Learning 569

Millions of people falsely believe that “Knowledge is Power.”

Knowledge is only potential power. It becomes power only when, it is organized into definite plans of action and directed to a definite end.

An educated man is one who has so developed the faculties of his mind that he may acquire anything he wants, or it’s equivalent, without violating the rights of others.

Henry Ford once said, “Why I should clutter up my mind with general knowledge, for the purpose of being able to answer questions, when I have men around me who can supply any knowledge I require?”

Through the assistance of his ‘Master Mind’ group, Henry Ford had at his command all the specialized knowledge he needed to enable him to become one of the wealthiest men in America. It was not essential that he have this knowledge in his own mind.

Before you can be sure of your ability to transmute desire into its monetary equivalent, you will require specialized knowledge of service, merchandise, or profession which you intend to offer in return for fortune.

The self discipline one receives rom a definite programme of specialized study makes up to some extent, for the wasted opportunity when knowledge was available without cost. Correspondence schools insist upon prompt payments, whether the student makes good grades or poor, has the effect of causing one to follow through with the course when he would otherwise drop it, giving the greatest lesson on decision, promptness, action and the habit of finishing that which one begins.

 

 

 

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100 Lessons from Henry Ford

Innovators change things. They take new ideas, sometimes their own, sometimes other people’s, and develop and promote those ideas until they become an accepted part of daily life. Innovation requires self-confidence, a taste for taking risks, leadership ability and a vision of what the future should be. Henry Ford had all these characteristics, but it took him many years to develop all of them fully.

Henry Ford (July 30, 1863 – April 7, 1947) was an American industrialist, the founder of the Ford Motor Company, and sponsor of the development of the assembly line technique of mass production. Although Ford did not invent the automobile or the assembly line,He developed and manufactured the first automobile that many middle class Americans could afford.

As owner of the Ford Motor Company, he became one of the richest and best-known people in the world. He is credited with “Fordism”: mass production of inexpensive goods coupled with high wages for workers.

Here are 100 great lessons from him:

