Saving the e-mail from going the way of the letter and becoming a lost art: how to write a quality e-mail and get a quality response.

Hello again, dear reader.

People often said that, letter writing is a lost art; well it's been my experience. Recently, that e-mail writing is also becoming a lost art as a work-at-home freelance writer. I am constantly dealing with e-mails. I swear, some days I check my inbox over 100 times a day. What I have recently noticed about e-mails however, is that people are already forgetting how to write professional e-mails using slang terms, bad punctuation and spelling, and then wondering why they don't get a response, to be absolutely fair. This could all be in my head. I mean, I am a semi professional writer. So maybe it's just me being a stickler for correct grammar and letter writing etiquette. That makes me think there's a problem with the way people are constructing e-mail the case. After all, you think this is one part of life that people should have mastered by now thanks to modern technology, however, just in case it's not just me being a stickler for proper e-mail writing etiquette and grammar, and there is something wrong with the way most people are writing e-mail these days. I thought today's conversation would be about how to write a quality e-mail and get a quality response in return...



How to write an email?
What’s next; a conversation, on how to tie your shoes?
I know, I know. Email is such a ubiquitous part of our lives that you might think that people would naturally have it down pat.
But having received thousands of emails over the past four years, I can say with certainty that frequency does not necessarily beget proficiency. Which is to say: a lot of people out there are pretty clueless about how to compose a good email. Even those hired as professional PR reps!
No matter how basic a life skill, it’s something you still have to learn. And unfortunately, nobody seems to be teaching young folks the components of an effective email, despite the fact that it forms the backbone of modern communication. Knowing how to write a good email—one that will actually get a response–is crucial to your success: it can make the difference between whether or not you get a job, find a mentor, get funding for an idea, or receive potentially life-changing advice.
You see, each email is essentially a pitch, even if you’re not literally selling a business idea. What you’re pitching is the idea that you’re worth responding to—and that can be a tough sell. The person to whom you’re writing may get dozens, even hundreds of emails every single day, and they can’t possibly give every single email the same time and attention; so just like with face-to-face pitches, these people develop ways of slotting their emails into two tracks—those that get a response and those that get kicked to the trash folder. What determines the track you get funneled to is whether or not you raise one of the recipient’s red flags; an email can be your first impression with someone, and since the recipient doesn’t have much to go on, he or she will be looking for little, subtle clues as to whether they should hit reply or delete. These red flags can be really small things—things that may not seem at all fair to you–but they’ve probably found that 8 out of 10 people who exhibit those characteristics aren’t worth responding to, as it ends up being a waste of their time.
The blog Think Simple Now did a great job of outlining the way the sender of the email and the recipient of the email have very divergent perspectives:
Observing the Receiver

• Gets a lot of email.
• May receive compliments regularly, if they are a public figure.
• Regularly gets asked a standard set of questions and favors.
• Does not have a lot of free time.
• Does not mind helping you, if it is fast.

Observing the Sender

• Spends a long time crafting the ‘perfect’ (-ly long) email.
• Believes that their request is original, unique, and special.
• Believes that they are the first to ask for such favors.
• Cannot imagine why anyone would turn them away.
• Desires to tell the whole story, explained from every angle, so that the listener can understand their point of view.

