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106

My work is progressing very well I think. Most of it has been on wiring diagrams for the three ship jobs on deck now, Atlantic Refining, Southern Pacific and Panama Canal, the latter diagram being made almost entirely by myself. I'm gradually learning day by day and soon will be ready for more responsibility. Of course I don't feel I have as much as I want or as much as I want to do, but any new job is always the same way and a fellow feels for the first three or four weeks that he doesn't know much and isn't of much value. In another week or so, I should be able to have more responsible and interesting work although this right now is to some extent responsible and certainly very interesting if one chooses to make it so. Here is a line I wrote at my desk the other day: "One of the great factors in success is enthusiasm in one's work. And to be enthusiastic, one must see beyond the actual details of the job itself, must look into the broader aspect and see the romance in it, see the interlinkage with the great affairs of the world."

Erie, Pa.,
Saturday, November 27, 1926.

Went to a dinner tonight given in honor of Mr. Delack, the former assistant manager of the Erie Works, who has just been appointed to the same position at Schenectady under Mr. Eveleth. And there I saw a man stepping up one step higher on that ladder that, as Mr. Case said, is wide at the bottom and narrow at the top, where the optimist sees the wide bottom and says he'll take a chance, and the pessimist sees the narrow top and wont risk it. In other words, I believe that wherever one is, the ladder is narrow at the top and if one gets there, one has made good, in the GE or anywhere else. With the GE one takes the bigger chance perhaps because the competition is the keenest and the competitors also the keenest perhaps. As I saw Mr. Delack there, the man who'd won the respect and loyalty and even love maybe of nearly all the men in this great plant, I wondered just what the secret of his great success might be. And after he'd been eulogized by five speakers, he himself got up and spoke, and I thought as I listened and watched him, I saw the reason for his success. It wasn't all in what he said but but it was the way he looked and the way his voice inflected as he said it. What he said wassimple and true and one knew from the way he talked that he had tried to do his best as he saw it. I thought I could see in him a real love of doing right and a real desire to serve. One thing he said was this: "You have heard from all the gentlemen who have just spoken, how well I have done my work and how conscientious I've been in it. Well, even if that be true, I see no reason why that should call forth great praise. To do our best -- and that is what we all should do -- and if we don't do it, we're simply falling short in our part in the scheme of things. We should all do our best -- that is the whole thing. And if we do our best, no matter