Kitabı oku: «Boy Wanted», sayfa 2
THE SECRET OF SUCCESS
He that can have patience can have what he will. – Franklin.
One day, in huckleberry-time, when little Johnny Wales
And half-a-dozen other boys were starting with their pails
To gather berries, Johnny’s pa, in talking with him, said
That he could tell him how to pick so he’d come out ahead.
“First find your bush,” said Johnny’s pa, “and then stick to it till
You’ve picked it clean. Let those go chasing all about who will
In search of better bushes, but it’s picking tells, my son;
To look at fifty bushes doesn’t count like picking one.”
Thinking is the talking of the soul with itself. – Plato.
A man who dares waste an hour of time has not discovered the value of time. – Darwin.
And Johnny did as he was told, and, sure enough, he found
By sticking to his bush while all the others chased around
In search of better picking, it was as his father said;
For while the others looked, he worked, and thus came out ahead.
And Johnny recollected this when he became a man,
And first of all he laid him out a well-determined plan;
So, while the brilliant triflers failed with all their brains and push,
Wise, steady-going Johnny won by “sticking to his bush.”
CHAPTER III
OPPORTUNITY
There is nothing impossible to him who will try. – Alexander.
If you just get a chance?
Oh, certainly, it would be unfair for us grown-ups to expect you, a mere inexperienced youth, to win without giving you a fair opportunity.
But what is a fair opportunity?
The winds and the waves are always on the side of the ablest navigators. – Gibbon.
Opinions regarding what is best for the making of a boy differ greatly. Some assert that a child born with a silver spoon in its mouth is not likely to breathe as deeply and develop as well as one that is born without any such hindrance to full respiration.
He that studieth revenge keepeth his own wounds green. – Bacon.
Kind parents, a good home training, a chance to go to school, influential friends, good health, and some one to stand between you and the hard knocks of the world all serve to make a boy’s surroundings truly enviable. Under such conditions any boy ought to win. Yet some boys have won without these advantages.
The two noblest things are sweetness and light. – Swift.
The wise prove, and the foolish confess, by their conduct, that a life of employment is the only life worth leading. – Paley.
The world belongs to the energetic. – Emerson.
He who hurts others injures himself; he who helps others advances his own interests. – Buddha.
He that sips of many arts drinks of none. – Fuller.
There is a higher law than the constitution. – William H. Seward.
Abraham Lincoln was born of very poor parents in a very crude cabin. Some years later the family passed through a long, cold, Indiana winter with no shelter but a shed built of poles, open on one side to the frosts and snows. Even when a cabin took the place of this rude “camp” it was left several years, we are told, without floor, doors or windows. His biographers inform us that here in the primeval forest Abraham Lincoln spent his boyhood. His bed of leaves was raised from the ground by poles, resting upon one side in the interstices of the logs of which the hut was built, and upon the other in crotches of sticks driven into the earth. The skins of animals afforded almost the only covering allowed this truly miserable family. Their food was of the simplest and coarsest variety and very scarce. Here Mrs. Lincoln died when Abraham was nine years old, and her lifeless form was placed in a rude coffin which Abraham’s father made with his own hands. The grave was dug in a cleared space in the forest and there Nancy Hanks Lincoln was buried. Many months passed before it was practicable to secure a preacher who, when he came, gathered the family about him in the woods and spoke a few words over the mound of sod. When fame had come, Mr. Lincoln used to say that he never attended school for more than six months in all his life – in no spirit of boastfulness, however, like many a self-made American, but with a regret that was deeply felt. While a boy he worked out his sums on the logs and clapboards of the little cabin, evincing the fondness for mathematics that remained with him through life. But even amid his dark isolation some light found its way to his slowly expanding mind. He got hold of a copy of “Aesop’s Fables,” read “Robinson Crusoe” and borrowed Weems’s “Life of Washington,” filling his mind with the story of that noble character. One night after he had climbed up the pegs, which served as a ladder to reach his cot, which in the more finished condition of the cabin had been placed in the attic, he hid the book under the rafters. The rain which came in before morning soaked the leaves so that he was compelled to go to the farmer from whom he had borrowed the book and offer to make good the loss. That unphilanthropic neighbor exacted as its price three days’ work in the corn-field, and at the end of that time the damaged volume came into the youthful Abraham’s absolute possession. It was a long way from those rude surroundings to the presidential chair in the White House at Washington, but “with malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right,” he made the journey to the glory of himself and the American people.
