 Hello everyone this is Robert Gephardt and today I want to talk to you about a book. I said before I wouldn't be presenting or talking about any books unless they had to do with linguistics and languages or translations something along those lines or with business being an entrepreneur being a freelancer you know something to do with personal business. In other words stuff that you'll find useful and helpful. So this video and this book that I'm going to talk about falls under the latter section and the name of the book is let me get this right because it's kind of complicated uh it was letters from a self-made merchant to his son. This is a book that was written I think in 1902 and it's these are the letters written by John Graham head of the house of Graham and company pork packing company in Chicago and they're written to his son Pierpont who who is just starting off in the business and they're letters of advice and encouragement sometimes they're scolding him stuff like that and it's a collection of these letters and they're extremely interesting there's their stories their anecdotes their pieces of advice and even though it's written over a hundred years ago it's stuff that I mean you would see today and it's very useful it's very relevant I want to mention a couple of things he talks about and maybe also some quotes of uh that some of the quotes that I highlighted from there well let me start he has a story at a certain point about this guy called Jim a college graduate guy seems lazy and he's the guy that he hired to start working in the company start working uh down at the bottom and work his way up and so he talks about how he started him lugging boxes this guy Jim and then Jim said he hurt his shoulder so he came he came up with a system in which the boxes could kind of self-lug themselves and pulley system and something that basically guaranteed that Jim would be out of a job right and so then the the boss decided to make him a time keeper someone who back then you know the factories he had to keep time and make sure everything was running on time and so Jim was kind of lazy and didn't feel like doing it so he set up a timekeeping system so then the boss decided to make him write out letters and because he had to back then you have to write a lot of letters for correspondence and uh but then he said I don't know he got the equivalent of carpal tunnel or something so he made made the boss buy a typewriter so uh then he made uh Jim do door-to-door sales and then after a while of doing door-to-door sales Jim convinced him to set up a marketing campaign instead so he goes through all these examples and basically how Jim was so lazy but he kept saving the company money so the boss had to keep giving him raises and keep promoting him and he kept going ahead in the company by basically being too lazy to deal with what he was given to do and so it's interesting it's a different point of view and um and I find there are a lot of examples like this lessons you can learn that aren't the most obvious ones you would think of and that are a bit different even though it was written over a hundred years ago um and then there's some quotes that I like from throughout the book I'll mention a couple of the shorter ones here you can trust a woman's taste on everything except men and it's mighty lucky that she slips up there or we'd pretty nigh all be bachelors um here's some other quotes poverty never spoils a good man but prosperity often does um I want to say right here that the easiest way in the world to make enemies is to hire friends what else is there uh you'll find that education's about the only thing lying around loose in this world and it's about the only thing a fellow can have as much as he's willing to haul away everything else is screwed down tight and the screwdriver is lost I just like the way that's put um when I was a young fellow and out of place I always made it a rule to take the first job that offered and to use it for bait you can catch a minnow with a worm and a bass will take your minnow a good fat bass will tempt an otter and then you've got something worth skinning basically he's talking about leverage you know use whatever job you can take as leverage to get your next job and it ties along with what I've talked about using your early jobs to get ratings and referrals and uh and use those to get your next better jobs and bigger jobs and obviously he goes into this um this topic as well uh let's see what else we have here a mistake sprouts a lie when you cover it up tact is the lack of keeping quiet at the right time of being so agreeable yourself that no one can be disagreeable to you of making inferiority feel like equality oh here's an interesting one of course clothes don't make the man but they make all of him accept his hands and face during business hours and that's a pretty considerable area of the human animal uh be slow to hire and quick to fire um it's easier for a boss to do a thing himself than to tell someone twice to do it wearing is the one game in which if you guess right you don't get any satisfaction out of out of your smartness I like that one there are two unpardonable sins in this world success and failure those who succeed can't forgive a fellow a fellow for being a failure and those who fail can't forgive him for being a success if you do succeed though you'll be too busy to bother very much about what the failures think I like that one too uh never learn anything about your men except from themselves a good manager needs no detectives and the fellow who can't read human nature can't manage it there are two things you never want to pay any attention to abuse and flattery the first can't harm you and the second can't help you and there are other ones but I'm going to leave it at that for now anyway that's enough for now this is just an interesting book if you can I'm sure you can find it cheap again it's an old book and so you can probably find I found it on Kindle for cheap I'm pretty sure that's why I bought it I don't remember exactly someone must have recommended it to me I definitely recommend looking it up I'll leave a link to to it down below and it's definitely something I recommend and that I gave five stars to which I don't do very often but I found a lot of useful information in there that's pretty much it for now if you did find this useful please don't forget to click like or thumbs up because then I can tell what's useful and what isn't in terms of videos it's the best way for me to keep track also don't forget to subscribe if you want more videos like this in the future and otherwise that's pretty much it I'll see you in the next video thanks bye