Chapter XIV: Calm (3)

The fate of the successful who hold on long after they have amassed a great, or at least an adequate, fortune, is written broad across the face of financial history. The young man who has arrived has formed the habit and acquired the technique of business. The habit has become part of his being. How hard it is to give it up! His technique has become almost universally successful. If he has made L50,000 by it, why not go on and make half a million; if he has made a million, why not go on and make three? All that you have to do, says the subtle tempter, is to reproduce the process of success indefinitely. The riches and the powers of the world are to be had in increasing abundance by the mere exercise of qualities which, though they have been painfully acquired, have now become the very habit of pleasure. How dull life would seem if the process of making money was abandoned; how impossible for a man of ripe experience to fail where the mere stripling had succeeded? The temptation is subtle, but the logic is wrong. Success is not a process which can reproduce itself indefinitely in the same field. The dominant mind loses its elasticity: it fails to appreciate real values under changed conditions. Victory has become to it not so much a struggle as a habit. Then follows the decline. The judgment begins to waver or go astray out of a kind of self-worship, which makes the satisfaction of self, and not the realisation of what is possible, the dominant object in every transaction. There will be plenty of money to back this delusion for a time, and plenty of flatterers and sycophants to play up to and encourage the delusion. The history of Napoleon has not been written in vain. Here we see a first-class intellect going through this process of mental corruption, which leads from overwhelming success in early youth, to absolute disaster in middle-age. The only hope for the Napoleon of Finance is to retire before his delusions overtake him.

But what is the man who retires early from business to do? Some form of activity must fill the void. The answer to the question is to be found in a change of occupation. To some, recreation, and the pursuit of some art or science or study may bring satisfaction, but these will be the exceptions. Some kind of public service will beckon to the majority. And it is natural that this should be the case. Politics, journalism, the management of Commissions or charitable organisations, all require much the same kind of aptitudes and draw on the same kind of experiences which are acquired by the successful man of affairs. The difference is that they are not so arduous, because they are rarely a matter of life and death to any man--and certainly can never be so to a man with an assured income.

On the other hand, from the point of view of society, it is a great advantage to a nation that it should have at its disposal the services of men of this kind of capacity and experience. What public life needs above all things is the presence in it of men who have a knowledge of reality. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the landowning classes supplied this kind of direction to the State as the fruit of their leisure, and, despite some narrowness and selfishness, they undoubtedly did their work well. But they were disappearing as a class before the war, and the war has practically destroyed them. Nor are the world-wide industrial, commercial, and economic problems of the twentieth century particularly suitable to their form of intellect. The policy of Great Britain of to-day ought to be founded on a knowledge both of markets and production. It is here that the retired man of affairs can help. Simply to go on making money after all personal need for it has passed is, therefore, a form of selfishness, and, in consequence, will not bring happiness, and in the ultimate calculation that life can hardly be called successful which is not happy.

My final message is one of hope to youth. Dare all, yet keep a sense of proportion. Deny yourself all, and yet do not be a prig. Hope all, without arrogance, and you will achieve all without losing the capacity for moderation. Then the Temple of Success will assuredly be open to you, and you will pass from it into the inner shrine of happiness.

_Printed by Hazell, Watson & Viney, Ld., London and Aylesbury._

End of Project Gutenberg's Success (Second Edition), by Max Aitken Beaverbrook