a
quick, bad temper. Tact, diplomacy, and good judgment can be learned and
used efficiently by the countless thousands of people who now are
tactless, undiplomatic, and characterized by poor judgment.

So it is with the principal emotional, ethical, and spiritual qualities
of the master salesman. _You_ have them _all_, elementally. _Certainly
you can develop any selected element to higher activity and use it_ to
help you sell true ideas of your best capabilities.

Maybe you have fought long and vainly for self-confidence, for courage,
for will power. Perhaps you have realized for years that you are slow in
perception, and have struggled to make yourself take mental snap-shots
of details and conditions. You have wished and willed and worked to be
agreeable and courteous; yet perhaps you lose friends by your
characteristic disagreeableness and lack of courtesy. If, in spite of
all you so far have done to improve yourself, you have been unable to
get rid of your faults and defects, you are apt to question the
statement that you _certainly can_ develop such qualities as you most
desire.

[Sidenote: Decision Will Power Hard Work Insufficient]

No doubt you have _decided_, probably you have _willed_, very likely you
have made a _persistent struggle_ to change your characteristics. You
honestly have tried hard to grow, and to increase your man capacity.
Consequently your failure may have left you rather hopeless about ever
succeeding as you once expected to succeed. Perhaps you have given up
your case as "too tough a job." We will assume that you are not so young
as you wish you were, and that you have committed to memory the
fatalistic, hoary lie, "You can't teach an old dog new tricks." But
recall the fixed habit of bitterness the walnut had for centuries, the
color and size of the natural calla, the sour taste of the little wild
prune, which the plant wizard changed most radically without using any
"wizardry" at all. He just _applied scientific knowledge_ in his
training of walnut t