The Last Thursday in September

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Back in the old town, where two saddlers stitched the same harness for the same farms, and one ended the year with a round worth four pounds a month while the other had begun four things and kept none of them.

Two saddlers in one town, the same oak-bark leather off the same tanner, the same beeswax, the same thread.
Both began a Thursday round in March, collecting harness off the farms and returning it mended the week after.
One wrote two lines inside his order book before the first Thursday and did not look at them until September.
One ran his round on his feelings, which the weather and the week's takings took turns at governing.
By Christmas the first was calling at nineteen farms, and the second had given it up in April and three other things since.
What did the two lines do that the feelings could not?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two saddlers, in a town I have never named. Both worked at a clamp by the window, the smell of neat's-foot oil in the room and a pot of wax and resin going hard on the stove. Both bought their leather off the tanner by the river, both could put a hand on a trace and tell you how many winters it had left, and neither was the better workman.

Their trade came the same way, which was in, through the door, when something broke. A collar gone at the seam, a girth worn thin, plough reins that should have been seen to in February and were brought in during sowing. Good work, and all of it waiting on somebody else deciding to walk down the hill with an armful of leather.

In the February of that year both men had the same idea, which was to stop waiting. A cart, a Thursday, a circuit of the farms up the valley, collecting what wanted mending and bringing it back the week after.

The first saddler wrote two lines inside the cover of his order book before the first Thursday. Twenty-six weeks, to the last Thursday in September, and no decision before it. Count the pieces collected each Thursday and the money the round brings in each month, and do not count the first six weeks at all. Underneath, in smaller writing, one condition: if the round failed to cover the hire of the cart and the boy for three Thursdays running he would stop it there and then, date or no date.

March was wet and the lanes were bad. Four pieces the first Thursday, three the second, one of those a strap he mended for nothing to be civil. By the fifth Thursday he was taking seven, and in June eleven, because the farms had begun putting harness aside on a Wednesday evening knowing a cart was coming. In August, the harvest harness all wanting sound in the same fortnight, he took twenty-three pieces in a day and turned the boy round for a second load. On the last Thursday in September he read his own two lines and spent the evening adding up. The round had paid for itself by the middle of May. He kept it, raised his figure for the far end of the valley, and that was the whole of the decision.

The second saddler began on the same Thursday in March and had the same wet lanes. Four pieces, then three. On the third Thursday it rained from eight until four, the cart came back with two collars in it, and sitting in a wet coat that evening he decided the valley did not want the thing and the valley had told him so. He stopped it in April.

In May he took a stall at the Tuesday market and gave it up in June after one poor fair day. In July he ordered three hundred handbills, which were still in their paper in October. In September he resolved to open an hour earlier, and did, for nine days. Four reasonable notions, not one of them given long enough to tell him anything.

And here is the half nobody notices. All that year the second saddler opened on Saturday afternoons, as he had since his father's time. It brought him almost nothing, it cost him the only afternoon he had, and he had never set a date on which he would ask whether it was worth doing. The things he judged by feeling lasted three weeks. The thing he never thought to judge at all had lasted thirty years.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

Before you begin a thing, write down how long you will give it and what you will count, because a trial with no end and no measure is settled by your mood on the worst day of it. The decision gets made either way. The only question is whether it is made by you in a dry room beforehand, or by a wet Thursday afterwards.

This works because the earliest weeks of anything new are the most expensive and the least informative. You are slow at it, nobody knows it is happening, and the ordinary bad luck of weather and timing has not had a chance to average out. Judge on that evidence and you are not judging the idea, you are judging your first attempt at it on a poor day. The date set in advance does nothing clever. It moves the verdict to the point where there is something to be a verdict about.

There is a second benefit, quieter and worth as much. A man who has settled when he will judge a thing is free to work at it in the meantime. The second saddler paid a tax on every venture he began, the tax of asking each evening whether it was working, and that question takes its energy from the effort it interrogates.

You will be offered persistence as a whole virtue, usually by somebody with something to sell, and it is not one. Persistence with no measure is stubbornness that has had a good run, and the resolve that carried the first saddler's round through a wet March would have carried those Saturday afternoons to the grave. Grit is not what separated the two men. One had a test and the other had a temperament. A rule for stopping is a kindness in the other direction too, since stopping on a date you set in February is a plan being followed rather than a man giving up, and much of what keeps traders in dead ventures is the dread of looking like a quitter. It helps to have settled beforehand what the money already spent is worth, and the answer is that it gets no vote.

Two cautions. First, a trial period is not permission to ignore the unmistakable. Put a condition under the date, as the first saddler did, naming the news that would stop you tomorrow, so that you never confuse a wet fortnight with a cart that loses money every time it goes out. Second, the measure must be something the thing itself governs and you can count. A collection round is judged on pieces collected and money brought in, not on the year's takings, into which a hundred other causes pour. Set the length honestly as well. Six weeks on a round that depends on harvest tells you nothing, and three years on a market stall is not patience but a hiding place. Ask what one full cycle of the thing is, a season or a harvest or a dozen attempts, and give it that. How much deliberation the setting of it deserves depends, as ever, on whether the decision can be walked back.

Three questions, and the first wants doing tonight:

1. What did you stop last year without a figure? Name the two or three things you began and abandoned, and write beside each what you would have needed to see, and by when, to call it a fair test. One of them, I expect, was stopped in a wet March.
2. What are you still doing that has never had a review date? Go through the standing habits of your week, the opening hours, the subscription, the customer you drive nine miles to, and put a date in next year's diary against each. What quietly costs you is never what you are worrying about.
3. What are you starting this week? Before you start it, write the date you will judge it, the one figure you will judge it by, and the condition that would stop it sooner. Two lines and a third, inside the cover, in ink, where you will have to look at them.

The Answer to the Riddle

What did the two lines do that the feelings could not?

They took the verdict out of the hands of the worst day. Both saddlers had the same wet March, the same three-piece Thursday, the same sinking feeling in a wet coat at six in the evening. Only one had decided already, in a dry room in February, that such a feeling was not evidence and that the evidence would be counted in September. The lines did not make him braver. They made the question unavailable to him until it could be answered.

The verse:

Set down the day you mean to judge it, set it down before,
For courage in a wet March is a borrowed sort of thing.
The man who weighs on Thursday evening weighs the evening, not the trade,
And the trade he never weighed at all is the one that bleeds him dry.

Until next time. Go and write three lines inside the cover of your book for the next thing you begin: the date you will judge it, the figure you will judge it by, and the news that would stop it sooner.

P.S. Write one more thing beside the date, which is the figure you expect to find there. Nobody does this, and it is the cheapest education available to a trading man. In a year you will have six or seven such guesses with the true answer written under each, and you will know whether you habitually expect too much of a new thing or too little, and by roughly how much. That is worth more than any single trial it came out of.

Also in the archive: The Hour Nobody Claimed, Nine Weeks in a Tin and Settled in February.