When a librarian was leaving a large field of endeavor to enter upon a still larger one, his office-boy, hearing some speculation regarding his successor, was heard to say, “I could hold down that job myself. I’ve watched everything he does and there isn’t a thing I couldn’t do”. What he had watched were the motions and they looked easy. But we should not laugh at this kind of confidence. An old stager said to me once “Oh, these young men! They think they can do it all; and the trouble is that _sometimes they are right_.” A young man is a neutral in luck. His good or bad fortune is yet to be revealed. The complete vocational test would be one that could tell whether the office boy were really fitted to be librarian, and if he were, would see that he ultimately became librarian. Now we must rely not only on the boy’s own ability to estimate his powers but on his fighting strength to realize his vision. And there is more to it than this. A worker may have the ability and may know that he has it, and yet he may distrust his own estimate and so fail to follow it up. This is one of the saddest varieties of “ill-luck”. We often hear it said “He can do that, if he would only realize it”. Too often, however, the man or the woman does realize it perfectly well; his self estimate of his powers may be quite high enough; it may even be too high. Talk with him and you may discover to your surprise that he thinks highly of himself. But at the critical moment he loses his nerve. Doubts arise in his mind. Is he, after all, as able to rise to the emergency as he has always thought himself? He hesitates; and he is lost. His “ill luck” has again been too much for him.