I have already told you, but purposely repeat it, NO BOY OR MAN CAN BE
A SUCCESS UNLESS HIS HEART AND COMPLETE INTEREST ARE IN HIS WORK. The
most difficult part of the problem is at the beginning. Your father or
mother wants you to be a lawyer or minister, your teacher says you
have great talent for a medical career, but you do not care for any
one of these professions. You find it hard to really know just what
to do, and I sympathize with you all. I think that those who see you
from the outside, who look upon you just as a real boy and have no such
relations to you as parents or teachers, are in fact the best judge of
what you are capable of being fitted for in a life’s career. Go and
advise with some successful man who knows you in your play and daily
life, but do not take his advice if it is something HE likes and you
detest. You will soon have to be your own master, and now is a good
time to commence. But fit yourself for something, you MUST. Notice how
everything around you is fitted by nature and then trained by man, to
do its work. The bulldog is not taken out in the field to nose for
game; the draft horse is not taken to the trotting track; the canary
bird is not trained to catch eagles. No, each and every kind has its
special work to do in making the world go around, and each of us has to
be trained according to our talents. Just because we all have two legs
and arms does not indicate that we are all the same――just human beings
all turned out from the same mold. Arms are made for one man to use
them in a certain line of work that another man cannot, with success,
use his. And so on.
Every man who has trained his particular talents to their highest point
and then strives to widen them, is an aristocrat――a prince, whether he
is a brick-layer or lawyer. He only sinks to the level of a commoner
who has neglected that working stuff which is in him. And he does not
neglect this if he is happy in his work, or rather, if it is pleasure
instead of work.
This does not mean that all the preparatory work will be congenial
or without real labor. No, much of the work that you have to do
preliminary to that which is to bring you success, will be HARD
work――plugging work, full of disagreeable details, but all necessary to
build the foundations.
The dirty, muddy work involved in digging for the foundation of some
building that will be a pride to its architect, is disagreeable, but
the architect must see that this work is properly done; must get right
into the mud and dirt himself to know that every detail he has worked
out is being rigidly followed. If the designer of the useful and
beautiful building did not have constantly in his mind the results of
all this digging, he would be a failure, he would never be a designer
and builder of magnificent works for the future generations to admire.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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