Temperance

Temperance gives a useful measure of enough

You have reached your monthly sales target. A customer needs a basic printer for occasional letters, and you have found one that fits. Beside it, the premium ink subscription comes with a large promotional rosette. You begin the extra pitch, then stop: this customer would scarcely use the first delivery before the next arrived. You put the rosette back and explain the simpler purchase. The ink has ambitious plans for a correspondence that does not exist.

An illustrative scene.

Temperance: finding the balance

A sales employee can earn an extra reward by pressing a subscription the customer is unlikely to use.

A frequent user might benefit from the subscription. Temperance asks whether wanting the extra gain has distorted this judgment, not whether the sale is larger.

What Temperance makes possible

A well-matched purchase gives the customer equipment they can use and maintain. The employee can enjoy skilled service, a completed task and fair reward without turning each success into an unfinished demand for more. That disposition also helps a team discuss targets in terms of the work they are meant to encourage.

Temperance in ordinary life

A team incentive

Ask what useful result the measure rewards, and what it leaves out.

An optional upgrade

Compare the extra feature with a use you actually have.

Nearby virtues, different work

Integrity

Integrity keeps an ethical commitment in the decision. Temperance examines an appetite even where no stated rule has been broken.

Self-Command

Self-Command restrains an impulse; Temperance cultivates the larger pattern of wanting and enjoying.

Temperance and its counterfeits

Prestige through austerity

Conspicuous self-denial counterfeits Temperance when looking superior becomes another appetite.

How to cultivate Temperance

1. Name the purpose of the additional sale, feature or expansion.

2. Notice when the attraction is chiefly being able to say “more.”

3. Let a suitable offering count as a finished success.

Try it today

Review one optional feature in an ordinary tool you use. Identify what already meets your purpose before considering an upgrade.

Questions worth returning to

• What would I recommend if this extra sale did not affect my reward?
• What is worth enjoying about a job that is already well done?

Keep the practice proportionate

Quotations and further reading

Seven readings, one for each day. All remain available here. Historical arguments and fictional dialogue are identified in their source notes.

1. I have seen your nobler aspirations fall off one by one, until the master-passion, Gain, engrosses you.

   Charles Dickens · A Christmas Carol
   Stave II, The First of the Three Spirits; paragraph beginning ““You fear the world too much,” she answered, gently. “All your other hopes have merged int…”
   Belle, in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol · Project Gutenberg #46, with original 1843 John Leech illustrations and December 1843 preface; exact underlying text imprint not specified.

   Belle challenges Scrooge’s displacement of other hopes by gain. The sales scene asks whether a bonus has displaced the customer’s actual purpose. This is a fictional character’s diagnosis, not Dickens issuing business advice.

2. We must feel while we are working that the time will come when we shall not have to work.

   William Morris · Signs of Change
   SIGNS OF CHANGE / p. 141USEFUL WORK VERSUS USELESS TOIL.; paragraph beginning “I have put the hope of rest first because it is the simplest and most natural part of our…”
   William Morris · Longmans, Green & Co., London, New York and Bombay, 1896; Project Gutenberg #3053 transcriber identifies this edition.

   Morris makes rest part of worthwhile work rather than an obstacle to it. This supplies a distinct aspect of enough alongside the sales page’s resistance to endless additions.

3. But it is not merely the quantity and value of the produce that is entitled to consideration, but the improvement of the condition of the population by whom this great branch of industry is conducted.

   Samuel Smiles · Self-Help
   CHAPTER III. The Great Potters—Palissy, Böttgher, Wedgwood.; paragraph beginning “The result of Wedgwood’s labours was, that the manufacture of pottery, which he found in t…”
   Samuel Smiles · Popular Edition, John Murray, London, 1897; Project Gutenberg #935.

   Smiles broadens the assessment of manufacture beyond volume and value sold. The employee’s target should remain connected to useful service and the lives of those doing the work. His surrounding historical assessment is celebratory and needs independent factual checking if used as evidence about conditions.

4. Seek not proud riches, but such as thou mayest get justly, use soberly, distribute cheerfully, and leave contentedly. Yet have no abstract nor friarly contempt of them.

   Francis Bacon · Essays
   THE ESSAYS OR COUNSELS, CIVIL AND MORAL, / Of Riches; paragraph beginning “I CANNOT call riches better than the baggage of virtue. The Roman word is better, impedime…”
   Francis Bacon · Project Gutenberg #575 transcription; underlying print edition not specified in the preserved capture.

   The paired sentences distinguish measured acquisition and use from contempt for all gain. That supports recommending an addition when it genuinely serves a customer while refusing an unsuitable one.

5. A purchase made at the lowest price will be dear, if it be a superfluity.

   Samuel Smiles · Thrift
   A FABLE. / CHAPTER II. / HABITS OF THRIFT.; paragraph beginning “Many persons are diligent enough in making money, but do not know how to economize it,—or…”
   Samuel Smiles · Fiftieth Thousand, John Murray, London, 1892; Project Gutenberg #14418.

   Smiles separates cheapness from usefulness. The subscription’s bargain price cannot make unused ink a suitable purchase; the surrounding blame of improvidence is not a judgment about this customer’s character.

6. Hence, it follows, that if a thing is to be useful, it must be not only of an availing nature, but in availing hands.

   John Ruskin · Unto This Last and Other Essays on Political Economy
   UNTO THIS LAST: / ESSAY IV. / AD VALOREM.; paragraph beginning “Hence, it follows, that if a thing is to be useful, it must be not only of an availing nat…”
   John Ruskin · Ward, Lock & Co., London, Melbourne and Toronto, 1912; Project Gutenberg #36541.

   Ruskin makes usefulness depend on the recipient as well as the object. The ink supply may be useful to another customer while being excessive for this one. “Availing” means effective; the note must not imply the customer lacks personal worth.

7. The stipend is a due and necessary adjunct, but not the object, of his life, if he be a true clergyman, any more than his fee (or honorarium) is the object of life to a true physician. Neither is his fee the object of life to a true merchant.

   John Ruskin · Unto This Last and Other Essays on Political Economy
   UNTO THIS LAST: / ESSAY I. / THE ROOTS OF HONOUR.; paragraph beginning “Observe, the merchant's function (or manufacturer's, for in the broad sense in which it is…”
   John Ruskin · Ward, Lock & Co., London, Melbourne and Toronto, 1912; Project Gutenberg #36541.

   Ruskin’s comparison allows necessary remuneration while distinguishing it from the purpose of the work. The sales employee can earn a living and take satisfaction in a useful sale without treating the next bonus as the governing aim. The paragraph’s later extreme demand for sacrifice is not adopted.

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