Law of Success (21st Century Edition)

PROFITING BY FAILURE 857

was paid-that the opportunity came to enter the automobile manu-
facturing business. I saw the need for trained automobile mechanics,
therefore I opened an educational department in the manufacturing
plant and began to train ordinary machinists in automobile assembly
and repair work. The school prospered, paying me over a thousand
dollars a month in net profits.
Again I was beginning to near the rainbow's end. Again I knew I
had at last found my niche and that nothing could swerve me from my
course or divert my attention, this time from the automobile business.
My banker knew that I was prospering, therefore he loaned me
money with which to expand. A peculiar trait of bankers, a trait which
may be more or less developed in the rest of us too, is that they will
loan us money without any hesitation when we are prosperous.
My banker loaned me money until I was hopelessly in his debt,
then he took over my business as calmly as if it had belonged to him.
Which it did.
From the station of a man of affairs who enjoyed an income of
more than a thousand dollars a month, I was suddenly reduced to
poverty.

COMMENTARY

As was noted previously, according to one calculation source the value of

one dollar at the beginning of the twentieth century was the equivalent of

almost twenty dollars at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Using

that comparison, the thousand dollars Hill's business was earning then

would be worth close to twenty thousand dollars a month today. But,

as was also noted previously, there are many factors and variables in

making direct dollar comparisons when it comes to salaries, and the

conversion figures also vary among sources.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics it took $17.89 in 2002 to

buy what $1.00 bought in 1913. If the $17.89 figure were used relative