ack of natural
business ability may not be a man's fault, it is nothing to be proud of.
You may not be born with keen, financial sense, but that is no reason why
you may not develop more and more of it and make yourself a better
business man. As a matter of fact, every man is in business--he has
something to sell which he wishes the rest of the world to buy from him.
He has himself, at least, to support, and more than likely he has others
dependent upon him. He has no right, therefore, to neglect business
affairs and to permit others to impose upon him and to steal from him and
from those dependent upon him the proper reward for his labor.

Even the youth who is poor in mathematics can learn something about
geometry, algebra, and trigonometry; even he who "has no head for
language" can learn to speak a foreign tongue and even to read Latin or
Greek. It is not easy for either one of them and perhaps the one can never
become a great mathematician nor the other a great linguist, but both can
learn something, both can improve their grasp of the difficult subject.
There are probably few readers of these pages who have not in their school
days overcome just such handicaps in some particular subject of study.

In a similar way those who are impractical and have little business sense
can improve in this respect and they ought to. Such people ought to study
practical affairs, ought to give their attention to financial matters. In
fact, one of the best ways to increase financial judgment is to form the
intimate acquaintance of some one who has a keen sense of financial
values. If such a person can be persuaded to talk about what he knows, the
impractical man will do well to take a keen interest in what he says, to
qualify himself to understand it, and, if possible, to get the point of
view from which a good business man approaches his problems and studies
his affairs. Actual practice is, of course, necessary for development, and
the impractical man ought to take an interest in his affairs and ought to
do his best to handle them. Naturally, he needs to seek competent counsel
in regard to them, but he should pay some attention to the counsel given,
try to learn something from it, watch results of every course of action
and in every possible way study to make himself more practical and less
theoretical and abstract in his attitude toward life in general and toward
business affairs in particular.

Not long ago we attended a meeting