The Man Who Gets Things Done- Food For Thought

September 8, 2010 by KJM
Filed under: Uncategorized

From Dr. Frank Crane’s Four Minute Essays

“The Lord certainly shows His low opinion of money by the kind of folks He gives it to,” said the pale young man at the banquet.

“Look at Hiram Perkins over there — ignorant, no manners, no grammar, no anything but money.”

The pale young man was a Harvard graduate, and inclined to Socialism and Poetry and The Future.

“Well,” said his Uncle Tom, who sat next to him, “I’m not so sure the Lord missed it on Perkins. To my mind he comes nearer earning his millions than most of us.”

“Why, what can he do?”

“Nothing. That’s the idea. He doesn’t do. He gets things done.”

“Humph!” grunted the youth.

“Yes,” went on his uncle, “there’s a small but lively tribe of fellows who get things done. They toil not, neither do they spin, They couldn’t qualify for a labor union. They are not educated, not many of ‘em. They can’t read Greek and Latin nor do stunts in Mathematics. They are short on Art and Literature. They are not Socialists. They are not Philosophers. When you meet them you think they are about as common as prunes.

“And yet, they are the biggest men in these United States. Because they get things done.”

“What things?” asked the yound man.

“Oh, any old thing you want,” replied his uncle.

“There’s Hi Perkins, for instance. He came from a little town out in Illinois. He was a foundling. A poor grocer’s wife adopted him. He worked in the store. By the time he was seventeen he had changed his foster father’s store from a piddling affair to the biggest mercantile enterprise in town. When he was twenty-one he had a chain of stores in the surrounding towns. At thirty he owned the street railway and the water-works and electric plant. At thirty-eight he owned public utilities in a dozen towns. And it wasn’t graft, nor the power of unlimited capital, nor anything like that. It was because, somehow, he got things done when everyone else failed.

“There are plenty of people that can do things if you thell them how. Hi Perkins is one of the kind that do things when nobody can tell them how.

“Loyalty, honesty, perseverance, training, education, and all those things are good. But there’s something rarer, something that the Creator gives only to the hundredth man. It is the ability to accomplish the impossible. It is the genius for finding a way. And the Lord gave that to Perkins.

“All you need to tell him is that a certain thing ought to be done. He goes and does it. It isn’t mentality nor suavity nor talent. I don’t know what it is. He doesn’t know. But when he puts his shoulder to a wheel it moves. When he faces obstacles they vanish.”

“I see,” said the young man, “a sort of typical American, crude but efficient.”

“Yep,” replied his uncle. “You’ve said it. Still, he doesn’t do things, you know. He gets things done. There’s a difference.”