I go on to remark that the most effective instrument to overcome one’s laziness in work is the force of habit. Why should we use this mighty force in the service of our physical nature and not put it to use in our higher life as well? As a matter of fact, one can as well accustom himself to work or to self-control, to virtue, or truthfulness, or generosity, as he can to laziness, or self-indulgence, or extravagance, or exaggeration, or stinginess. And this is to be said further--that no virtue is securely possessed until it has become a habit. Thus it is that as a man trains himself to the habit of work, the resistance of idleness constantly diminishes until at last work becomes a necessity. When this happens, one has become free from a very great part of the troubles of life. There remain a few elementary rules with which one can the more easily find his way to this habit of work. And first among such rules is the knowing how to begin. The resolution to set oneself to work and to fix one’s whole mind on the matter in hand is really the hardest part of working. When one has once taken his pen or his spade in hand, and has made the first stroke, his whole work has already grown easier. There are people who always find something especially hard about beginning their work, and who are always so busy with preparations, behind which lurks their laziness, that they never apply themselves to their work until they are compelled; and then the intellectual and even the physical excitement roused by the sense of insufficient time in which to do one’s work injures the work itself. Other people wait for some special inspiration, which in reality is much more likely to come by means of, or in the midst of, work itself. It is at least my experience that one’s work, while one is doing it, takes on a different look from that which one anticipated, and that one does not reach so many fruitful and new ideas in his times of rest as he does during the work itself. From all this follows the rule, not to postpone work, or lightly to accept the pretext of physical or intellectual indisposition, but to dedicate a definite and well-considered amount of time every day to one’s work. Then, if the “old man,” as St. Paul calls him, is cunning enough to see that he must in any event do some work at a special time and cannot wholly give himself to rest, he may usually be trusted to resolve to do each day that which for each day is most necessary.