Taking an interest in your work, enjoying what
you are doing opens the secret door of success.
A number of years ago I went to California to
speak at the different centers, by way of the
Panama Canal, and on the boat I met a man named Jim Tully.
For years he had been a tramp. He called himself The King of the Hoboes.
He was ambitious and picked up an education.
He had a vivid imagination and commenced writing
stories about his experiences.
He dramatized tramp life, he enjoyed what he
was doing, and became a very successful author.
I remember one book called "Outside Looking In."
It was made into a motion picture.
He is now famous and prosperous and lives in
Hollywood. What opened the secret door to
success for Jim Tully?
Dramatizing his life - being interested in what he
was doing, he made the most of being a tramp.
On the boat, we all sat at the captain's table,
which gave us a chance to talk.
Mrs. Grace Stone was also a passenger on the
boat; she had written the "Bitter Tea of General
Yen," and was going to Hollywood to have it
made into a moving-picture; she had lived in
China and was inspired to write the book.
That is the Secret of Success, to make what you
are doing interesting to other people. Be
interested yourself, and others will find you interesting.
A good disposition, a smile, often opens the secret door; the Chinese say, "A man without a smiling face, must not open a shop."
The success of a smile was brought out in a French moving-picture in which Chevalier took the lead, the picture was called, "With a Smile." One of the characters had become poor, dreary and almost a derelict; He said to Chevalier "What good has my honesty done me?" Chevalier replied, "Even honesty won't help you, without a smile." So the man changes on the spot, cheers up, and becomes
very successful.
Living in the past, complaining of your misfortunes, builds a thick wall around
your Jericho.
Talking too much about your affairs, scattering
your forces, brings you up against a high wall.
I knew a man of brains and ability, who was a
complete failure.
He lived with his mother and aunt, and I found
that every night when he went home to dinner,
he told them all that had taken place during the
day at the office; he discussed his hopes, his
fears, and his failures.
I said to him, "You scatter your forces by talking
about your affairs. Don't discuss your business
with your family. Silence is golden!"
He took my lead. During dinner he refused to talk
about business. His mother and aunt were in
despair. They loved to hear all about everything,
but his silence proved golden!
Not long after, he was given a position at one
hundred dollars a week, and in a few years, he
had a salary of three hundred dollars a week.
Success is not a secret, it is a System.
Many people are up against the wall of
discouragement. Courage and endurance are
part of the system. We read this in lives of all
successful men and women.
I had an amusing experience which brought this to
my notice. I went to a moving picture theatre to
meet a friend.
While waiting, I stood near a young boy, selling programs.
He called to people passing, "Buy a complete
program of the picture, containing photographs of
the actors and a sketch of their lives."
Most people passed by without buying. To my
great surprise, he suddenly turned to me, and said
- "Say, this ain't no racket for a guy with ambition!"
Then he gave a discourse on success. He said,
"Most people give up just before something big
is coming to them. A successful man never gives up."
Of course I was interested and said, "I'll bring you
a book the next time I come. It is called The Game
of Life and How to Play It. You will agree with a
lot of the ideas."
A week or two later I went back with the book.
The girl at the ticket office said to him - "Let me
read it, Eddie, while you are selling programs."
The man who took tickets leaned over to see
what it was about.
"The Game of Life" always gets people's interests.
I returned to the theatre in about three weeks,
Eddie had gone. He had expanded into a new job
that he liked. His wall of Jericho had crumbled, he
had refused to be discouraged.
Only twice, is the word success mentioned in the
Bible - both times in the Book of Joshua.
"Only be strong and very courageous to observe to
do according to all the law which Moses, my
servant, commanded thee: turn not from it to the
right nor to the left, that thou mayest have good
success whithersoever thou goest. This book of the
law shall not depart from thy mouth, but thou shalt
meditate therein day and night, that thou mayest
observe to do all that is written therein, for then
shalt thou make thy way prosperous and thou shalt
have good success. Turn not to the right nor to the left."
The road to success is a straight and narrow path; it is a road of loving absorption, of undivided attention.
You attract the things you give a great deal of
thought to.
So if you give a great deal of thought to lack, you
attract lack, if you give a great deal of thought to
injustice, you attract more injustice.
Joshua said, "And it shall come to pass, that when
they make a long blast with the ram's horn, and
when ye hear the sound of the trumpet, all the
people shall shout with a great shout: and the wall
of the city shall fall down flat, and the people shall
ascend up, every man straight before him."
The inner meaning of this story, is the power of
the word, your word which dissolves obstacles,
and removes barriers.
