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Long after he had established himself as one of America’s leading
businessmen, as well as history’s greatest steelmaker, Andrew Carnegie
reflected that “We all live in the richest and freest country in the
world, where no man is limited except by his own mental attitude and his
own desires.”
At the time—a decade or so before the First World War—Carnegie’s
attitude was nearly universal. In America, anyone could carve out a
better life for himself if he worked hard. Today, Carnegie’s attitude is
considered almost quaint.
Opportunity? Why, opportunity is a rare thing, and those Americans
not lucky enough to be born with it should be given it at other people’s
expense. Whether it’s an education, a job, a house, or a grant,
opportunity is seen as something that others have to provide you
with. If you don’t succeed, it’s not because you failed to capitalize
on plentiful opportunities. It’s because you just weren’t one of the
fortunate few.
Carnegie would have bristled. “My men began in exactly the same
station in life which I occupied a few years ago,” Carnegie once
observed. “They have had the same privileges for personal advancement
that I had.”
It’s hard to imagine anyone beginning in a lower station. Carnegie
had arrived in America, a twelve-year-old Scottish immigrant. With
barely a penny to his family’s name, and with only five years of formal
education behind him (“Lack of schooling is no valid excuse for failure;
neither is an exhaustive schooling a guarantee of success,” he would
later say), young Andrew went to work at a textile mill, twelve hours a
day, for $1.20 a week.
It wasn’t much, but it was enough. The job gave Carnegie the
opportunity to learn and to demonstrate his dedication to hard work.
Very quickly he moved on and up: less than a year later he had secured a
position at O’Reilly’s Telegraph Company, starting at more than twice
what he had earned at the mill.
It was there that Carnegie’s rise began in earnest—not through some
“lucky break” but through the habit Carnegie would later refer to as
“going the extra mile.” Carnegie, still working incredibly long days,
began going to work early in order to learn how to send and receive
telegraph messages. He worked so hard at it that he could eventually
take telegraph messages by ear rather than by transcribing the Morse
code—a feat only two other people in America could perform.
That ability helped him gain the notice of Thomas A. Scott, a superintendent for the Pennsylvania
Railroad. Scott hired the young man, still a teenager, to be his
secretary and telegrapher at $35 a month—a tidy sum at the time and a
far cry from $1.20 a week.
Carnegie soon became indispensable to Scott. The real turning point
came not too long after he was hired. Carnegie was in the office alone
one day when news came of a wreck on the Eastern Division. Rail traffic
started backing up; instead of shrugging his shoulders and saying “not
my job, not my problem,” Carnegie chose to take action. “Mr. Scott was
not to be found,” he would later write. “Finally, I could not resist the
temptation to plunge in, take the responsibility, give ‘train orders’
and set matters going.”
It was no easy decision. Although Carnegie had watched Scott deal
with similar problems in the past, lives and property were at stake. “I
knew it was dismissal, disgrace, perhaps criminal punishment for me if I
erred. On the other hand, I could bring in the wearied freight-train
men who had lain out all night. I could set everything in motion. I knew
I could.” And he did, forging Scott’s signature and issuing orders
until rail traffic was back to normal.
Thanks to Carnegie’s determination and hard-won abilities, Scott
started opening doors for the young man and teaching him the skills he
would need to succeed in business. Later, he would help Carnegie make
his first investment, launching Andrew’s career as a capitalist in
earnest. By 1860, at the age of 25, Carnegie was making almost
$50,000—more than enough to count himself as wealthy.
“Opportunity” means a set of circumstances in which a course of
successful action is possible. Opportunity is abundant. What’s scarce is
the willingness to take advantage of it. To the extent a country is
free, a person with no money, no education, no connections can rise as
far as his ability and ambition will take him. But developing ability
and ambition is a challenging, uncomfortable, even scary process.
Relatively few people in any era choose to do it, and as a result, few
capitalize on life’s unlimited opportunities.
In Carnegie’s words, a “man may be born in poverty, but he does not
have to go through life in poverty. He may be illiterate but he does not
have to remain so. But . . . no amount of opportunity will benefit the
man who neglects or refuses to take possession of his own mind power and
use it for his own personal advancement.”
That was what led Carnegie to success: the constant use of his mind
in pursuit of a better life. Whether he was learning a new skill, taking
decisive action in an emergency, or forging the most innovative and
efficient steelmaking company in the world, the commitment to following
the judgment of his reasoning mind was the only opportunity he needed.
That—the willingness to think—is something no one else can give you.
Source: http://www.forbes.com
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