Three Magic Words - U.S. Andersen

than we are receiving, or receiving more than we are giving, but in the end the flow always balances. We never get the better of anything, nor are we ever dealt the worst. There are no bargains in living, nor is anyone duped except by himself.

Mutual exchange is always with us; it is life itself; and he who recognizes this will spend his hours developing his capacity to serve and build and create and give. “Whosoever compels thee to go a mile,” said Jesus, “go with him twain.” No service that you perform can possibly go unrewarded. And no disservice that you perform can possibly go unpunished. The law of mutual exchange is the law of morality, of sin and punishment, of righteousness and reward.

How best can we serve? The answer is by creating, never by competing. We serve neither ourselves nor humanity by competing for another man’s job, another manufacturer’s market, another man’s business. We serve by creating new jobs, new markets, new means, newmethods. The magic that makes each of us what he is springs from an inexhaustible source.

We are creative creatures, umbilically tied to the creative power of God. We create by our thoughts, miraculously, each moment of every day. Beneath the level of our consciousness there lies an infinite pool of knowledge upon which we may draw for every project we have the courage to embark upon. Always “God gives threads to those who spin a web,” and he smiles on those who dare and aspire. No man is denied this creative power. It is the foundation, the root, the very essence of each of us. By working with it we are carried to dazzling heights; by opposing it we wither our lives in endless rounds of futility.

The secret which every intellectual man quickly learns—that beyond the energies of his possessed and conscious intellect he is capable of a new energy (as of intellect doubled upon itself), by abandonment to the nature of things; that beside his privacy of power as an individual man, there is a great public power upon which he can draw, by unlocking, at all risks, his human doors, and suffering the ethereal tides to roll and circulate through him; then he is caught up into the life of the Universe, his speech is thunder, his thought is law, and his words are universally intelligible to plants and animals.

—Emerson THE WONDERFUL BANK I often engage in buying and selling oil properties, and occasionally someone will ask, “How do you figure you are rendering creative service when people sometimes buy oil properties from you without realizing a return on their investment?”

I usually answer, “Everyone gains in some manner.” All men benefit from the development of the petroleum industry—through heating, transportation, plastics, to name only a few—and the interchange of oil lands is an integral part in the