At a symposium sponsored by the Management Association of the Philippines last Tuesday, one of the speakers used this quote attributed to Samuel Smiles:
Sow a thought, and you reap an act;
Sow an act, and you reap a habit;
Sow a habit, and you reap a character;
Sow a character, and you reap a destiny.
Catchy quotes are good, but I also tend to be cautious. Thanks to the Internet, I’m able to check out the full quote and its context, including the person being quoted.
It turns out Samuel Smiles was a 19th-century Scottish reformer, known mainly for a book titled “Self-Help,” which was first published in 1859 and sold 20,000 copies within a year—a blockbuster of a bestseller in his time. By the time Smiles died in 1902, his book had sold some 250,000 copies. In 2002, the Oxford University Press reprinted the book—a testament to its continuing relevance for our times.
The book found international appeal, and it is said that even the Khedive of Egypt and Sudan had several passages from it engraved into the walls in his palace.
Sakichi Toyoda, founder of Toyota, is also said to have been greatly influenced by the book, so that Smiles’ advice has found its way into Toyota’s vocational institutes.
Self-help appeal
The title of Smiles’ book produced a whole genre that appeared in the 20th century and persists today: self-help books to improve one’s lot. These books now come in all sizes and shapes, all offering tips for a better something: better health, better love life, better business and, generally, a better life.
Smiles’ book, it turns out, is full of other quotable quotes, from others as well as his own. He drew from a wide range of sources, from the Bible (“Seest thou a man diligent in his business? He shall stand before kings,” from Proverbs of Solomon) to philosophers, both classical and those from his times (“The worth of a State, in the long run, is the worth of the individuals composing it,” from John Stuart Mill).
As in the many best-selling self-help books available today, Smiles’ appeal comes from his use of “real-life” examples, much like modern business schools do. Smiles focused on short case studies of successful scientists, artists, business people and industrialists. The subtitle of his book is “with Illustrations of Conduct and Perseverance,” all converging to argue his case about the importance of developing individual character. The core of a strong character, he wrote, are “truthfulness, integrity and goodness”—really abstract terms, which would mean nothing without the habits that Smiles pushes, mainly diligence and perseverance.
I suspect that many of those who bought his book were parents because much of his writing looks into the strengths and weaknesses of the educational system. He wrote extensively about the importance of education and the development of the mind, but also argued for physical education by quoting Daniel Malthus: “I think myself that the better half, and much of the most agreeable part, of the pleasures of the mind, is best enjoyed while one is upon one’s legs.”
Smiles also believed in the value of what we would call vocational education today or what he described as “the use of hands and tools.” Our Don Bosco schools will love the way Smiles praised this kind of education, arguing that the working classes have an advantage over the leisure classes (the rich) because they have more opportunities to acquire manual dexterity as well as “impart the ability of being useful, and implant in them the habit of persevering physical effort.”
Habit, character, destiny
I could quote much more from Smiles’ book, but I want to talk more about his philosophical outlook. He was a government reformer, mainly arguing for fewer laws and more efforts to develop individuals, primarily character. For this, he has been criticized as emphasizing the individual too much, maybe even to the point of blaming poverty on the poor themselves—that is, if you’re poor it’s because you didn’t work hard enough.
But Smiles was also critical about “laissez-faire capitalism,” where the government keeps its hands off businesses and allows them to do whatever they want. He also criticized “the worship of power, wealth, success, and keeping up appearances”—pakitang-tao again, which I wrote about recently.
The conclusion of Smiles’ book offers a message for our times, as parents become obsessed with thinking that the best education depends on one’s choice of school. Smiles warned: “The best culture is not obtained from teachers when at school or college, so much as by our own diligent self-education… Hence parents need not be in too great haste to see their children’s talents forced into bloom. Let them see to it that the youth is provided, by free exercise of his bodily powers, with a full stock of physical health; set him fairly on the road of self-culture; carefully train his habits of application and perseverance; and as he grows older, if the right stuff be in him, he will be enabled vigorously and effectively to cultivate himself.”
That last quote should make educators think hard, too, about how we might educate the next generation of parents to take a more active role in developing their children’s potential and ability to cultivate themselves.
The advice on sowing and reaping is also appealing to social scientists like myself, who argue that we cannot always blame government and social structures for all our problems. Instead, we need to look at culture, which includes the way we inculcate habits (kaugalian in Filipino) and character. Smiles proposed that we link thoughts to acts, acts to habit, habit to character, and character to destiny. It reminds me of how one of my mentors, Dr. Alfredo Bengzon, constantly emphasized that to transform society, one needs to get people to think differently first, and then have that thinking shape feeling, which then shapes behavior.
Smiles’ formulation should also make us think differently about destiny, which isn’t some given fate over which we have no control. We can shape our destiny, as individuals, and as a nation.
Beyond dollars and pesos then, we should be thinking of national development in terms of individuals and families, charting their own courses, maybe even itineraries, but with a collective compass.
(The original version of Smiles’ “Self-Help” is downloadable, for free, from Gutenberg.org. Someone should think about doing a local adaptation, in local languages.)
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E-mail: mtan@inquirer.com.ph