Competition is. In every business, no matter how small or how large, someone is just around the corner forever trying to steal your ideas and build his success out of your imagination, struggling after that which you have toiled endless years to secure, striving to outdo you in each and every way. If such a competitor would work as hard to originate as he does to copy, he would much more quickly gain success.

Alice Foote MacDougall

Categorized in : Success Struggle Business

Imagination is a valuable asset in business and she has a sister, Understanding, who also serves. Together they make a splendid team and business problems dissolve and the impossible is accomplished by their ministrations.... Imagination concerning the world's wants and the individual's needs should be the Alpha and Omega of self-education.

Alice Foote MacDougall

team business self

... hunger and cold, ill-health and pain are nothing. They pass. The thing that remains is ignorant criticism, well-meaning but futile advice, the contempt of a subordinate, the feelings of the underdog.

Alice Foote MacDougall

ill-health pain advice

Success of life depends upon keeping one's mind open to opportunity and seizing it when it comes.

Alice Foote MacDougall

inspiration success opportunity

Success is an absurd, erratic thing. She arrives when one least expects her and after she has come may depart again almost because of a whim.

Alice Foote MacDougall

erratic success may

Commercialism is the blemish on the fair face of American life. Fighting against the terrible conditions of the explorer and pioneer, our forefathers had little time to think of beauty. Hearts and heads became as hardened to the more gracious things of life as did their bodies against physical hardship. Little by little, as nature yielded before the dynamite of their wills, life began to express itself in the same hard terms, and the great commerce of a New World bent everything to its indomitable will.

Alice Foote MacDougall

fighting business heart

Despising cowardice in others, I wished to prove myself no coward. Believing in the good, the gentle, the beautiful things of life, I addressed myself to the sweet duty of keeping these attributes for my children's sake and my own. And in striving to provide a living for them, I found a success beyond my wildest dreams.

Alice Foote MacDougall

beautiful inspirational life

To me life means the growing of a soul. I do not know why this duty is imposed upon us. I merely know that it is, and I feel that we are given much latitude of free will.

Alice Foote MacDougall

soul life mean

a few hours with Beethoven are more restful than sleep.

Alice Foote MacDougall

hours music sleep

Not only is orderliness an economy; it produces rest.

Alice Foote MacDougall

orderliness economy order

for the poor the whole world is a self-constituted critic; your smallest action is open to debate. No secret place of your soul is safe from invasion.

Alice Foote MacDougall

secret-places soul self

When one is working out a problem ... life becomes duality. One's ego transacts the ordinary routine of things, as if the mind had an upper and lower story and the regular performance of the day's duties moved and motivated on the upper floor, while down below the all-absorbing problem toils silently, forcefully, toward its solution.

Alice Foote MacDougall

work-out ego mind

When one is altering the face of the universe one cannot remember small helpful acts.

Alice Foote MacDougall

helpful gratitude faces

For too many of us ease is far more soul-destroying than trouble.

Alice Foote MacDougall

soul trouble ease

Life means opportunity, and the thing men call death is the last wonderful, beautiful adventure.

Alice Foote MacDougall

beautiful mean death

There is romance in coffee. It comes from the ends of the earth, and goes to the far corners of man's habitation.

Alice Foote MacDougall

romance coffee men

That is the wearisome part of business - there is no peace, no sense of certain, permanent achievement, no stability. The unexpected, and usually the awful, is forever happening.

Alice Foote MacDougall

achievement business forever

You realize the futility of worry. You learn to hate the small and the little. Life is a pie which you cut in large slices, not grudgingly, not sparingly. You know your limitations and proceed to eliminate them; your abilities, and proceed to develop them. You are free.

Alice Foote MacDougall

pie cutting hate

In business everyone is out to grab, to fight, to win. Either you are the under or the over dog. It is up to you to be on top.

Alice Foote MacDougall

fighting dog winning

Perhaps nothing in all my business has helped me more than faith in my fellow man. From the very first I felt confident that I could trust the great, friendly public. So I told it quite simply what I thought, what I felt, what I was trying to do. And the response was quick, sure, and immediate.

Alice Foote MacDougall

trust business success

Really to succeed, we must give; of our souls to the soulless, of our love to the lonely, of our intelligence to the dull. Business is quite as much a process of giving as it is of getting.

Alice Foote MacDougall

lonely kindness success