The key to getting a response to your email is to put yourself in the recipient’s shoes and tailor your email accordingly. How do you do that? Well below we outline some of the things we look for in determining whether or not an email is worthy of a response. Now, the language may seem a little harsh. But this is not one man’s personal’s pet peeves—these are the same things that business owners, agents, and newspaper editors have told me they use in evaluating their emails; these are the things folks already say behind your back, and there’s no use in keeping it from people for the sake of being “nice.”
Note: These guidelines are only for emails that you write when you’re hoping for something from the recipient, even if it’s just a response. If you’re just dashing off a quick note to pass along some information or share your appreciation, or are corresponding with someone you’re very familiar with, the rules really don’t matter very much.
Respect the recipient’s time and make sure the email is even necessary. Everyone’s time is precious. When you send an email, what you’re saying is, “What I have to say is worth five minutes of your time, time you could be spending on your business or with your family.”
So don’t waste the recipient’s time with a question that you can figure out yourself. Exercise some self-reliance! I’m amazed at the number of questions I get that could easily be answered with a 10 second Google search (indeed, it is tempting to respond with “Let me Google that for you…”). After you exhaust Google, search the person’s website. Check out their past articles, their FAQ, and their About page.
On AoM we accept guest post submissions, and right above our contact box we have a link to the “Write for AoM” page that describes all of our guest posting guidelines, one of which is:
“Submit your guest post using the form below. Don’t email us asking if you can write for us. It will just get deleted. If you’d like to write a guest post, write it up, and submit it using the form on this page.”
And yet day after day we still get emails from guys that say, “Hi! I was wondering if I could write a guest post for you.” I used to still respond to these emails, but I found that 9 out of 10 of the people who couldn’t be bothered to read the instructions, couldn’t write a good guest post, either.
Begin with a salutation. Starting straight off with the first sentence of your email makes you sound abrupt. Instead, begin with “Dear ____” (for a more formal email), or “Hi _____” for a more casual one. But not “Hey ____” unless you’ve already established a rapport and history with the recipient.
I think the tendency to leave off the salutation is strongest when using a contact form to submit your message. But keep in mind that even when you use a contact form, it arrives in the person’s inbox looking like any other email.
Type your email address correctly in the contact form. This probably seems like a complete no-brainer. But people will ask me for advice, I’ll spend 20 minutes thinking about their question and writing a thoughtful reply, and then when I hit send, I’ll get a delivery failure notice. Arg! That’s 20 minutes of my life that I’ll never get back.
Address the email to a specific person(s). Do your best to find out the name of the person who will be reading the email instead of saying just “Hey everybody” or “To Whom It May Concern.” Using a person’s name builds rapport since it makes your message seem more personal and less like spam. If there are a couple of people in charge, address the email to both of them. Since Kate and I run the site together, people who address their queries to “Brett and Kate,” instead of just “Brett” automatically get extra points.
Spell the recipient’s name right. Again, a no-brainer, right? Yet we get emails addressed to “Brent and Kay” all the time. Misspelling someone’s name kills your rapport with the recipient before they’ve even read the body of your email. It tells the recipient that you either don’t know much about them or aren’t very detail-oriented. And if you follow the spelling error with, “I’m such a big fan of yours,” you come off as rather disingenuous.
Build a bit of rapport before getting down to business. Just as in any kind of pitch, you want to create a bit of rapport with the person before you start talking business. It makes the recipient of your email a little more inclined to like you, hear you out, and want to help you. Keep it short and authentic. Here are some examples of rapport-building intros:
“I am a loyal fan who has been reading your website for three years. Because of AoM, I now take James Bond showers, shave with a safety razor, and write weekly love notes to my wife.”
“I have been a customer of Jim’s Sporting Goods for the past 20 years. My dad bought me my first mitt there when I was 7.”
“I am a great admirer of your research on the howler monkey. Reading your book made me want to come to this university and major in biology. Which is why I’m writing to you today…”
“As a fellow native of Austin…”
Something I’ve been noticing PR people do lately is to say something like, “You have a great site. I really enjoyed [article I clearly just picked off the front page one minute ago].” When rapport-building is obviously phony, it backfires. You want to say something so specific that the recipient knows you’re not sending the exact same generic message to lots of other people and that your interest in them is genuine.
Keep it short and to the point. Again, everyone’s time is precious. Don’t send someone a wall of text. Don’t give them your life story. Get right to the point in as few sentences as possible. You might think that giving the recipient as much detail as you can will make it more likely that he or she will respond to you, but the opposite is true. A giant block of text makes the recipient feel overwhelmed; they’d rather just delete it than deal with taking ten minutes to read and digest your tome. If your idea isn’t interesting enough to grab someone in just a few sentences, then you need to work on your idea, and if the advice you need requires multiple paragraphs to explain, you either need to do more research yourself first or it’s simply not a question you should be asking a stranger over the internet.
Make your request crystal clear. Even though you want to keep your email short, be sure to make whatever it is you’re hoping to get from the recipient as clear and specific as possible.
This is my least favorite kind of email:
Hi AoM:
I really enjoy your site. I feel like it is a great fit with what we do. We should do some kind of partnership or something. What are your ideas on how we can do that?
Sincerely,
Vague Vinny
Of course I don’t have any ideas about how we can work together…you just entered my mind ten seconds ago! If you are contacting me, it is your responsibility to take a look at the kind of things we already do and then come up with an idea you think we might like—a clear, concrete proposal. Give the recipient a pitch they can say yes or no to. If you’re asking a question, make that question as specific as possible, one that it won’t take the recipient very long to answer.
The shorter your email and the easier it is for the recipient to answer your question, the more likely you are to get a response.
Don’t be a tease. Now for my other least favorite email:
Hi Brett and Kate-
I have an awesome idea that can help you improve your website. Write me back if you want to hear more!
XOXO-
Huckstering Harry
Why would I waste my time writing you back if I don’t know whether or not I’d even be interested in your idea? Automatic delete.
If you have a website, link to it. Don’t tell me about your blog or website without linking to it. I know it would only take me 5 seconds to Google the name of your biz, but I’m not going to do it. It’s just one of those deal-breakers. Make things as easy as possible for the recipient.
And when you link to your site, make sure it’s up and running! Numerous times people have pointed me to their site, and when I clicked on it, the site was down for maintenance. Delete.
DON’T USE ALL CAPS. The universal sign of the crazy man. Using all CAPS make you seem like you’re shouting. Automatic delete.
or all lower cases. Yeah I know it’s 2012, and capitalization is so 20^th century. And maybe someday the young people of the world will rise up and do away with capitalization altogether. But until then, when you’re dealing with 29-year-old geezers like myself, you should capitalize things that need to be capitalized, otherwise you seem lazy and dopey. If you can’t be bothered to take the time to push the shift key on your phone, I can’t be bothered to take your email as seriously as other people’s.  I know, it’s not fair, but 8/10 emails from people who don’t capitalize are, in fact, pretty dopey emails.
Proofread and spell check. Read the email over a few times to make sure everything is right. Remember, this is your first impression with someone—make it a good one. I know a newspaper editor who throws a press release away as soon as she sees a mistake. Personally I’m not looking for perfection—I’ve thought some of my own emails were flawless when I sent them, only to look at them later and see egregious errors. But do the best you can, and at least spell words that are important to the recipient correctly. “I want to write about manlyness” won’t get you very far.
Close with a valediction. Ending your message without a valediction and your name makes you seem brusque. Close with “Sincerely _____,” or “Best __________.”
Return the favor.  If somebody takes time out of their day to offer you free advice, do whatever you can to support their website or business! For example if somebody runs a shoe blog and sells shoes too, and you ask him all sorts of questions about what shoes to wear with what, and he kindly answers you, then buy your shoes from him! Only a scalawag asks for advice from a small business owner who’s willing to talk to him and then takes his business to some giant impersonal website to save a few bucks.
Follow-up once. But just once. If you still don’t get a response, they’re not interested.