1. “In Life there are no big problems; there are just a lot of little problems.”
2. “Quality means doing it right when no one is looking.”
3. “My best friend is the one who brings out the best in me.”
4. “If everyone is moving forward together, then success takes care of itself.”
5. “One who fears failure limits his activities. Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.”
6. “You can’t build a reputation on what you are going to do.”
7. “A business absolutely devoted to service will have only one worry about profits. They will be embarrassingly large.”
8. “An idealist is a person who helps other people to be prosperous.”
9. “It is not the employer who pays the wages. Employers only handle the money. It is the customer who pays wages.”
10. “Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is probably the reason why so few engage in it.”
11. “You will find men who want to be carried on the shoulders of others, who think that the world owes them a living. They don’t seem to see that we must all lift together and pull together.”
12. “There is joy in work. There is no happiness except in the realization that we have accomplished something.”
13. “It has been my observation that most people get ahead during the time that others waste.”
14. “A bore is a person who opens his mouth and puts his feats in it.”
15. “You can’t learn in school what the world is going to do next year.”
16. “I am looking for a lot of men who have an infinite capacity to not know what can’t be done.”
17. “Most people spend more time and energy going around problems than in trying to solve them.”
18. “Whatever you have, you must either use or lose.”
19. “We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker’s dam is the history we make today.”
20. “I do not believe a man can ever leave his business. He ought to think of it by day and dream of it by night.”
21. “Wealth, like happiness, is never attained when sought after directly. It comes as a by-product of providing a useful service.”
22. “History is more or less bunk.”
23. “What’s right about America is that although we have a mess of problems, we have great capacity – intellect and resources – to do something about them.”
24. Coming together is a beginning, keeping together is progress, working together is success.
25. If you think you can do a thing or you think you can’t do a thing, you are right.
26. Anyone who stops learning is old,whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young.The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young.
27. Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goals.
28. Life is a series of experiences, each one of which makes us bigger, even though it is sometimes hard to realize this. For the world was build to develop character and we must learn that the setbacks and grieves which we endure help us in marching onward.
29. Don’t find fault, find a remedy. Anybody can complaint.
30. I believe God is managing affairs and that he doesn’t need any advice from me. With God in charge, I believe everything will work out for the best in the end. So what is there to worry about.
31. If money is your hope for independence you will never have it. The only real security that a man will have in this world is a reserve of knowledge, experience and ability.
32. One of the greatest discoveries a man makes, one of his great surprises, is to find he can do what he was afraid he couldn’t do.
33. When everything seems to be going against you, remember that the airplane takes off against the wind, not with it.
34. Even a mistake may turn out to be the one thing necessary to a worthwhile achievement.
35. If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from that person’s angle as well as from your own.
36. The man who will use his skill and constructive imagination to see how much he can give for a dollar, instead of how little he can give for a dollar, is bound to succeed.
37. It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.
38. A business that makes nothing but money is a poor business.
39. Enthusiasm is the yeast that makes your hopes shine to the stars. Enthusiasm is the sparkle in your eyes, the swing in your gait, the grip of your hand, the irresistible surge of will and energy to execute your ideas.
40. Capital punishment is as fundamentally wrong as a cure for crime as charity is wrong as a cure for poverty.
41. Before everything else, getting ready is the secret of success.
42. There is one rule for the industrialist and that is: Make the best quality of goods possible at the lowest cost possible, paying the highest wages possible.
43. Time and money spent in helping men to do more for themselves is far better than mere giving.
44. The competitor to be feared is one who never bothers about you at all, but goes on making his own business better all the time.
45. There is no man living that can not do more than he thinks he can.
46. I cannot discover that anyone knows enough to say definitely what is and what is not possible.
47. Competition is the keen cutting edge of business, always shaving away the costs.
48. As we advance in life we learn the limits of our abilities.
49. Speculation is only a word covering the making of money out of the manipulation of prices, instead of supplying goods and services.
50. A market is never saturated with a good product, but it is very quickly saturated with a bad one.
51. Money is like an arm or leg – use it or lose it.
52. The highest use of capital is not to make more money, but to make money do more for the betterment of life.
53. Exercise is bunk. If you are healthy, you don’t need it; if you are sick you should not take it.
54. Business is never so healthy as when, like a chicken, it must do a certain amount of scratching around for what it gets.
55. The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.
56. If I have asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.
57. Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it’s black.
58. Vision without execution is just hallucination.
59. Chop your own wood and it will warm you twice.
60. You say I started out with practically nothing, but that isn’t correct. We all start with all there is, it’s how we use it that makes things possible.
61. The whole secret of a successful life is to find out what is one’s destiny to do, and then do it.
62. Any man who thinks he can be happy and prosperous by letting the government take care of him better take a closer look at the American Indian.
