1Yahweh, my heart isn’t haughty, nor my eyes lofty; nor do I concern myself with great matters, or things too wonderful for me. 2Surely I have stilled and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with his mother, like a weaned child is my soul within me. 3Israel, hope in Yahweh, from this time forward and forever more.
This short psalm is a portrait of someone who has stopped straining after things too big for them. The image is of a weaned child resting against its mother, no longer fussing for what it wants, simply content to be near. There is relief in admitting our limits. Today might hold a little more peace if we set down one question we were never meant to answer.
One day when a discussion had arisen on the question whether the wise man could stoop to hold opinion, and Sphaerus had maintained that this was impossible, the king, wishing to refute him, ordered some waxen pomegranates to be put on the table. Sphaerus was taken in and the king cried out, "You have given your assent to a presentation which is false." But Sphaerus was ready with a neat answer. "I assented not to the proposition that they are pomegranates, but to another, that there are good grounds for thinking them to be pomegranates. Certainty of presentation and reasonable probability are two totally different things." Mnesistratus having accused him of denying that Ptolemy was a king, his reply was, "Being of such quality as he is, Ptolemy is indeed a king."
R. D. Hicks, 1925
Sphaerus came from the Bosporus region and studied under Zeno and then Cleanthes. He later went to Alexandria, to the court of Ptolemy Philopator, around 220 BC. His many books, on ethics, the passions, kingship and Heraclitus among other subjects, are lost. We know him through the biographical and doctrinal summaries of Diogenes Laertius, a compiler of the third century AD, and through scattered later reports.
Sphaerus did not claim never to be fooled. He claimed only that he had been careful about what he agreed to. He had agreed to 'this looks very likely to be a pomegranate', and he had not agreed to 'this is a pomegranate'. Most of our daily mistakes come from letting the second claim slip in under the first. We say 'she ignored me' when we know only that she did not reply, or 'it's a disaster' when we know only that the first numbers look bad. The Stoic skill here is modest but useful. You act on the best appearance, and you keep a little space between what you saw and what you declare to be true.
PracticeToday, the next time you catch yourself stating something as fact about another person's motives or about how things will turn out, rephrase it silently as 'it appears that...' and note what you actually know. If you can check it with one question or one look, do that before you act.
William Wrigley Jr. started with soap and ended up in gum. He did it by noticing which of his freebies customers wanted more than the product.
In 1891, William Wrigley Jr. arrived in Chicago from Philadelphia with $32. He was 29 and had been a travelling soap salesman since he was 13. His plan was to sell Wrigley's Scouring Soap, a product from his father's line. Soap was a crowded, low-margin trade, so he sweetened each sale with a free gift: a can of baking powder.
Customers cared more about the baking powder than the soap. Wrigley took the hint and started selling baking powder. To keep the sweetener going, he now needed a new free gift, and in 1892 he chose chewing gum. He packed a couple of packs of it with each can. Gum was cheap, small, and easy to ship, and buyers kept asking for it. Within a short time he dropped soap and baking powder and sold only gum. He brought out Juicy Fruit and Wrigley's Spearmint in 1893.
A gift was a useful test of demand. A price can't tell you much about whether people want a product, but a freebie that people ask for by name tells you a great deal. Wrigley also gave retailers premiums such as clocks and coffee grinders, scaled to the size of their orders. The habit he'd picked up on the road, of winning over the dealer first, stayed with him.
Advertising was the other bet. It nearly sank him, because it was expensive and he lost heavily on it for a time. Then the Panic of 1907 pushed ad rates down, and he bought far more space while competitors cut back. By 1908 Spearmint was selling more than $1 million a year, and by 1911 it was reportedly America's best-selling gum. In that same year he took over Zeno Manufacturing, which made his gum, and formed the Wm. Wrigley Jr. Company.
RememberCustomers will tell you what your real product is if you watch which free extra they ask for.
Read nextDaniel Robinson, 'Marketing Gum, Making Meanings: Wrigley in North America, 1890–1930' (Enterprise & Society, 2004)
Source: JSTOR Daily, summarising Daniel Robinson's article; Encyclopaedia Britannica on William Wrigley Jr.