Embracing the power of a quiet professional: living with the satisfaction of a job well done in spite of the lack of fortune and fame.

Hello again, dear reader.

Today's conversation is one of those motivational and/or meditational exerts that I find on my late-night forays into the forgotten literary quarters of knowledge and wisdom located in the dusty corners of libraries, bookshelves, literary journals, and the Internet. Today's excerpt, stuck out in my mind, because it talks about the "display of energy." Of a person or as I like to think of it the "quiet professional" versus the glory hound, the quiet professional is the individual that toils away in secret. Trying to solve a problem which can be anything from curing cancer to preventing a child's nightmare by chasing monsters out from under the bed, to quiet professional goes about their work, seeking no accolades or praise in the assembly focused on reaching the goal. They have set for themselves the "glory hound" however, tries to accomplish their goal, large or small, simply to garner accolades and praise from the world at large. While they may indeed accomplish their goal, and do some good for the world that it is done is tainted by a desire for fame and fortune, and once fame and fortune has been achieved. The glory hound may no longer have the best interest of humanity at heart, whereas the quiet professional will continue to toil away at their task, keeping a genius in secret, because they derive all their joy and pleasure from simply completing a job well done and leaving the world, just a little bit better than when they found it "Long live the quiet professional!"

“Display of Energy”
From The Successful Man in His Manifold Relations to Life, 1886
By J. Clinton Ransom

Energy also displays itself in quietness. “The more noise the less power,” reads one of the principles of mechanics, and it is just as true of the physical and intellectual efforts of man. The great workers work quietly, often in obscurity. The world does not know that a great genius has labored, and that tremendous energy has been exerted, until it sees it in the results accomplished by years of toil.

