Self-Help

"The author Samuel Smiles was a Scot who lived in mid-19th century London. His book promoted the Puritan way of life, propagating both the virtues of early Victorian enterprise as well as its author’s own social idealism. An interesting aspect of the Smiles thesis is that he did not regard self-help as selfish – the concept was indissolubly bound up with service to others. The British, who had created the Puritan managerial culture and gave it to America, largely abandoned it in the mid-Victorian era, a century before America. However, it survived and prospers in distant Japan, in part because of Smiles’s book. Within a year of first publication in English, Self-Help had been translated into Japanese, whereupon it became one of ‘the founding texts’ of the Meiji era, the period when Japan rose to be a world power. Smiles’s book inspired a peasant farmer, Sakichi Toyoda, to found a company to manufacture textile machinery; today Sakichi’s great-grandson, Akio Toyoda, chairs its successor, Toyota Motor."