[Sidenote:  No Normal Man Lacks Qualifications For Success]

Certainly a slouch can straighten up, wash his dirty hands and face, dress neatly, and suggest proper regard for his appearance.  The physical weakling is able to build considerable strength into himself.  Dullards, unless their brains are stunted, may develop surprising intellectual keenness.  Careless men can train themselves to painstaking accuracy.  Individuals who are habitually late may become models of punctuality.  The man of flighty thoughts can concentrate.  It is possible to control 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 trees and callas and prunes and other forms of vegetable life.  Have you tried his method of development?  Do you know exactly what he did?

If Luther Burbank had merely desired and willed that the walnut should give up its old bad habit, he never could have accomplished the job of development.  He might have insisted persistently for a life-time that the little, sour, dry prune should become more luscious and larger than the plum; but it would have remained the same in size and other characteristics as it always had been, despite his continued determination.  Desire, will, and persistence were but preliminary steps toward the complete accomplishment of his purpose with the prune.