STREET DOGS

More Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son by George Horace Lorimer (1903):

You can t too soon make it a rule to invest only on your own know and never on somebody else’s say so.

You may lose some profits by this policy, but you're bound to miss a lot of losses. Often the best reason for keeping out of a thing is that everybody else is going into it. A crowd is always dangerous; it first pushes prices up beyond reason and then down below common sense.

It’s all right to take a long chance now and then, when you’ve got a long bank account, but it has been my experience that most of the long chances are taken by the fellows with short bank accounts.

You will meet a lot of men in Chicago who will point out the corner of State and Madison and tell you that when they first came to the city they were offered that lot for a hundred dollars, and that it has been the crowning regret of their lives that they didn’t buy it.

But for every genuine case of crowning regret because a fellow didn’t buy, there are a thousand because he did.

Don’t let it make you feverish the next time you see one of those won’t-you-come-in-quickand-get-rich-sudden ads if your money's tied up in the suddenmillionaire business, you will likely have to keep on clerking.

A man's fortune should grow like a tree, in rings around the parent trunk. It’ll be slow work at first, but every ring will be a little wider and a little thicker than the last one.

Whenever you hear of a man’s jumping suddenly into prominence and fortune, look behind the popular explanation of a lucky chance. You will usually find that these men manufactured their own luck by years of slow preparation, and are simply realising on hard work.