INTRODUCTION TO THE MASTER MIND !O7he built a dozen single-room log houses along the road; these houses
he rented out to tourists at $3 a night each. The dining room, the gas-
oline station, and the log houses brought him a net income of $15,000
the first year. The next year he extended his plan by adding fifty more
log houses, with three rooms each, which he now rents out as summer
country homes to people in a nearby city, at a rental of $150 each for
the season.
The building material cost him nothing, for it grew on his land in
abundance (that same land which the college president believed to be
worthless ).
Moreover, the unique and unusual appearance of the log bungalows
served as an advertisement for the plan, whereas many would have con-
sidered it a real calamity had they been compelled to build out of such
crude materials.
Less than five miles from the location of these log houses, this same
man purchased an old worked-out farm of 150 acres, for $25 an acre,
a price the seller believed to be extremely high.
By building a dam, one hundred feet in length, the purchaser of
this old farm turned a stream of water into a lake that covered fifteen
acres of the land, stocked the lake with fish, then sold the farm off in
building lots to people who wanted summer places around the lake.
The total profit realized from this simple transaction was more than
$25,000, and the time required was one summer.
Yet this man of vision and Imagination was not educated, in the
orthodox meaning of the term.
Let us keep in mind that it is through these simple illustrations
of the use of organized knowledge that one may become educated and
powerful.
In speaking of that transaction, the college president who sold the
fifty acres of "worthless" land for $500 said:
"Just think of it! That man, whom most of us might call ignorant,
mixed his ignorance with fifty acres of worthless land and made the