But one
cannot help feeling regretful that the custom is not growing more
rapidly.
A man must unquestionably prepare years ahead for his retirement, not
alone financially, but mentally as well. Bok noticed as a curious fact
that nearly every business man who told him he had made a mistake in his
retirement, and that the proper life for a man is to stick to the game
and see it through--"hold her nozzle agin the bank" as Jim Bludso would
say--was a man with no resources outside his business. Naturally, a
retirement is a mistake in the eyes of such a man; but oh, the pathos of
such a position: that in a world of so much interest, in an age so
fascinatingly full of things worth doing, a man should have allowed
himself to become a slave to his business, and should imagine no other
man happy without the same claims!
It is this lesson that the American business man has still to learn:
that no man can be wholly efficient in his life, that he is not living a
four-squared existence, if he concentrates every waking thought on his
material affairs. He has still to learn that man cannot live by bread
alone. The making of money, the accumulation of material power, is not
all there is to living. Life is something more than these, and the man
who misses this truth misses the greatest joy and satisfaction that can
come into his life-service for others.
Some men argue that they can give this service and be in business, too.
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