63. When Henry Ford decided to produce his famous V-8 motor, he chose to build an engine with the entire eight cylinders cast in one block, and instructed his engineers to produce a design for the engine. The design was placed on paper, but the engineers agreed, to a man, that it was simply impossible to cast an eight-cylinder engine-block in one piece. Ford replied,”Produce it anyway.
64. Success is 99% failure.
65. I see no advantage in these new clocks. They run no faster than the ones made 100 years ago.
66. None of our men are ‘experts.’ We have most unfortunately found it necessary to get rid of a man as soon as he thinks himself an expert because no one ever considers himself expert if he really knows his job. A man who knows a job sees so much more to be done than he has done, that he is always pressing forward and never gives up an instant of thought to how good and how efficient he is. Thinking always ahead, thinking always of trying to do more, brings a state of mind in which nothing is impossible. The moment one gets into the ‘expert’ state of mind a great number of things become impossible.
67. There are three things that grow more precious with age; old wood to burn, old books to read, and old friends to enjoy.
68. Whether you believe you can or believe you can’t, you are absolutely right.
69. Money doesn’t make us anyway it just unmasks us.
70. I will build a car for the great multitude. It will be large enough for the family, but small enough for the individual to run and care for. It will be constructed of the best materials, by the best men to be hired, after the simplest designs that modern engineering can devise. But it will be so low in price that no man making a good salary will be unable to own one.
71. Everything comes to him who hustles while he waits.
72. The way to learn to do things is to do things. The way to learn a trade is to work at it. Success teaches how to succeed. Begin with the determination to succeed, and the work is half done already.
73. “I invented nothing new. I simply assembled the discoveries of other men behind whom were centuries of work. Had I worked fifty or ten or even five years before, I would have failed. So it is with every new thing. Progress happens when all the factors that make for it are ready, and then it is inevitable. To teach that a comparatively few men are responsible for the greatest forward steps of mankind is the worst sort of nonsense.”
74. “We try to pay a man what he is worth and we are not inclined to keep a man who is not worth more than the minimum wage.”
75. “Genius is seldom recognized for what it is: a great capacity for hard work.”
76. “You don’t have to hold a position in order to be a leader.”
77. “To do more for the world than the world does for you – that is success.”
78. “Where people work longest and with least leisure, they buy the fewest goods. No towns were so poor as those of England where the people, from children up, worked fifteen and sixteen hours a day. They were poor because these overworked people soon wore out — they became less and less valuable as workers. Therefore, they earned less and less and could buy less and less.”
79. “There is no disgrace in honest failure; there is disgrace in fearing to fail”
80. “New York is a different country. Maybe it ought to have a separate government. Everybody thinks differently, they just don’t know what the hell the rest of the United States is.”
81. “As long as we look to legislation to cure poverty or to abolish special privilege we are going to see poverty and special privilege grow”
82. “That the Devil finds work for idle hands to do is probably true. But there is a profound difference between leisure and idleness.”
83. “Those who believe they can do something and those who believe they can’t are both right.”
84. “To see a thing clearly in the mind makes it begin to take form.”
85. “Sometimes you just don’t like somebody”
86. “If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got.”
87. “As we serve our jobs we serve the world.”
88. “Experience is the thing of supreme value.”
89. “To teach that a comparatively few men are responsible for the greatest forward steps of mankind is the worst sort of nonsense.”
90. “The one aim of these financiers is world control by the creation of inextinguishable debt.”
91. “It ought to be the employer’s ambition as leader to pay than any similar line of business, and it ought to be the workman’s ambition to make it possible”
92. “Success is about creating value
    Failure is a chance to begin again more intelligently. It is just a resting place. We learn more from our failures than our success”
93. “Do you want to know the cause of war? It is capitalism, greed, the dirty hunger for dollars. Take away the capitalist, and you will sweep war from the earth.”
94. “Speculation into thing already produced that is not business”
95. “It is not usual to speak of an employee as a partner, and yet what else is he?”
96. “The idea of gas engines was by no means new, but this was the first time that a really serious effort had been made to put them on the market. They were received with interest rather than enthusiasm and I do not recall any one who thought that the internal combustion engine could ever have more than a limited use. All the wise people demonstrated conclusively that the engine could not compete with steam. They never thought that it might carve out a career for itself. That is the way with wise people—they are so wise and practical that they always know to a dot just why something cannot be done; they always know the limitations. That is why I never employ an expert in full bloom. If ever I wanted to kill opposition by unfair means I would endow the opposition with experts. They would have so much good advice that I could be sure they would do little work.”
97. “Givers have to set limits because takers rarely do.”
98. “It is probably true that the commonest real cause of anti-semitism is the action of the international Jew who is often unknown and always secure, but innocent victim of it is the poor Jew.”
99. “That man is best educated who knows the greatest number of things that are so, and who can do the greatest number of things to help and heal the world.”
100. “Technically this isn’t a quote because no one can verify that Ford said these very words.”