At the age of forty he tried to look ahead and plan out his life as far as he could.Barring unforeseen obstacles, he determined to retire from active business when he reached his fiftieth year, and give the remainder of his life over to those interests and influences which he assumed now as part of his life, and which, at fifty, should seem to him best worth while.He realized that in order to do this he must do two things: he must husband his financial resources and he must begin to accumulate a mental reserve.
The wide public acceptance of the periodical which he edited naturally brought a share of financial success to him.He had experienced poverty, and as he subsequently wrote, in an article called "Why I Believe in Poverty," he was deeply grateful for his experience.He had known what it was to be poor; he had seen others dear to him suffer for the bare necessities; there was, in fact, not a single step on that hard road that he had not travelled.He could, therefore, sympathize with the fullest understanding with those similarly situated, could help as one who knew from practice and not from theory.He realized what a marvellous blessing poverty can be; but as a condition to experience, to derive from it poignant lessons, and then to get out of; not as a condition to stay in.
Of course many said to Bok when he wrote the article in which he expressed these beliefs: "That's all very well; easy enough to say, but how can you get out of it?" Bok realized that he could not definitely show any one the way.No one had shown him.No two persons can find the same way out.Bok determined to lift himself out of poverty because his mother was not born in it, did not belong in it, and could not stand it.
That gave him the first essential: a purpose.Then he backed up the purpose with effort and an ever-ready willingness to work, and to work at anything that came his way, no matter what it was, so long as it meant "the way out." He did not pick and choose; he took what came, and did it in the best way he knew how; and when he did not like what he was doing he still did it as well as he could while he was doing it, but always with an eye single to the purpose not to do it any longer than was strictly necessary.He used every rung in the ladder as a rung to the one above.He always gave more than his particular position or salary asked for.He never worked by the clock; always by the job; and saw that it was well done regardless of the time it took to do it.This meant effort, of course, untiring, ceaseless, unsparing; and it meant work, hard as nails.
He was particularly careful never to live up to his income; and as his income increased he increased not the percentage of expenditure but the percentage of saving.Thrift was, of course, inborn with him as a Dutchman, but the necessity for it as a prime factor in life was burned into him by his experience with poverty.But he interpreted thrift not as a trait of niggardliness, but as Theodore Roosevelt interpreted it:
common sense applied to spending.
At forty, therefore, he felt he had learned the first essential to carrying out his idea of retirement at fifty.
The second essential--varied interests outside of his business upon which he could rely on relinquishing his duties--he had not cultivated.
He had quite naturally, in line with his belief that concentration means success, immersed himself in his business to the exclusion of almost everything else.He felt that he could now spare a certain percentage of his time to follow Theodore Roosevelt's ideas and let the breezes of other worlds blow over him.In that way he could do as Roosevelt suggested and as Bok now firmly believed was right: he could develop himself along broader lines, albeit the lines of his daily work were broadening in and of themselves, and he could so develop a new set of inner resources upon which he could draw when the time came to relinquish his editorial position.
He saw, on every side, the pathetic figures of men who could not let go after their greatest usefulness was past; of other men who dropped before they realized their arrival at the end of the road; and, most pathetic of all, of men who having retired, but because of lack of inner resources did not know what to do with themselves, had become a trial to themselves, their families, and their communities.
Bok decided that, given health and mental freshness, he would say good-by to his public before his public might decide to say good-by to him.So, at forty, he candidly faced the facts of life and began to prepare himself for his retirement at fifty under circumstances that would be of his own making and not those of others.
And thereby Edward Bok proved that he was still, by instinct, a Dutchman, and had not in his thirty-four years of residence in the United States become so thoroughly Americanized as he believed.
However, it was an American, albeit of Dutch extraction, one whom he believed to be the greatest American in his own day, who had set him thinking and shown him the way.
