Ford Ideals Author:Henry Ford Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: 'Swelled Head" in Business THERE is a disease known as "swelled head" which may be contracted in any line of activity, but which is particularly dangerous in ... more »business. Because of the inelegance of its name and the commonness of its occurrence among light and giddy youth, it is regarded not as a dangerous disease, but as something light, like the ailments of childhood. We know, however, how serious the ailments of childhood can be when they attack grown persons. If we were to be very strict about words, we should perhaps say that the term "swelled head" was hardly descriptive. If the head of the patient actually should enlarge and his brain power increase, the disease would not exist. It is the feeling of enlargement in heads that have not enlarged nor expanded at all, that constitutes the abnormal condition. That is to say, the condition described as "swelled head" is a delusion—the patient thinks he has expanded when he has not. The only element in him that has increased is his self-esteem, and when that increases out of proportion to everything else, there comes an unbalanced condition which is just as dangerous to his affairs as insanity is to society. This ailment is not confined to men in small and unimportant positions, although it is found there too; but it is frequently found among men whom the world thinks to be "big men" because they wear big titles and deal in big things. There would seem to be little reason for much swelled-headedness among the "big men" of today, for it is precisely in their fields that all the big failures and all the big humiliations have come. There is, of course, such a thing as a sense of self- satisfaction in one's work, a sense of being able to do the thing required, a sense of mastery, and a plain knowledge of having accomplishe...« less