They live a sort of "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" life, and why? Are they not
to blame? And are they not to be classed as scoundrels? Yes--and no. These
men are diseased. Their contact with the world has inoculated them with
the world's contagion. What is this disease? The diagnosis has been
considered simple. So simple that the world has called it commercialism,
or money madness, and treated the disease according to this diagnosis
without studying it further. May it not be true that, for many cases at
least, the diagnosis is wrong? Do men choose the strenuous, money-grabbing
life because they really love it, or love the money? I believe thousands
of men in professional life to-day, who are known as dollar-chasers,
really long for a more simple life, but the disease they have has robbed
them of the power to choose "that better part." And that disease is not
money madness, but _failurephobia_.
The fear of failing, or of being called a failure, dominates the
professional world as no other power could. It claims thousands of poor
fellows who were brought up to the active, worth-while life of the farm or
of a trade, and chains them to a miserable, sham, death-in-life sort of
existence, that they come to loathe, but dare not leave because of their
disease, failurephobia.
Success is the world's standard. Succeed in your business or profession,
by honest means if you can, but _succeed_! At least, keep up the
appearance of succeeding, and you may keep your place in society. It may
be known that your business is poor, and that you go to your office and
sit in solitude day in and day out, and that you starve and skimp at home,
but so long as you keep up the _show_, you are a "professional man!" What
mighty courage it takes to acknowledge what everybody else knows, and
_quit_! A writer in a medical journal told of a young physician in Boston
who put an ad. in a daily paper asking for a job in which a strong man
could use the strength a manly man ought to be proud of, to earn an honest
living. If men only had the courage, I wonder how many such ads. would
appear in the columns of our papers!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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