When the people shouted the walls fell down.
We find in folk-lore and fairy stories, which
come down from legends founded on Truth,
the same idea - a word opens a door or cleaves a rock.
We have it again in the Arabian Night's Story, "Ali
Baba and The Forty Thieves." I saw it made into
a moving picture.
Ali Baba has a secret hiding place, hidden
somewhere behind rocks and mountains, the
entrance may only be gained by speaking a secret
word. It is "Open Sesame!"
Ali Baba faces the mountain and cries "Open
Sesame!" and rocks slide apart.
It is very inspiring, for it gives you the realization
of how YOUR own rocks and barriers, will part
at the right word.
So let us take the statement -
The walls of lack and delay now crumble away,
and I enter my Promised Land, under grace.
***************************
“Outside Looking In” is, most fundamentally, a series of pointed scenes from a busy life. Its vaguely oxymoronic subtitle (“Adventures of an Observer”) seems misleading. No one who counted William F. Buckley, John Waters, Studs Terkel, Beverly Sills and Murray Kempton among his many friends, and who had close-up views of many of the last century’s signal events, can qualify as a true outsider.
The early chapters of “Outside Looking In” are a Greyhound bus tour through many events Mr. Wills covered as a barnstorming young journalist, writing for Harold Hayes’s Esquire and other publications. He was thrown in jail along with Benjamin Spock, Joe Papp and Judy Collins during the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, after agreeing to take part in a protest. He flew into Memphis on the night of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. He visited strip clubs in Dallas in 1966 while writing about Jack Ruby, Lee Harvey Oswald’s killer, who owned a club called the Carousel.
There is a chapter here on Nixon (Wills landed on his enemies list), as well as on Jimmy Carter, whom he admired, and on the Clintons (he has kinder things to say about Hillary than about Bill, and admires her gifts as a mimic). There are chapters as well on Buckley, who asked the young and unknown Mr. Wills to write theater criticism for National Review, and on Studs Terkel. Mr. Wills also writes fondly about his friendship with the actor and antiwar activist Dick Cusack, the father of the actors John and Joan, and the rest of the busy Cusack clan.
Credit Patricia Wall/The New York Times
Mr. Wills writes gratefully, and with relish, about the intellectual and spiritual armor he acquired early. “I was blessed by my schooling — Catholic grade school, high school, college (St. Louis University) and graduate school (Xavier of Cincinnati),” he says.
Mr. Wills also has a Ph.D. in classics from Yale, and he is eloquent about why this sort of education matters to anyone who wishes to write and think seriously. “Learning classical Greek is the most economical intellectual investment one can make,” he writes. “On many things that might interest one — law and politics, philosophy, oratory, history, lyric poetry, epic poetry, drama — there will be constant reference back to the founders of those forms in our civilization.”
There are moments when “Outside Looking In” seems like a data dump, as if Mr. Wills were flipping though a trunk of his yellowed magazine clips. There’s more here than is strictly necessary about things like the particulars of Sills’s run as chairwoman of the Metropolitan Opera. And a bit, spread over several pages, about the actor Joseph Fiennes’s behaving like a twerp on a film set that Mr. Wills visited is a waste of this book’s already limited storage capacity.
Other narrative detours are pure labors of love. Mr. Wills’s chapter on his family’s years in Baltimore (he and his wife have three children) includes a long and ardent disquisition on the glories of Johnny Unitas’s passing with the Baltimore Colts, and Raymond Berry’s receiving. Mr. Wills approvingly quotes the sportswriter Frank Deford, who declared: “If there were one game scheduled, Earth versus the Klingons, with the fate of the universe on the line, any person with his wits about him would have Johnny U. calling signals in the huddle.”
Mr. Wills’s politics have never been doctrinaire, but he makes it clear that he arrived at his middle-class conservatism by temperament. He says the rosary daily. He has never smoked pot. He dresses, in his daughter’s words, “like a bum.” He has had sex with only one woman.
“I agree with Hilaire Belloc: ‘it is well to have loved one woman from a child,’ ” he writes.
More than faith, Mr. Wills admires faithfulness. He’s justifiably proud that he’s been true to his wife, to his friends, to the two universities where he’s taught for long stretches over 43 years and to the few literary agents he’s had. For a man who describes himself as one of the least interesting people on the planet, he makes the old virtues sound surprisingly sexy.
OUTSIDE LOOKING IN
Adventures of an Observer
By Garry Wills
195 pages. Viking. $25.95.
