366 
EMPLOYMENT PSYCHOLOGY 
or even one flange of one finger, it would ruin your pos 
sibilities as a musician and undo the work of years spent 
in training.” Instead of allowing the young man to take 
a chance, therefore, he exerted himself to find a position 
in which this danger was absent. Now, in a less obvious 
way, every case of employment involves a determination 
of the applicant’s self-interest. The whole aim of selection 
is to select the right man for the right place, and naturally, 
no man is in the right place until his own interests as 
well as the interests of his employer are being furthered. 
These elements of an applicant’s point of view are fun 
damental and are common to all normal applicants. It 
does not require a psychologist to see them or to acknowl 
edge their truth, any more than it requires a mathema 
tician to see that things equal to the same thing are equal 
to each other, or that 2 plus 2 equals 4. However, though 
any man may recognize self-esteem and self-interest as 
fundamental factors in the human equation it by no 
means follows that this knowledge enables him to under 
stand the particular individual or to achieve the individ 
ual’s point of view. Just as the knowledge of the axioms 
is only the first step in becoming a mathematician, so 
the knowledge of these fundamental facts of human 
nature is only a beginner’s step in becoming a master of 
the human equation. In order to approximate the view 
point of the particular applicant it is essential to make a 
much more thorough and painstaking study of human 
nature. It is necessary to study human equations as 
systematically and scientifically as the mathematician 
studies the many kinds of mathematical equations. For 
there is an endless number and variety of human equa 
tions or viewpoints, as we saw when we tried to imagine 
ourselves in the position of an applicant and could not