The meditations of a Newton, the calculations of a Kepler, the discoveries of a Faraday, the inventions of a Galileo and a Herschel are never heralded to the world by the sound of trumpets and cymbals. Often-times the world does not know that a hero has lived, until he has died and passed from the stage of action. Indeed a great man must always labor unseen and un-honored for half a century before he can stand for a decade upon the mountain top. The greatest general America has ever known, was noted for his quietness and modesty of demeanor. The hero of a score of battles could hardly be distinguished by dress or manner, from the meanest soldier in the ranks, and U. S. Grant was never known to boast of a single deed of his. Washington was no less quiet, no less self-composed and no less retiring than Grant, but where Washington tread there thrones trembled, there the powers of tyranny were rebuked and silenced. The man who could marshal victory out of an army of farmers at Boston; who could outwit the brilliant generalship of a Burgoyne and a Cornwallis; who could successfully resist for eight long years the whole war-power of Great Britain, with a mere handful of determined patriots, was necessarily a great man, but there were no signs of greatness in the manner or daily speech of the “Father of his Country.” America’s greatest poet, in whom the energies of genius burned with marvelous vigor, was simple and quiet and tender as a child. Longfellow possessed great genius, great learning, great power; but he bore about him no visible signs of that power. His life was as quiet as a summer evening. The author of those tender songs that have thrilled the heart of the world could not boast. He could not exhibit, even to the eye of his friend, the pent-up energies of a poet’s heart. The marvelous power of great poetic genius was as quiet as the smooth-running rods and wheels of the famous Corliss engine. . . .

And thus we might go on “counting o’er earth’s chosen heroes,” and we should find them all earnest, determined, resolute men, who go to the great tasks of their lives, to pour out almost superhuman energies with the ease and quietness which is only born of power. The man who groans at a difficulty, sobs at a disappointment, cries out to the neighborhood every time he puts forth an effort, is like the man whom Sam Jones recently described: “When I hear some men speak or see them work, they remind me of a river steamboat, with a very large whistle and a very small boiler, so that every time the whistle blows the boat stops.”

How to have a productive discussion or meeting without the bias of negative solutions.

Hello again dear reader.

Today's conversation, is based on a talk I recently had a very good friend, that was lamenting the fact that they had trouble leaving business meetings, and that they could not get any new ideas. For many of the employees, instead they would get a regurgitation of one of the ideas previously mentioned with simply a slight "tweak" to the idea. I smiled and told my friend. "Maybe this happens, because you are so intimidating." My friend chuckled and said something to the effect; of they didn't think it looked tough enough to be intimidating. I agreed with the statement, which of course made my friend chuckle some more.

However, I decided to see if I could do a little research into exactly why people are reluctant to present new ideas in a business meeting (or any kind of group discussion for that matter) and to see whether it was the fault of the manager or person leading the meeting or discussion or whether it had something to do with a sort of groupthink mentality and the answer I found was surprising, it is sort of the fault of the leader and sort of the fault of the group at the same time, in essence, what happened to people start to judge a decision as being positive or negative. Based on the outcome and the bias that this outcome represents, because a decision that appears to be the most positive for a given situation during a certain span of time can ultimately have a negative long-term effect, the reverse of this is also true. A native decision within a given span of time can also have a positive outcome in the long run. So then the trick becomes not judging a decision based on its upcoming short-term, but rather to see where it fits into the structure of the project or discussion over the long term. To determine whether something will have a positive or negative effect, so hopefully by the end of today's discussion, and after reading the following scenario, you too, dear reader, will be able to lead your next meeting or group discussion and find positive solutions to a problem without basing your decisions solely on the short-term outcome.





You’re a manager of a division in your company. Your team’s been facing a vexing problem for months, and you call a meeting to hash out possible solutions to it.
Positioned at the head of a table around which your subordinates are seated, you spend 15 minutes laying out the main issue.
You then share what you think is the best plan to fix it.
Because you’re a democratic manager who understands the power of getting as much input as possible from diverse viewpoints, you now open the floor to suggestions.
Your team awkwardly stares at you or furrows their brows, feigning that they’re thinking of a solution. Finally, someone speaks up, but instead of offering any new ideas, they take an idea you proposed and tweak it slightly. More awkward silence. Another person agrees with the modified idea submitted by the brave soul who piped up first.
Thirty stilted minutes later, you adjourn the meeting, frustrated at your nincompoop, yes-men employees who couldn’t even suggest a single new bold idea to solve the knotty problem with which your division is grappling. “What am I even paying these people for?” you think resentfully.
But what if the problem isn’t the people you lead? What if the problem is you and one small but crucial mistake you consistently make when leading meetings? And what if you could easily correct that mistake to start eliciting much greater engagement?

