The Expanded and Annotated My Life and Work

THE ROLE OF THE INDIVIDUAL IN THE 
ADVANCEMENT OF INDUSTRY
Ford’s statement that “a man’s real work is what he is chosen to do” is 
consistent with the Asian concept of karma or destiny, and also with the 
Roman concept of fatum. Fatum does not mean fate or fortune, but rather 
a divine calling. Paterno and Asbell (1989, pp. 43–45) explains it as follows 
with regard to Aeneas, the hero whose destiny was to found Rome:
Destiny, the fatum, the divine word, the inner voice, whatever you want to 
call it, tells you where you have to wind up and what you’re destined to do, 
but it doesn’t tell you how to get there or how to do it. … Through years of 
hardship and peril, Aeneas reluctantly but relentlessly heeds his fata until 
he founds Rome.
Paterno and Asbell emphasize that fatum does not include specific 
directions on how to achieve the desired goal, but only the absolute inner 
need to reach it. Ford (1922, p. 307) elaborates that a person who follows 
this path is an instrument of destiny, and an agent of the universe.
* * *
Faith is the sixth sense that completes all the others and it shows itself chiefly 
in loyalty to Duty, for Duty sums up all the creative work we do. Our career is 
our duty, and our duty is our contribution to life. Creative work is not a fine 
and pleasant frenzy; it is often doing what we would not choose to do, for we 
are chosen oftener than we choose. A man plodding along at what he knows 
to be his duty is an agent of the universe, in his right place.
* * *
If it was Henry Ford’s fatum to transform the United States into the 
wealthiest and most powerful nation on Earth, and to create a prosper-
ous middle class, he achieved it through diligent work and persistence. 
The latter personal characteristic includes a refusal to be beaten by tem-
porary setbacks, and to keep trying until one succeeds. Persistence and 
perseverance are, in fact, aspects of the quality that Niccolò Machiavelli 

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248  •  The Expanded and Annotated My Life and Work
called virtù. Ford (1922, p. 148) described its aspects as follows: “And the 
texture of a man is his vitality, his energy, his character, his courage and 
his rock-bottom brain power.” The lesson, therefore, is that a clear sense of 
fatum or destiny in combination with virtù leads to world-class success in 
any enterprise.
* * *
Every advance begins in a small way and with the individual. The mass can 
be no better than the sum of the individuals. Advancement begins within the 
man himself; when he advances from half-interest to strength of purpose; 
when he advances from hesitancy to decisive directness; when he advances 
from immaturity to maturity of judgment; when he advances from appren-
ticeship to mastery; when he advances from a mere dilettante at labour to 
a worker who finds a genuine joy in work; when he advances from an eye-
server to one who can be entrusted to do his work without oversight and 
without prodding—why, then the world advances! The advance is not easy. 
We live in flabby times when men are being taught that everything ought to 
be easy. Work that amounts to anything will never be easy. And the higher 
you go in the scale of responsibility, the harder becomes the job. Ease has its 
place, of course. Every man who works ought to have sufficient leisure. The 
man who works hard should have his easy chair, his comfortable fireside, his 
pleasant surroundings. These are his by right. But no one deserves ease until 
after his work is done. It will never be possible to put upholstered ease into 
work. Some work is needlessly hard. It can be lightened by proper manage-
ment. Every device ought to be employed to leave a man free to do a man’s 
work. Flesh and blood should not be made to bear burdens that steel can 
bear. But even when the best is done, work still remains work, and any man 
who puts himself into his job will feel that it is work.
And there cannot be much picking and choosing. The appointed task may 
be less than was expected. A man’s real work is not always what he would 
have chosen to do. A man’s real work is what he is chosen to do. Just now 
there are more menial jobs than there will be in the future; and as long as 
there are menial jobs, someone will have to do them; but there is no reason 
why a man should be penalized because his job is menial. There is one thing 
that can be said about menial jobs that cannot be said about a great many 
so-called more responsible jobs, and that is, they are useful and they are 
respectable and they are honest.
The time has come when drudgery must be taken out of labour. It is not 
work that men object to, but the element of drudgery. We must drive out 
drudgery wherever we find it. We shall never be wholly civilized until we 
remove the treadmill from the daily job. Invention is doing this in some 
degree now. We have succeeded to a very great extent in relieving men of 

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What We May Expect  •  249
the heavier and more onerous jobs that used to sap their strength, but even 
when lightening the heavier labour we have not yet succeeded in removing 
monotony. That is another field that beckons us—the abolition of monotony, 
and in trying to accomplish that we shall doubtless discover other changes 
that will have to be made in our system.