Bok realized that he could not definitely
show any one the way. No one had shown him. No two persons can find
the same way out. Bok determined to lift himself out of poverty
because his mother was not born in it, did not belong in it, and could
not stand it. That gave him the first essential: a purpose. Then he
backed up the purpose with effort and an ever-ready willingness to
work, and to work at anything that came his way, no matter what it was,
so long as it meant "the way out." He did not pick and choose; he took
what came, and did it in the best way he knew how; and when he did not
like what he was doing he still did it as well as he could while he was
doing it, but always with an eye single to the purpose not to do it any
longer than was strictly necessary. He used every rung in the ladder
as a rung to the one above. He always gave more than his particular
position or salary asked for. He never worked by the clock; always by
the job; and saw that it was well done regardless of the time it took
to do it. This meant effort, of course, untiring, ceaseless,
unsparing; and it meant work, hard as nails.

He was particularly careful never to live up to his income; and as his
income increased he increased not the percentage of expenditure but the
percentage of saving. Thrift was, of course, inborn with him as a
Dutchman, but the necessity for it as a prime factor in life was burned
into him by his experience with poverty. But he interpreted thrift not
as a trait of niggardliness, but as Theodore Roosevelt interpreted it:
common sense applied to spending.

At forty, therefore, he felt he had learned the first essential to
carrying out his idea of retirement at fifty.

The second essential--varied interests outside of his business upon
which he could rely on relinquishing his duties--he had not cultivated.
He had quite naturally, in line with his belief that concentration
means success, immersed himself in his business to the exclusion of
almost everything else. He felt that he could now spare a certain
percentage of his time to follow Theodore Roosevelt's ideas and let the
breezes of other worlds blow over him. In that way he could do as
Roosevelt suggested and as Bok now firmly believed was right: he could
develop himself along broader lines, albeit the lines of his daily work
were broadening in and of themselves, and he could so develop a new set
of inner resources upon which he could draw when the time