How to Improve Your Personality
By R. J. BRYANT
How can I best improve my appearance, and yet not become foppish or dudish? How can I meet people who are better educated than I am? How can I bring the truth to such persons? These and many other questions are constantly recurring to every good Seventh-day Adventist. And who can say they are not very important questions? If we endeavor to obtain a hearing from some prominent and influential person, the first thing he looks at is our general appearance; the second, the way in which we address him and introduce the object of our call. If you wish to call on a lady or gentleman, and be used as one, you must have the appearance of a lady or gentleman, as this is all others have to judge you by at first. If you wish to create an interest in the minds of those upon whom you call, you must have the faculty that will enable you to do so. But how may we cultivate this faculty? And how may we improve our personal appearance? These are the questions that now come before us. “I am too poor to have a neat appearance,” is an excuse that no business man or woman will accept nowadays; for there is no man or woman, no boy or girl, too poor to be neat and clean. To have a clean face and hands, with well-combed hair; a clean collar and tie, with the tie in its proper place; clothes well brushed and pressed; polished shoes; and a special liking and use of the bath tub,—it will all cost so little that no one can make the cost of it an excuse for not having an attractive personality. And no man or woman, boy or girl, of good appearance will dare risk losing prestige by attempting to go among the people without first seeing that their personal appearance is immaculate. No greater opportunity is offered to any one to cultivate a neat and attractive personal appearance, along with a spirit of love, kindness, and refinement, than that of soliciting for our denominational books. The meeting and conversing with people in all walks of life; the study of how to please and persuade; the business transactions in a kind and Christlike way, together with the opportunity to travel, will endow one with a power that will be felt wherever one goes. Is your life's aim the ministry, the medical work, the Bible work, the school work, or something else that will require a great deal of personality wherever you go? If so, spend a year or two canvassing. It will do you more good than a college course, and, combined with the college course, will give you the start in life for which you are looking. Do you want to do good all your life? Do you want to take a part in spreading this gospel of the kingdom to all the world in this generation? Do you want to do all this in a way that will improve your personal appearance and manners, besides fitting you for more good in this world and preparing you for the next? Then enter the canvassing work; study it as a science; make it a life-work and aim. It will do as much as all else, if not more, to fit and prepare you for that beautiful home in the earth made new.