finance that breaks up service because it looks to the immediate dollar.
If the first consideration is to earn a certain amount of money, then,
unless by some stroke of luck matters are going especially well and
there is a surplus over for service so that the operating men may have a
chance, future business has to be sacrificed for the dollar of to-day.

And also I noticed a tendency among many men in business to feel that
their lot was hard--they worked against a day when they might retire and
live on an income--get out of the strife. Life to them was a battle to
be ended as soon as possible. That was another point I could not
understand, for as I reasoned, life is not a battle except with our own
tendency to sag with the downpull of "getting settled." If to petrify is
success all one has to do is to humour the lazy side of the mind but if
to grow is success, then one must wake up anew every morning and keep
awake all day. I saw great businesses become but the ghost of a name
because someone thought they could be managed just as they were always
managed, and though the management may have been most excellent in its
day, its excellence consisted in its alertness to its day, and not in
slavish following of its yesterdays. Life, as I see it, is not a
location, but a journey. Even the man who most feels himself "settled"
is not settled--he is probably sagging back. Everything is in flux, and
was meant to be. Life flows. We may live at the same number of the
street, but it is never the same man who lives there.

And out of the delusion that life is a battle that may be lost by a
false move grows, I have noticed, a great love for regularity. Men fall
into the half-alive habit. Seldom does the cobbler take up with the
new-fangled way of soling shoes, and seldom does the artisan willingly
take up with new methods in his trade. Habit conduces to a certain
inertia, and any disturbance of it affects the mind like trouble. It