The Go-Getter by Peter B. Kyne Book Review: The Blue Vase Test
The Go-Getter by Peter B. Kyne is a 1921 business parable of roughly 11,000 words about a wounded war veteran named Bill Peck who is handed a deliberately impossible errand and refuses to fail it. It teaches exactly one thing: the standard you hold when a task looks undoable. Kevin Trudeau recommends it, and it sits at the opposite end of his Training Balance Scale from every manifestation book on his list. You will finish it in one sitting. You will quote it for years.
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Under an hour to read. The standard outlasts the hour by decades.
The Go-Getter by Peter B. Kyne Book Review: The Short Verdict
- Published: 1921, as a novelette. A silent film followed in 1923.
- Author: Peter B. Kyne, a San Francisco novelist and a field artillery captain in the First World War.
- Length: about 11,000 words in five numbered sections.
- Reading time: under an hour, and it holds up on a second reading.
- Core claim: commitment is a decision made in advance, not willpower summoned at the obstacle.
- The device: the Degree of the Blue Vase, the most memorable hiring challenge in business fiction.
- Weakest part: the dated ethnic caricature in the middle telephone sequence.
- Our rating: 4.5 out of 5.
What The Go-Getter Actually Teaches
Who Peter B. Kyne was
Peter B. Kyne was born in San Francisco in 1880 and died there in 1957. He wrote adventure and business fiction and created the shipping magnate Cappy Ricks across a run of novels. During the First World War he served as a captain of Battery A, 144th Field Artillery. That matters here. He opens this book with a dedication to the man he calls his dead chief, Brigadier-General LeRoy S. Lyon, sometime commander of the 65th Field Artillery Brigade, 40th Division, who had died in February 1920, the year before the story appeared. The dedication is not decoration. The whole book argues for the one thing Kyne says Lyon both practiced and preached, which was loyalty to the country and to whatever task you were handed.
Inside the Ricks Logging and Lumbering Company
The setting is a lumber and shipping business, and the corporate detail matters more than it looks. Alden P. Ricks, called Cappy, sits above two companies: the Ricks Logging and Lumbering Company, run by Mr. Skinner as president and general manager, and the Blue Star Navigation Company, run by his son-in-law Captain Matt Peasley. Cappy is complaining to both men that nobody in his organization shows any initiative when a stranger asks to see him. Neither the logging side nor the shipping side has produced a man he can promote.
It is William E. Peck, an ex-private with his left forearm amputated halfway to the elbow, a leg that healed short, and an American Legion button in his lapel. A World War I veteran, turned down twice already by the men downstairs. So the whole story runs inside one office hierarchy: the owner sets the test, the lumbering company hands the new man the worst stock in the yard, and the shipping side refuses him a loan on the night everything depends on it. Every obstacle Bill Peck faces comes from inside his own employer.
Bill Peck sells himself before he sells anything else
Bill Peck does not ask for a job. He announces he has come to collect one. When Cappy asks why he is so confident, Bill Peck explains that before he can sell any product he first has to sell the manufacturer on the salesman, and that he is, at that moment, selling himself. "Quite right, sir," he tells the old man when Cappy says he talks like someone who does not expect to be refused. Cappy buys.
What follows is the part most summaries skip. Skinner starts Peck at the bottom on skunk spruce, a Humboldt County wood Cappy cheerfully describes as coarse, wet, heavy and foul-smelling, which is to say the stock nobody can move. Peck moves it. In Ogden he talked a retail yard Skinner had chased for years into sampling a carload of it, at a dollar above the price Skinner gave him. He also had engraved business cards in hand the same day he was hired, and told Cappy he had decided on the job a week earlier.
The Degree of the Blue Vase
Then comes the test the book is remembered for. On a Sunday evening Cappy asks Peck to fetch a blue cloisonné vase from a shop window and deliver it to his train stateroom by 7:55, before the eight o'clock departure.
Every obstacle is deliberate. The shop is not on the street Cappy named. When Peck finds it, the sign has been changed so the owner's name reads Cohen, then Cohn, then Cohen again, sending him through the B. Cohens of San Francisco and nine towns around the bay. The store is locked. A policeman is posted at the door so he cannot break the window. And the vase costs two thousand dollars cash on a Sunday night, in a city where Peck is a stranger and both his bosses refuse him a dime.
He misses the eight o'clock train. He does not stop, and he does not ask anyone to make it easier.
He puts up a platinum ring set with diamonds and sapphires as security against his own check, buys the vase, hires a pilot from a flying school at the Marina, flies south at midnight, lands in a stubble field in the Salinas Valley, twists a Sunday newspaper into a torch, and flags down the moving train at two in the morning. Cappy answers his stateroom door in a nightshirt.
Cappy calls it the Degree of the Blue Vase, and he says he gives it to every candidate for a senior post. Two men out of a field of fifteen had delivered. The vase was never the point. The Shanghai management job was.
