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As a student of business, sales and personal development history, I will be sharing some ideas from people who have had an extreme impact on my thinking and philosophy. The first in the series is Bertie Charles Forbes (1880-1954). He was a Scottish financial journalist and author who founded Forbes magazine.

B.C. Forbes was born in New Deer, Aberdeenshire. After studying at the University of Dundee, in 1897 Forbes worked as a reporter and editorial writer with a local Dundee newspaper until 1901 when he moved to Johannesburg, South Africa, and founded the Rand Daily Mail. He emigrated to New York City in 1904, where he was employed as a writer and financial editor at the Journal of Commerce before joining the Hearst chain of newspapers as a syndicated columnist in 1911. Forbes left Hearst after two years to become the business and financial editor at the New York American, where he remained until 1916.

He founded Forbes magazine in 1917 and acted as editor in chief until his death in 1954. Forbes published a number of books that contained his thoughts in the form of epigrams (short sayings or quotations).

Here are several of the more provocative – and keep in mind that most of them were written 75 years ago. It’s amazing to me how simple truths can endure:

• A business, like an automobile, has to be driven in order to get results.

• A shady business never yields a sunny life.

• Better to be occasionally cheated than perpetually suspicious.

• Books are like a mirror. If an ass looks in, you can’t expect an angel to look out.

• Difficulties should act as a tonic. They should spur us to greater exertion.

• Golf without bunkers and hazards would be tame and monotonous. So would life.

• He best keeps from anger who remembers that God is always looking upon him.

• History has demonstrated that the most notable winners usually encountered heartbreaking obstacles before they triumphed. They won because they refused to become discouraged by their defeats.

• If you don’t drive your business, you will be driven out of business.

• Jealousy … is a mental cancer.

• Many a man thinks he is patient when, in reality, he is indifferent.

• Real riches are the riches possessed inside.

• The bargain that yields mutual satisfaction is the only one that is apt to be repeated.

• The man who has won millions at the cost of his conscience is a failure.

• There is more credit and satisfaction in being a first-rate truck driver than a 10th-rate executive.

• To make headway, improve your head.

• Turn resolutely to work, to recreation, or in any case to physical exercise till you are so tired you can’t help going to sleep, and when you wake up you won’t want to worry.

• Vitally important for a young man or woman is, first, to realize the value of education and then to cultivate earnestly, aggressively, ceaselessly, the habit of self-education.

• Think not of yourself as the architect of your career but as the sculptor. Expect to have to do a lot of hard hammering and chiseling and scraping and polishing.

• Many of the most successful men I have known have never grown up. They have retained bubbling-over boyishness. They have relished wit, they have indulged in humor. They have not allowed “dignity” to depress them into moroseness. Youthfulness of spirit is the twin brother of optimism, and optimism is the stuff of which American business success is fashioned. Resist growing up!

WOW! No wonder B.C. Forbes was such a huge financial success.

Jeffrey Gitomer can be reached by phone at (704) 333-1112 or by e-mail at salesman@gitomer.com. © 2008 Jeffrey H. Gitomer