SUSPENDED above the desk of a Pittsburg bank president is this motto: “Do the Hard Thing First.” Ten years ago he was discount clerk in the same bank. “How did you climb so fast?” I asked. “I lived up to that text,” he replied. “There’s not much to tell. I had long been conscious that I was not getting on as fast as I should. I was not keeping up with my work; it was distasteful to me. When I opened my desk in the morning and found it covered with reminders of work to be done during the day, I became discouraged. There were always plenty of comparatively easy things to do, and these I did first, putting off the disagreeable duties as long as possible. Result: I became intellectually lazy. I felt an increasing incapacity for my work. One morning I woke up. I took stock of myself to find out the trouble. Memoranda of several matters that had long needed attention stared at me from my calendar. I had been carrying them along from day to day. Enclosed in a rubber band were a number of unanswered letters which necessitated the looking-up of certain information before the replies could be sent. I had tried for days to ignore their presence.” “Suddenly the thought came to me: ‘I have been doing only the easy things. By postponing the disagreeable tasks, the mean, annoying little things, my mental muscles have been allowed to grow flabby. They must get some exercise.’ I took off my coat and proceeded to ‘clean house.’ It wasn’t half as hard as I had expected. Then I took a card and wrote on it: ‘Do the Hard Thing First,’ and put it where I could see it every morning. I’ve been doing the hard thing first ever since.”—Robert Webster Jones.