SELF-CONTROL 517Saving, for this habit marks you as a person who exercises an impor-
tant form of Self-Control.
The modern tendency of those who work for a salary is to spend
it all. If a person who receives $ I 5,000 a year, and manages to get along
on it fairly well, receives an increase of $ I ,000 a year, do they continue
to live on $15,000 and put the increased portion of their income into
savings or investments? No, not unless he or she is one of the few
who have developed the savings habit. Then what do they do with this
additional $ I ,OOO? They trade in the old automobile and buy a new,
more expensive one, and at the end of the year they are poorer on a
$16,000 income than they were previously on a $15,000 income.
Somewhere between the miser who hoards, in an old sock, every
penny they get their hands on, and the person who spends every cent
they can earn or borrow, there is a "happy medium:' If you wish to enjoy
life with reasonable assurance of average freedom and contentment,
you must find this halfway point and adopt it as a part of your Self-
Control program.
Self-discipline is the most essential factor in the development
of personal power. It enables you to control your appetite and your
tendency to spend more than you earn, and your habit of "striking
back" at those who offend you, as well as the other destructive habits
that cause you to dissipate your energies through nonproductive effort
which takes on forms too numerous to mention in this lesson.
Very early in my public career I was shocked when I learned how
many people there are who devote most of their energies to tearing
down what the builders construct. By some queer turn of the wheel
of fate, one of these destroyers crossed my path by making it his busi-
ness to try to destroy my reputation.
At first I was inclined to "strike back" at him, but as I sat at my
typewriter late one night, a thought came to me that changed my entire
attitude toward this man. Removing the sheet of paper from my type-
writer, I inserted another on which I wrote this thought, in these words: