A Living Philosophy: Character and Real Life©

In my reading this week I came across Marshall Field’s “Twelve Rules For Success.” Field knew something about the subject. He was one of the more successful businessmen of his time. He started the famous Marshall Field company in New York City. Here are his “Twelve Rules.”

1. The value of time.

2. The success of perseverance.

3. The pleasure of working.

4. The dignity of simplicity.

5. The worth of character.

6. The power of kindness.

7. The influence of example.

8. The obligation of duty.

9. The wisdom of economy.

10. The virtue of patience.

11. The improvement of talent.

12. The joy of originating.(1)

I like this list! There is a lot to think about and implement in one’s life that will help in making that life a success by most any definition of the word. 

But, I want to call your attention to something which I think is important. Note how many of the things in the list involve character traits:

Perseverance

Character

Kindness

Example

Duty

Thrift (economy)

Patience

Creativity (originating)

Eight of twelve, or three-fourths involve important character traits. The other four: valuing time; work; simplicity, and talent, grow out of elements of one’s character. However, Field’s list, as good as it is, is incomplete. There are other virtues such as those stressed in the Beatitudes in the Savior’s Sermon on the Mount, and in 2 Peter 1 which should be added to Field’s list.

Below are four quotations culled from a large file on the subject, that illuminate the importance of character in various ways; the last of which can be considered almost “prophetic”:

DAN COATES:

Character cannot be summoned at the moment of crisis if it has been squandered by years of compromise and rationalization. The only testing ground for the heroic is the mundane. The only preparation for that one profound decision which can change a life, or even a nation, is those hundreds of half-conscious, self-defining, seemingly insignificant decisions made in private. Habit is the daily battleground of character.(2)

BOOKER T. WASHINGTON:

... I am conscious of the fact that mere connection with what is known as a superior race will not permanently carry an individual forward unless he has individual worth, and mere connection with what is regarded as an inferior race will not finally hold an individual back if he possesses intrinsic, individual merit. Every persecuted individual and race should get much consolation out of the great human law, which is universal and eternal, that merit, no matter under what skin found, is in the long run, recognized and rewarded.(3)

THEODORE ROOSEVELT:

Every great nation owes to the men whose lives have formed part of its greatness not merely the material effect of what they did, not merely the laws they placed upon the statue books or the victories they won over armed foes, but also their immense but indefinable moral influence upon the national character. It is not only the country which these men helped to make and helped to save that is ours; we inherit also all that is best and highest in their characters and in their lives.(4)

JOHN LUTHER:

Good character is more to be praised than outstanding talent. Most talents are, to some extent, a gift.  Good character, by contrast, is not given to us. We have to build it piece by piece--by thought, choice, courage, and determination.(5)

SAMUEL SMILES:

[W]hen the time arrives in any country when wealth has so corrupted, or pleasure so depraved, or faction so infatuated the people, that honor, order, obedience, virtue, and loyalty have seemingly become things of the past; then, amidst the darkness, when honest men–if, haply, there be such left–are groping about and feeling for each other’s hands, their only remaining hope will be in the restoration and elevation of Individual Character; for by that alone can a nation be saved; and if character be irrecoverably lost, then indeed there will be nothing left worth saving.(6)

Let’s think together again, soon.

Notes:  

1. Earl Nightingale, This Is Earl Nightingale, Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1969, 56.

2. Dan Coates, "Points To Ponder," Reader's Digest, (June 1996):252. 

3. Booker T. Washington, Up From Slavery, New York: Bantam Books, 1963, 28.

4. Theodore Roosevelt in, Reader's Digest, (November 1993):146.

5. John Luther, in Arthur F. Lenehan, (ed.), Leadership, (April 1994):3.

6. Samuel Smiles, Happy Homes and the Hearts that Made Them, Chicago: U. S. Publishing House, 1889, 87.