ACCURATE THINKING 681Hill's honesty received widespread publicity, which also served him well in
his next ventures, but it's believed that he never spoke publicly of the moral
dilemma he'd found himself in. He wrote of it in his memoirs only to point out
the virtues of honesty. And while he likely wouldn't have known the term in 1902,
it was also an excellent example of accurate thinking.Assuming that the foregoing was sufficient to impress upon your
mind the importance of searching for facts until you are reasonably
sure you have found them, we will now look at organizing, classifying,
and using those facts.
Consider again your own circle of acquaintances and find some-
one who appears to accomplish more with less effort than do any of
their associates. Study this person and you observe that he or she is
a strategist, in that they have learned how to arrange facts so as to
bring to their aid the law of increasing returns, which was described
in Lesson Nine.
The person who knows they are working with facts goes about
their task with a feeling of Self-Confidence that enables them to
refrain from procrastinating, hesitating, or waiting to make sure of
their ground. They know in advance what the outcome of their efforts
will be. Therefore, they move more rapidly and accomplish more than
does the person who must "feel their way" because they are not sure
they are working with facts.
The person who has learned of the advantages of searching for
facts as the foundation of their thinking has gone a very long way
toward the development of Accurate Thinking. But the person who has
learned how to separate facts into the important and the unimportant
has gone still further.
Inasmuch as this is an age in which money is looked upon as being
the most concrete proof of success, let us look again at a man who has
accumulated almost as much of it as has any other man in the history
of the world-John D. Rockefeller.