irst 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 came to
relinquish his editorial position.

He saw, on every side, the pathetic figures of men who could not let go
after their greatest usefulness was past; of other men who dropped
before they realized their arrival at the end of the road; and, most
pathetic of all, of men who having reti