He was particularly careful never to live up to his income; and as his
income increased he increased not the percentage of expenditure but the
percentage of saving. Thrift was, of course, inborn with him as a
Dutchman, but the necessity for it as a prime factor in life was burned
into him by his experience with poverty. But he interpreted thrift not
as a trait of niggardliness, but as Theodore Roosevelt interpreted it:
common sense applied to spending.
At forty, therefore, he felt he had learned the first essential to
carrying out his idea of retirement at fifty.
The second essential--varied interests outside of his business upon
which he could rely on relinquishing his duties--he had not cultivated.
He had quite naturally, in line with his belief that concentration
means success, immersed himself in his business to the exclusion of
almost everything else. He felt that he could now spare a certain
percentage of his time to follow Theodore Roosevelt's ideas and let the
breezes of other worlds blow over him. In that way he could do as
Roosevelt suggested and as Bok now firmly believed was right: he could
develop himself along broader lines, albeit the lines of his daily work
were broadening in and of themselves, and he could so develop a new set
of inner resources upon which he could draw when the time came to
relinquish his editorial position.
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