47. Scott Nicholson almost sidestepped the recession. His plan was to become a Marine Corps second lieutenant. He had spent the summer after his freshman year in“platoon leader"training.Last fall he passed the physical for officer training,andwas told to report on Jan. 16.

4. On the other hand, maybe the employees were selfish, mean, and ill-mannered. Maybe this. Maybe that. I Don't know any more about it than you do. But I do know what Dr. Samuel Johnson said :“Gratitude is a fruit of great cultivation. You do not find it among gross people.”

3. Instead of wallowing in resentment and self-pity, he might have asked himself why he didn't get any appreciation. Maybe he had underpaid and overworked his employees. Maybe they considered a Christmas bonus not a gift, but something they had earned. Maybe he was so critical and unapproachable that no one or cared to thank him. Maybe they felt he gave the bonus because most of the profits were going for taxes, anyway.

2.“An angry man, ”said Confucius, “is always full of poison.”This man was so full of poison that I honestly pitied him. He was about sixty years old. Now, life-insurance companies figure that, on the average, we will live slightly more than two-thirds of the difference between our present age and eighty. So this man—if he was lucky— probably had about fourteen or fifteen years to live. Yet he had already wasted almost one of his few remaining years by his bitterness and resentment over an event that was past and gone. I pitied him.

1.I recently met a business man in Texas who was burned up with indignation. I was warned that he would tell me about it within fifteen minutes after I met him. He did. The incident he was angry about had occurred eleven months previously, but he was still burned up about it. He couldn't speak of anything else. He had given his thirtyfour employees ten thousand dollars in Christmas bonuses—approximately three hundred dollars each—and no one had thanked him.“I am sorry, ”he complained bitterly, “that I ever gave them a penny!”