danforth, the founder and president of Ralston Purina, of animal feed fame. I open the book to the first page, sneeze a few times from the dust, and encounter this:

Oh Texas!

“One Deputy Sheriff trailing you,

and another hid in the bushes in front of you,

Say! That’s Living!”

This was an exclamation of Texas, a bootlegger in Alice Brady’s play, “Zander the Great”. Texas was a bootlegger, but it wasn’t the profits that attracted him; it was the game.

Is business to you an adventure and a game? If not, check up; you are slipping. Our business, with its problems and its responsibilities, is to me the greatest game in the world. I wonder if in your week’s work there aren’t dangers trailing you, and obstacles hidden in the bushes at every turn. Lack of initiative, lack of self confidence, laziness, or inattention – sly, insidious foes ready to arrest your progress and deter you. But, in overcoming your obstacles, remember what Texas said,

“ Say! That’s Living!”.

 

If the man making dog food can feel this way about his work, I bet you can too. Life’s too short not to love what you do. If you don’t love what you’re doing, do something else.