The four words that carry the book
Peck's rage when he learns it was a setup is real and the book lets him have it. Then Cappy asks the only question that matters: why did you not quit? Peck answers that quitting would have been disloyal to his brigadier, a man whose brigade ran on a single motto. Told to do something, every officer and every private answered the same way: "It shall be done."
Not "I'll try." Not "let me see what I can do." The phrase removes the negotiation before it starts. Kyne's argument is that this is a decision made once, in advance, and then simply applied, which is why Peck never has to summon willpower at any point in his awful night. He already decided. He is only executing.
The last turn of the knife is the best writing in the book. Cappy asks who the brigadier was, and when Peck names him, Cappy goes quiet. Twenty-five years earlier that same man had been given the Degree of the Blue Vase and could not get the vase legitimately, so he put a cobblestone through the window, grabbed it, and ran a mile and a half before the police caught him.
Is The Go-Getter Just a Can-Do Attitude Story?
The Go-Getter by Peter B. Kyne gets sold that way, and the label undersells it. A can-do attitude is a mood, and moods do not survive the fourteenth phone call to the wrong B. Cohen. What Kyne is describing is narrower and more durable. Bill Peck does not face the challenge with a positive attitude. He faces it with a decision he made a week before anyone tested him.
A decision, not a positive attitude
Watch what he never does. He never gives himself a pep talk or a positive attitude speech. He never decides, at any point in that night, whether to keep going. The decision was made before he took the errand and everything after it is execution, which is why a man with one arm and a short leg can overcome an obstacle course built specifically to break him. A positive attitude asks you to feel a certain way while you work. Kyne asks you to settle the question once so you do not have to feel anything about it later. That is the difference between determination and enthusiasm.
The distinction has a practical edge. If a positive attitude is the engine, a bad morning is a reason to stop and you will need a fresh supply of enthusiasm at every one of the roadblocks. If commitment is a decision already made, a bad morning changes nothing, no matter how the day looks, because the question is closed. That is also why the four-word motto works and a can-do attitude poster does not. One is a policy, the other is a wish, and only one of them survives a Sunday night in a strange city.
The Go-Getter in Five Lessons
| Lesson | Where it happens in the story | What Kyne is arguing |
|---|---|---|
| Sell yourself first | Peck's opening interview with Cappy Ricks | Nobody buys your product until they have bought you. |
| Take the worst assignment | Skinner starts him on skunk spruce | The stock nobody wants is where a newcomer builds proof. |
| Decide before the obstacle | The brigade motto, "It shall be done" | Commitment made in advance costs no willpower later. |
| The obstacles are the test | The changed sign, the stacked Cohens, the posted policeman | Difficulty is often deliberate, and is measuring you. |
| Deliver late rather than not at all | Flagging the train at two in the morning | Missing the deadline is not permission to abandon the result. |
Common Criticisms of The Go-Getter
The caricature in the middle
This is a 1921 magazine story and it shows. The long telephone sequence hunting for the shop owner leans on dialect caricature of Jewish shopkeepers, which was ordinary humor in the popular fiction of the period and reads badly now. It is a handful of pages and it is genuinely the weakest material in the book. If period prejudice in old fiction ruins a book for you, this one will.
The loyalty runs one way
The loyalty Kyne celebrates runs upward, from employee to boss, and the reward comes from the boss. Peck's perseverance is real, but the man who benefits first is the owner who rigged the errand. Building something of your own, there is no Cappy Ricks to hand you the vase. You set the test and you administer it to yourself, which is harder and much less satisfying to read about.
There is no method, and no failed candidate gets a hearing
Kyne gives you a standard and a story, not a framework, not steps, and no exercises. There is nothing here to implement on Monday except a decision, so a reader who wants a method to achieve something specific will close it unsatisfied. The book also never asks about the thirteen men who failed to meet the challenge. Some of them presumably had good reasons, and a test designed so that only total compliance passes will select for that trait and nothing else. Read it as a portrait of one virtue rather than a hiring policy.
How Long Is The Go-Getter, and Where to Get It
The story text runs about 11,080 words across five numbered sections, which puts it under an hour for most readers and makes it the shortest book on Kevin Trudeau's recommended list. It is also in the public domain in the United States, and Project Gutenberg has carried it free since 2004 in plain text, EPUB and Kindle formats.
Audiobooks exist at both ends of the market. A free volunteer recording from LibriVox runs one hour and six minutes across three sections, and commercial audiobooks of the same text sell alongside the paperbacks. If you would rather listen than read, the whole story fits inside a commute. The paperback still earns its price for one reason: this is a book people hand to other people, and you cannot hand somebody a file.
Reading it once takes an evening. Reading it again, after you have failed a challenge of your own and produced a reasonable explanation for it, is when the motto starts to land.
