teful and thoughtful as a
rational or second-thought person always is, he lets his subconscious
self take hold of him, tumtum him along into showing everybody how
perfect he is.

Everybody knows how it is.

XXV

NEW BRAIN TRACKS IN BUSINESS

Speaking roughly, there are two kinds of men who are markedly successful
in business--the men who give people what they want, and the men who make
people want things they have thought they did not want before. Moving
pictures, watermelons, pianolas, telephones, forks, flying machines and
locomotives, appendicitis, Christianity and chewing gum, umbrellas and
even babies--have all been brought to pass by convincing other human
beings that they do not know what they want, by a process which is
essentially courting, that is: by a combination of fighting and affection
which arrests, holds and enthralls people into adding new selves to
themselves.

I confess to a certain partiality for men who get rich by making people
different because I am an evolutionist and the chances are that anything
you do to most people that makes them different, improves them.

But comparisons are irrelevant and I am not willing to back down from my
good opinion of American human nature in business and admit that men who
prosper by making people want telephones, or things they have not wanted,
are the business superiors of men who prosper by just piling up on people
more and more and better--things they want already.

The superior business man is the man who has a superior knowledge of
himself, who searches out and uses the gift he is born with in himself
and who gets other people to use theirs. Because it happens that I am an
inventor, or what is called an artist, and because though I cannot
remember, without the slightest doubt, I began, to advertise that I was
here, or about to be here, before I was born, and because I would be
bored to death handing out to people things I know they want, or
presenting to people truths they merely believe already, it would be
shallow for me to say that the men in American business who do not make
people want things, and who just heap up on them what they want, are not
successful men, are not equally important, equally essential to the state
and are not doing for themselves and others just what the country, if it
was a wise country and was around asking people to do things, would ask
them to do.

On the other hand, I believe that in the present new tragic eco