Act "as if" you were interested in your job, and that bit of acting will tend to make your
interest real. It will also tend to decrease your fatigue, your tensions, and your worries.
A few years ago, Harlan A. Howard made a decision that completely altered his life. He
resolved to make a dull job interesting-and he certainly had a dull one: washing plates,
scrubbing counters, and dishing out ice-cream in the high-school lunch-room while the
other boys were playing ball or kidding the girls. Harlan Howard despised his job-but
since he had to stick to it, he resolved to study ice-cream-how it was made, what
ingredients were used, why some ice-creams were better than others. He studied the
chemistry of ice-cream, and became a whiz in the high-school chemistry course. He was
so interested now in food chemistry that he entered the Massachusetts State College
and majored in the field of "food technology". When the New York Cocoa Exchange
offered a hundred-dollar prize for the best paper on uses of cocoa and chocolate-a prize
open to all college students-who do you suppose won it? ... That's right. Harlan Howard.
When he found it difficult to get a job, he opened a private laboratory in the basement of
his home at 750 North Pleasant Street, Amherst, Massachusetts. Shortly after that, a
new law was passed. The bacteria in milk had to be counted. Harlan A. Howard was
soon counting bacteria for the fourteen milk companies in Amherst-and he had to hire
two assistants.
Where will he be twenty-five years from now? Well, the men who are now running the
business of food chemistry will be retired then, or dead; and their places will be taken by
young lads who are now radiating initiative and enthusiasm. Twenty-five years from
now, Harlan A. Howard will probably be one of the leaders in his profession, while some
of his class-mates to whom he used to sell ice-cream over the counter will be sour,
unemployed, cursing the government, and complaining that they never had a chance.
Harlan A. Howard might never have had a chance, either, if he hadn't resolved to make
a dull job interesting.
Years ago, there was another young man who was bored with his dull job of standing at
a lathe, turning out bolts in a factory. His first name was Sam. Sam wanted to quit, but
he was afraid he couldn't find another job. Since he had to do this dull work, Sam
decided he would make it interesting. So he ran a race with the mechanic operating a
machine beside him. One of them was to trim off the rough surfaces on his machine,
and the other was to trim the bolts down to the proper diameter. They would switch
machines occasionally and see who could turn out the most bolts. The foreman,
impressed with Sam's speed and accuracy, soon gave him a better job. That was the
start of a whole series of promotions. Thirty years later, Sam -Samuel Vauclain-was
president of the Baldwin Locomotive Works. But he might have remained a mechanic all
his life if he had not resolved to make a dull job interesting.
H. V. Kaltenborn-the famous radio news analyst-once told me how he made a dull job
interesting. When he was twenty-two years old, he worked his way across the Atlantic
on a cattle boat, feeding and watering the steers. After making a bicycle tour of England,
he arrived in Paris, hungry and broke. Pawning his camera for five dollars, he put an ad.
in the Paris edition of The New York Herald and got a job selling steropticon machines.
If you are forty years old, you may remember those old-fashioned stereoscopes that we
used to hold up before our eyes to look at two pictures exactly alike. As we looked, a
miracle happened. The two lenses in the stereoscope transformed the two pictures into
a single scene with the effect of a third dimension. We saw distance. We got an
astounding sense of perspective.
Well, as I was saying, Kaltenborn started out selling these machines from door to door
in Paris-and he couldn't speak French. But he earned five thousand dollars in