The Negative Power of Resulting

 Retired professional poker player Annie Duke, shared a psychological bias that’s very common but can be disastrous to poker players (and the rest of us as well). It’s called “resulting,” and it’s when you judge the quality of a decision by its outcome. It’s a narrative fallacy: a decision can be good but still garner a bad result, because other circumstances, like luck, are in play. For example, in poker, it’s very possible to make the best possible decisions based on the cards you’re dealt, and still lose a hand. You can also make abysmal choices, and still win, thanks to luck.
Focusing on outcomes can affect your decision-making process in a negative way; as Duke told me, “it just ends up distorting everything. It’s like a huge gravity well on your decision analysis . . . It’s like putting blinders on. You can’t see past it.” This faulty thinking plays out in a couple ways.
After you’ve made a decision, if you base its quality or “rightness” solely on its outcome, then you might misjudge what was in fact a good decision that simply turned out poorly due to luck. You may hesitate to continue making the same kinds of decisions based on this short-term loss, this single toss of the coin, when in the long-term, over the course of many tosses; it would actually be to your advantage to do so.
But resulting also negatively impacts the process of making that initial decision in the first place. If in preparing to make a decision, you already feel 100% certain that you know the best possible outcome, then you’ll stop looking for alternative information and options, and, sensing that your mind is made up, other people will be unlikely to share contrarian opinions with you. You end up moving on an overly narrow, single-track course towards what you think is the desired result.
For this reason, Duke, argues, “what we actually want to do is be analyzing our decisions in absence of outcomes as much as possible.”

Why Resulting Ruins Your Meetings and How to Avoid This Mistake

So, what does all this have to do with running a meeting?
Well, as Duke explains, “the best way to avoid resulting is to not know the result.”
But that result is exactly what you telegraph when you offer what you think is the best possible solution to a problem, before soliciting your team’s feedback. By sharing your opinion first, you create a result in their heads. You give them the outcome.
Once this occurs, Duke says, a couple things happen:
“you end up actually creating a version of resulting, which is that once the leader has expressed their belief, people will reason toward that in the same way that they reason toward making an outcome make sense. You’ve created another kind of resulting, which is people will start to reason toward what the leader has stated as the absolute truth, number one.
Number two — when they state things with certainty, people in the room are much, much less likely to share information that might be contrary to whatever the opinion that’s been expressed is and there’s two reasons why they might not do that. One is that they might feel like they’re wrong. If they’re not 100% certain of their own beliefs, if they have any uncertainty themselves, if they think maybe we should be going a different way, but I’m only 40% on that, they’re not going to speak up for fear that it’s going to be, ‘You’re wrong,’ or ‘You’re disagreeable.’ . . . Or they’re afraid of telling the leader that they’re wrong. They’re afraid of saying, ‘No, I don’t agree with you.’ That they’re going to get in trouble for that and so they tend to keep their mouth shut.”
In other words, once you set the outcome, your subordinates are going to judge whether their own ideas are right or wrong, or good or bad, based on how much they align with yours. They won’t feel comfortable sharing ideas that don’t jive with yours, their thinking will default to the parameters you’ve already set, and at most, they’ll just says things that slightly modify what you already proposed.
Leaders tend to set definitive outcomes like this, Duke says, because “a lot of people think, ‘Well, in order to really be believable to my team, in order for them to believe that I have the right to be leading them, I need to be expressing things so certainly.’”
But in fact, people don’t always expect or even desire that leaders be sure about everything. On the contrary, they will appreciate being able to express their opinions and ideas in an open atmosphere.
So when you’re leading meetings in which you hope to solicit engagement and feedback, follow this simple rule: Do not share your opinion on possible solutions before asking for input from your team.
Simply state what the problem is and then open the floor up to suggestions. By not throwing out your suggestions at the start, you avoid the pitfalls that come with resulting and outcome bias. Team members will be more likely to think outside the box and not just within the confines of your preset opinions. And since you haven’t yet said what you think, there’s less anxiety about saying something that makes the boss look dumb in front of everyone.
If you notice people are still hesitant to engage, you can say something like “I don’t have any set opinions on this, folks, so please don’t hesitate to throw out your craziest ideas.” Encourage people to think in terms of probabilities — “Even if you’re just 40% sure of something, share that idea anyway.”
Try rectifying this common mistake at the next meeting you lead. You’ll be surprised by how much more engagement you’ll receive.

The importance of embracing danger and wanderlust for personal growth and the betterment of humanity's soul.

 

Hello again, dear reader.

