Part 2

Whenever a young man tells me that if he "had his way" he would be a lawyer, or an engineer, or what not, I always reply:

"You can be what you will, provided that it is something the world will be demanding ten years hence."

This brings to my mind a certain stipulation which the ambition of youth must recognize. You must invest yourself or your money in a known demand. You must select an occupation that is fitted to your own special genius and to some actual want of the people. Choose as early as possible what your life-work will be. Then you can be continually equipping yourself by reading and observing to a purpose. There are many things which the average boy or girl learns in school that could be learned outside just as well.

Almost any man should be able to become wealthy in this land of opulent opportunity. There are some people who think that to be pious they must be very poor and very dirty. They are wrong. Not money, but the love of money, is the root of all evil. Money in itself is a dynamic force for helping humanity.

In my lectures I have borne heavily on the fact that we are all walking over acres of diamonds and mines of gold. There are people who think that their fortune lies in some far country. It is much more likely to lie right in their own back yards or on their front door-step, hidden from their unseeing eye. Most of our millionaires discovered their fortunes by simply looking around them.

Recently I have been investigating the lives of four thousand and forty-three American millionaires. All but twenty of them started life as poor boys, and all but forty of them have contributed largely to their communities, and divided fairly with their employees as they went along. But, alas, not one rich man's son out of seventeen dies rich.

But if a man has dilly-dallied through a certain space of wasted years, can he then develop the character--the motor force--to drive him to success? Why, my friend, will power cannot only be developed, but it is often dry powder which needs only a match. Very frequently I think of the life of Abraham Lincoln--that wonderful man! and I am thankful that I was permitted to meet him. Yet Abraham Lincoln developed the splendid sinews of his will after he was twenty-one. Before that he was just a roving, good-natured sort of a chap. Always have I regretted that I failed to ask him what special circumstance broke the chrysalis of his life and loosened the wings of his will.

Many years ago some of the students of Temple University held a meeting in a building opposite the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel. As they were leaving the building they noticed a foreigner selling peanuts on the opposite curb. While buying peanuts they got to talking with the fellow, and told him that any one could obtain an education if he was willing to work for it. Eagerly the poor fellow drank up all the information he could get. He enrolled at Temple University and worked his way through, starting with the elementary studies. He is to-day an eminent practising physician in the national capital.

Often I think of an office clerk who reached a decision that the ambitions which were stirring in his soul could be realized if he could only get an education. He attended our evening classes and was graduated with a B.S. degree. He is now the millionaire head of one of the largest brokerage houses in the country.

"Where there's a will there's a way!" But one needs to use a little common sense about selecting the way. A general may determine to win a victory, but if he hurls his troops across an open field straight into the leaden sweep of the enemy's artillery he invites disaster and defeat. The best general lays his plans carefully, and advances his troops in the way that will best conserve their strength and numbers. So must a man plan his campaign of life.

No man has a right, either for himself or for others, to be at work in a factory, or a store, or anywhere else, unless he would work there from choice--money or no money--if he had the necessities of life.

"As a man thinks, so he is," says the writer of Proverbs; but as a man adjusts himself, so really is he, after all. One great trouble with many individuals is that they are made up of all sorts of machinery that is not adjusted, that is out of place--no belts on the wheels, no fire under the boiler, hence no steam to move the mechanism.

Some folk never take the trouble to size themselves up--to find out what they are fitted to do--and then wonder why they remain way down at the bottom of the heap. I remember a young woman who told me that she did not believe she could ever be of any particular use in the world. I mentioned a dozen things that she ought to be able to do.

"If you only knew yourself," I said, "you would set yourself to writing. You ought to be an author."

She shook her head and smiled, as if she thought I was making fun of her. Later, force of circumstances drove her to take up the pen. And when she came to me and told me that she was making three thousand dollars a year in literary work, and was soon to go higher, I thought back to the time when she was a poor girl making three dollars a week when she failed accurately to estimate herself.

There is a deplorable tendency--

There is a deplorable tendency among many people to wait for a particularly favorable opportunity to declare themselves in the battle of life. Some people pause for the rap of opportunity when opportunity has been playing a tattoo on their resonant skulls for years.

Hardly a single great invention has been placed on the market without a number of men putting forth the claim that they had the idea first--and in most cases they proved the fact. But while they were sitting down and dreaming, or trying to bring the device to a greater perfection, a man with initiative rose up and acted. The telegraph, telephone, sewing-machine, air-brake, mowing-machine, wireless, and linotype-machine are only a few illustrations.

The most wonderful idea is quite valueless until it is put into practical operation. The Government rewards the man who first gets a patent or first puts his invention into practical use--and the world does likewise. Thus the dreamer must always lag behind the door.

True will power also predicates concentration. I shall never forget the time I went to see President Lincoln to ask him to spare the life of one of my soldiers who was sentenced to be shot. As I walked toward the door of his office I felt a greater fear than I had ever known when the shells were bursting all about us at Antietam. Finally I mustered up courage to knock on the door. I heard a voice inside yell:

"Come in and sit down!"

The man at the table did not look up as I entered; he was busy over a bunch of papers. I sat down at the edge of a chair and wished I were in Peking or Patagonia. He never looked up until he had quite finished with the papers. Then he turned to me and said:

"I am a very busy man and have only a few minutes to spare. Tell me in the fewest words what it is you want."

As soon as I mentioned the case he said:

"I have heard all about it, and you do not need to tell me any more. Mr. Stanton was talking to me about that only a few days ago. You can go to the hotel and rest assured that the President never did sign an order to shoot a boy under twenty, and never will. You may tell his mother that." Then, after a short conversation, he took hold of another bunch of papers and said, decidedly, "Good morning!"

Lincoln, one of the greatest men of the world, owed his success largely to one rule: whatsoever he had to do at all he put his whole mind into, and held it all there until the task was all done. That makes men great almost anywhere.

Too many people are satisfied if they have done a thing "well enough." That is a fatal complacency. "Well enough" has cursed souls. "Well enough" has wrecked enterprises. "Well enough" has destroyed nations. If perfection in a task can possibly be reached, nothing short of perfection is "well enough." Governor Talbot of Massachusetts got his high office because General Swift made a happy application of the truth in saying to the convention, "I nominate for Governor of this state a man who, when he was a farmer's boy, hoed to the end of the row." That saying became a campaign slogan all up and down the state. "He hoed to the end of the row! He hoed to the end of the row!" When the people discovered that this was one of the characteristics of the man, they elected him by one of the greatest majorities ever given a Governor in Massachusetts.

Yet we must bear in mind that there is such a thing as overdoing anything. Young people should draw a line between study that secures wisdom and study that breaks down the mind; between exercise that is healthful and exercise that is injurious; between a conscientiousness that is pure and divine and a conscientiousness that is over-morbid and insane; between economy that is careful and economy that is stingy; between industry that is a reasonable use of their powers and industry that is an over-use of their powers, leading only to destruction.