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RECIPE FOR PROSPERITY

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Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Nov 1, 1877

FromReview and Herald, Vol. 50, No. 18.

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RECIPE FOR PROSPERITY.

1. Let every youth be taught some useful art and be trained to industry and thrift.
2. Let every young man lay aside, and keep sacredly intact, a certain proportion of his earnings.
3. Let every one set out in life with a fixed determination to engage in business for himself, and let him put this determination into practice as early in life as possible.
4. Begin in a small, safe way, and extend your business as experience shall teach you is advantageous.
5. Keep your own books, and know constantly what you are earning and just where you stand.
6. Do not marry until in receipt of a tolerably certain income, sufficient to live on comfortably.
7. Never get into debt. A man who owes nothing can never fail.
8. Let every man who is able, buy a farm upon which to bring up his sons. It is on the farm that the best men, morally and intellectually, are trained.
9. Bear in mind that your business cannot be permanently prosperous unless you share its advantages equally with your customers. An “all turkey, all buzzard” system of business can never succeed in the long run. The parties to a transaction must be mutually benefited if the trade is to be kept up.
10. Experience has shown that a scrimping policy with employees is not the most profitable for the employer. Live and let live, is a better theory.
11. Never get your business so much extended that you are driven to take in another partner. If you engage in a partnership at all, let it not be forced on you.
12. If you find yourself incompetent to manage a business successfully, settle down contentedly to work for wages, do your best for your employer, make his interests yours, and shape your expenditures so as to live within your income. Every one is not qualified by nature to manage successfully, but as much real happiness may be enjoyed in a salaried position as in any other, if the individual be only frugal and contented.
13. Do not seek political office.
14. Aim to be just and fair in all your dealings, and cultivate a good reputation for paying promptly.
If these few rules were generally observed, we should hear but little complaint of hard times.—Sel.