 

Today's conversation is one of those interesting little exerts from a long forgotten in dusty piece of literature that I find on my late-night forays into the long forgotten and often hidden literary corners of the Internet. Today's excerpt is meant to inspire you dear reader, to develop a love for adventure and danger, all too often people think of the word "danger" and picture their life being imminent threat, while this is an accepted definition of danger. Of course, it is not the only definition experiencing a little danger in getting out of your comfort zone dear reader, is I think the ultimate purpose of life, there have been plenty of explorers and scientists that went on "dangerous" missions were conducted dangerous experiments. However, without these exploration missions or experiments, humanity might not have made such significant strides in the world of science and human knowledge. A little bit of danger can be a good thing, a taste of danger can send adrenaline coursing through the body and help you dear reader to appreciate all the richness of life. If only for a moment, so hopefully by the end of today's conversation, dear reader, you will be inspired to step out of your comfort zone and embrace the world with an eye and appreciation for the importance of embracing danger.

 

 

 

From The Business of Life
By Frank Crane
Published 1916

Danger includes War, Crime, and Adventure.
It is perhaps the primal human interest. Homer reeks with it. The Old Testament, the Eddas, and the Nibelungenlied are compact of it. Death, the supreme Danger, is particularly fascinating.
Digby Bell once said to me that he liked the kind of novel in which there was a murder in the first chapter, and the story “worked from that on up.” Men do not shrink from danger. They love it. They flee clubdom, luxurious leather chairs, highballs, and pussy-footed servants, to go hunt tigers in the wild, climb the dizzy Matterhorn, freeze in the Arctic ice-fields, where they get the scurvy and “spit out their teeth like stone,” or burn with fever in the tropic jungle.
Even the child is not deterred by danger. He loves to experiment with his safety, his health, and his life. Tell him a thing is perilous, and he longs to do it.
It’s the thrill he wants. And only danger can give it. He loves the swimming-hole so deep he may drown, and the loaded gun, and the green apples that may give him the colic.
The gambler does not want money. Give him a million dollars, and he will put it all on the next turn of a card. It is the excitement of that moment of peril he craves.
The essence of interest in every Game is Danger, if not of life and limb, at least the presence of sufficient uncertainty to make it a “sporting proposition.” The English and the Americans are gluttons for danger, and hence they are confirmed sports.
They conceive of everything as a game of chance. A lawsuit is not primarily to discover the facts and award justice, but one lawyer is pitted against another, and the public watches the contest with very much the same sensations it enjoys a prize-fight.
We cannot elect officials without making a game of it. So we speedily scrapped the decorous machinery our fathers devised for elections, organized opposing political parties, and proceeded to make it a game.
Crimes are alluring, and detective stories are fascinating, not because they are immoral, but because they appeal to our danger appetite. Criminals play with the highest stakes, liberty and life; and those of us too cautious for personal piracy like to read about it in “Treasure Island.” The greatest plays are tragedies and end in death, for death is the greatest of all dangers.
From the gentle old lady who “loves her murders” in the morning newspaper, to the sophisticated theatergoer who is best pleased when the curtain falls on plenty of gore, we are all human.
You have observed a curious thing: When this nation was about to enter the late war the country was consumed with enthusiasm, there was entire unanimity of spirit; our two million young men sailed blithely away and the rest of us cheered; but when the war was over and it came to making peace, immediately we fell apart and began quarreling: the Senate snarled; the soldiers complained; everybody seemed out of humor. As one wit expressed it, the Americans said, “Now the war is over, let’s go home and fight.” War, the first and greatest danger, appealed to us. Peace did not. Peace never did appeal to the human race. What it wants is Adventure.
And so long as peace is merely a negation, the stoppage of war, it will be the subject of infinite dissension, even as war produces the greatest social cohesion. Peace can never hope to have the popularity of war until it shall be made equally adventurous.
The human race is eternally young. Youth will have its way. The young man does not want to be safe. He wants to take a chance. He wants to play the game. And war is the most smashing, horrible, and grandiose game ever invented. We must stop it, but we must find a substitute.
It is for this reason the American people do not take kindly to Socialism, or any other system which proposes to make a man secure in his employment. If you were to offer the thousand workmen in your factory a guarantee that each of them could hold his job for the rest of his life, with few exceptions they would reject your proposition. For no American expects to stay in his present position. He is going to advance.
Every laborer feels he is a possible manager, owner, and millionaire. One reason why America has been so free from the atmosphere of militarism is that the ways of opportunity are all open. The soul has not been denied the danger-food it craves. When social conditions are fixed, as they are in the old world, and men are held down in the ruts of class, by and by there is an explosion. As a Western friend of mine expressed it, “Everybody just naturally wants to bust loose once in a while.” Peace cannot hope to cope with war until it also supplies opportunities for the people to “bust loose.”