It is just so with everything you start out to do. Start out with a high purpose and the common-sense idea that you HAVE to learn all the details first――to do the digging before that purpose can be fully carried out. Concentration, constant concentration upon your goal is the only rule to follow. Like football, you move toward the goal by punting, touchdowns, and penalties which put you back, but you have ever one end in view――to reach the goal. A willingness to take all the hard knocks and throw-downs with the mind’s eye fixed on the goal, is the kind of stuff which wins out. Never be a quitter. Concentration is absolutely necessary to get the power out of you and force it to do its work. As someone has said, if you will concentrate the rays of the sun by the means of a magnifying glass you can burn a hole in almost anything. If you focus all your forces on one thing you can do wonders. Don’t be a scatterer. You do not all want to be mere office clerks, bundle wrappers, or what is far worse for your future, mere political petitioners hanging on to your job by petty and ofttimes crooked work. No, be something, do something that means a future for you. “But,” you say, “how do I really know what I want to do, how can I find out for myself what my future SHOULD be? You say not to always follow the advice of successful men if such advice does not agree with my ideas of what I should like to do.” Yes, here is a difficulty. Let us see if we cannot solve it. Don’t make the mistake so many thousands of boys have made in the past, of confusing what you would LIKE to BE with what you are CAPABLE of DOING. Here is where so much of the trouble has arisen. You have in your mind, as an example, the success a young man is making in writing for the magazines and papers. You remember him when he was a youth and you were a small boy. His success has stimulated you, and you think that you will be a writer or reporter. Now the ambition is all very well, you have made up your mind what you WANT to be, but, and here comes the problem: Are you fitted by nature, temperament and TALENT for such work? This is a matter you must solve for yourself, at least at first. If you have done any writing at school, been connected with the school’s paper, or in any way found more pleasure in writing than you have in mathematics, more fun in reading than in loafing, real pleasure in putting together words and sentences so that they really sing to you, then you probably have the talent for the hardest vocation or profession in the world――journalism or literature. If all this is well proven to you――if you feel that you MUST write――then all the hard work at first will be willingly accepted. If the drudgery, petty details of learning the art of writing, is disagreeable, then it shows that while you have perhaps a desire to see your work in print you really have not the inborn talent.