Why Kevin Trudeau Recommends The Go-Getter
On Trudeau's Training Balance Scale, he claims success is roughly 90 percent internal alignment, belief and mindset, and only about 10 percent physical action. Most of his reading list works the 90. This book is the 10, and it is the clearest short treatment of it anyone has written.
That is not a contradiction. In Trudeau's model the action still has to happen; it is just that action taken from the wrong internal state produces grinding instead of results. Peck is the case study for what the right internal state looks like on the ground. His night is not hustle. He never doubts the outcome, only the route. Read against Trudeau's four-step formula of desire, belief, expectancy and inspired action, the whole story is the fourth step with the first three already settled.
The tighter connection is to what Trudeau calls the Teachability Index, which he defines as willingness to learn multiplied by willingness to change. Peck's index is maxed. He accepts skunk spruce without complaint from a manager who does not want him there. Skinner is the opposite. Cappy's whole problem, stated in the first paragraph of the book, is that he is surrounded by people who will not be taught.
And Peck is the absence of what Trudeau calls counterintentions, the buried programs he says run opposite to your stated goal. A man with a counterintention about the blue vase quits somewhere around the fourteenth phone call, and he will have a reasonable-sounding explanation for it. Peck has no brake to press. That is the point of the motto: it settles the argument with yourself before the argument can start, which is also why Trudeau says positive thinking on its own fails. Peck is not thinking positively. He is not thinking about it at all.
Where The Go-Getter Sits Next to the Global Information Network
Trudeau founded the Global Information Network in 2009 as a private success club, with members he says span more than 160 countries. GIN is organized as a progression of material and events. This book is not a system and does not pretend to be. It is a standard, delivered as a story, in one sitting.
Which is why it functions well as a companion rather than a foundation. The manifestation side of Trudeau's material, including his approach to manifesting what you want, deals with what you set up before you move. Kyne deals with the twenty minutes after everything goes wrong. Neither one covers the other. Work only the Kyne end and you get a person who grinds. Work only the inner end and you get a person who never ships. Trudeau's scale says you need both, weighted toward the inner work, and this is the cheapest possible way to install the outer half.
For where his own titles sit alongside recommendations like this one, the complete guide to Kevin Trudeau's books and reading order lays out the sequence.
Who Should Read The Go-Getter, and Who Should Skip It
Read it if you manage people, hire people, or want to become the person somebody hands the hard job to. Read it if you keep quitting at the fourteenth obstacle and want a phrase to interrupt that. Give it to a new hire in week one. It survives being handed to someone who does not read business books, and it will not take an hour of their life.
Skip it if you want a method, or if the period caricature described above will spoil it for you.
The Go-Getter: Frequently Asked Questions
What is The Go-Getter about?
A wounded First World War veteran named Bill Peck talks his way into a job at a San Francisco lumber and shipping company, is handed a deliberately impossible errand by the owner, and refuses to fail it. Peter B. Kyne published it as a novelette in 1921.
What is the Blue Vase test in The Go-Getter?
Cappy Ricks sends Peck to buy a blue vase and deliver it before a train leaves that evening. Ricks has secretly rigged every step: the wrong street, a changed shop sign, a policeman guarding the door, and a two thousand dollar cash price on a Sunday night. Ricks calls it the Degree of the Blue Vase and uses it to screen candidates for senior positions.
Who is Bill Peck in The Go-Getter?
William E. Peck, an ex-private who lost most of his left forearm and came out of the war with a leg that healed short. He sold lumber in the Midwest before enlisting. He is the go-getter of the title, and the model Kyne is holding up.
Who is Cappy Ricks in The Go-Getter?
Alden P. Ricks, known as Cappy, is the owner who sets the Blue Vase test. He controls the Ricks Logging and Lumbering Company, run by Mr. Skinner, and the Blue Star Navigation Company, run by his son-in-law Captain Matt Peasley. Kyne used the character across a run of novels.
How long does it take to read The Go-Getter?
The story runs about 11,000 words in five numbered sections, which is under an hour for most readers. A free LibriVox audiobook of the same text runs one hour and six minutes.
Is The Go-Getter in the public domain?
Yes, in the United States. Project Gutenberg has offered the 1921 text free since 2004 in plain text, EPUB and Kindle formats, and the free LibriVox recording was made from it.
What does "It shall be done" mean in The Go-Getter?
It is the motto of Peck's artillery brigade, the answer every officer and enlisted man was expected to give to any order. In the story it is the reason Peck refuses to quit. Kyne treats it as a decision made once, in advance, rather than a burst of motivation.
Was The Go-Getter made into a film?
Yes. A silent film based on the story was released in 1923, directed by Edward H. Griffith and produced by William Randolph Hearst.
Is The Go-Getter still worth reading?
Yes, with one caveat. The core of it has not aged at all, and it costs you an hour. The dated caricature in the middle section has aged badly and you should know it is coming.
Further reading: Peter B. Kyne on Wikipedia and the 1923 film adaptation on Wikipedia.