The Expanded and Annotated My Life and Work

THE ROLE OF SELF-RELIANCE
Modern management practitioners use the term internal locus of con-
trol for the characteristic that Ford now describes. The value of persis-
tence cannot be overemphasized. Ford himself did not succeed in his 
original car business, and he had to try more than once before it finally 
worked.
* * *
In clearing out the need for charity we must keep in mind not only the eco-
nomic facts of existence, but also that lack of knowledge of these facts encour-
ages fear. Banish fear and we can have self-reliance. Charity is not present 
where self-reliance dwells.

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200  •  The Expanded and Annotated My Life and Work
Fear is the offspring of a reliance placed on something outside—on a fore-
man’s good-will, perhaps, on a shop’s prosperity, on a market’s steadiness. 
That is just another way of saying that fear is the portion of the man who 
acknowledges his career to be in the keeping of earthly circumstances. Fear is 
the result of the body assuming ascendancy over the soul.
The habit of failure is purely mental and is the mother of fear. This habit 
gets itself fixed on men because they lack vision. They start out to do some-
thing that reaches from A to Z. At A they fail, at B they stumble, and at 
C they meet with what seems to be an insuperable difficulty. They then cry 
“Beaten” and throw the whole task down. They have not even given them-
selves a chance really to fail; they have not given their vision a chance to be 
proved or disproved. They have simply let themselves be beaten by the natu-
ral difficulties that attend every kind of effort.
More men are beaten than fail. It is not wisdom they need or money, or 
brilliance, or “pull,” but just plain gristle and bone. This rude, simple, primi-
tive power which we call “stick-to-it-iveness” is the uncrowned king of the 
world of endeavour. People are utterly wrong in their slant upon things. They 
see the successes that men have made and somehow they appear to be easy. 
But that is a world away from the facts. It is failure that is easy. Success is 
always hard. A man can fail in ease; he can succeed only by paying out all 
that he has and is. It is this which makes success so pitiable a thing if it be in 
lines that are not useful and uplifting.
If a man is in constant fear of the industrial situation he ought to change 
his life so as not to be dependent upon it. There is always the land, and 
fewer people are on the land now than ever before. If a man lives in fear 
of an employer’s favor changing toward him, he ought to extricate himself 
from dependence on any employer. He can become his own boss. It may be 
that he will be a poorer boss than the one he leaves, and that his returns will 
be much less, but at least he will have rid himself of the shadow of his pet 
fear, and that is worth a great deal in money and position. Better still is for 
the man to come through himself and exceed himself by getting rid of his 
fears in the midst of the circumstances where his daily lot is cast. Become a 
freeman in the place where you first surrendered your freedom. Win your 
battle where you lost it. And you will come to see that, although there was 
much outside of you that was not right, there was more inside of you that 
was not right. Thus you will learn that the wrong inside of you spoils even 
the right that is outside of you.
A man is still the superior being of the earth. Whatever happens, he is still