He that has no cross will have no crown. – Quarles.
What a fine demonstration of the power and efficacy of self-help! It is quite enough to convince any boy that there is no difficulty he cannot overcome when once he has formed an invincible partnership between
“MYSELF AND I”
A strenuous soul hates a cheap success. – Emerson.
Myself and I close friends have been
Since ’way back where we started.
We two, amid life’s thick and thin,
Have labored single-hearted.
In every season, wet or dry,
Or fair or stormy weather,
We’ve joined our hands, myself and I,
And just worked on together.
All that is great in man comes through work, and civilization is its product. – Smiles.
Though many friends have been as kind
And loving as a brother,
Myself and I have come to find
Our best friends in each other,
For while to us obscure and small
May seem the tasks they bend to,
We’ve learned our fellow-men have all
They and themselves can tend to.
Ability and necessity dwell near each other. – Pythagoras.
Myself and I, and we alone,
You and yourself, good neighbor,
Each in his self-determined zone
Must find his field of labor.
That prize which men have called “success”
Has joy nor pleasure in it
To satisfy the soul unless
Myself and I shall win it.
The only amaranthine flower is virtue. – Cowper.
Dr. Arnold, whose long experience with youth at Rugby gave weight to his opinion, declared that “the difference between one boy and another consists not so much in talent as in energy.” “The longer I live,” says Sir Thomas Buxton, another student of human character, “the more certain I am that the great difference between men, between the great and the insignificant, is energy, invincible determination, an honest purpose once fixed, and then death or victory. This quality will do anything in the world; and no talents, no circumstances, will make a two-legged creature a man without it.”
The secret of success is constancy to purpose. – Beaconsfield.
Says an old Latin proverb: “Opportunity has hair in front, but is bald behind. Seize him by the forelock.”
The only knowledge that a man has is the knowledge he can use. – Macaulay.
What sculpture is to a block of marble, education is to a human soul. – Addison.
There is a sufficient recompense in the very consciousness of a noble deed. – Cicero.
When Thomas A. Edison went out into the world to make his way, he had received only two months’ regular schooling, but his mother had early impressed upon his mind the thought that he must atone for his lack of school training by developing a taste for reading. His biographers tell us that the “Penny Encyclopedia” and Ure’s “History of the Sciences” were in his hands at a time when most boys, having become acquainted with stories of adventure, look for mystery in every bush and resolve to become pirates and Indian fighters. There are many stories of his early acuteness. One relates how when a boy of twelve or fourteen he was employed in selling papers on a railroad train in Michigan, and upon receiving advance news of a battle of the Rebellion fought at that time he secured fifteen hundred papers on credit, telegraphed the headlines to the stations along the route, and sold his wares at a premium. It was after this exploit that he conceived the idea of starting a daily paper of his own. Securing some old type from the “Detroit Free Press,” he set up his establishment in a car and began the publication of the “Grand Trunk Herald,” the first newspaper ever published on a train. He also installed in the car a laboratory for making experiments in chemistry, and both his newspaper and his experiments flourished until one unlucky day when he set fire to the car with phosphorus. This was too much for the conductor who promptly threw the young editor and scientist with all his belongings out on the station platform, and in addition boxed his ears so roughly as to cause him to be ever after partly deaf. But misfortune could not dampen his ardor. His lack of schooling was more than atoned for by his grit, ambition and studious habits. With the possession of these qualities and the disposition to make the most of spare moments, this famous physicist, chemist, mechanician, and inventor has done more for himself, and more for humanity and the advancement of civilization than any of the college-bred workers in industrial sciences during the last half-century.
The only failure a man ought to fear is failure in cleaving to the purpose he sees to be best. – George Eliot.
The secret of success in life is for a man to be ready for his opportunity when it comes. – Disraeli.
He needs no tears who lived a noble life. – Fitz James O’Brien.
“Yesterday’s successes belong to yesterday with all of yesterday’s defeats and sorrows,” says a present day philosopher. “The day is here! The time is now!”
RIGHT HERE AND JUST NOW
I don’t think much of a man who is not wiser to-day than he was yesterday. – Abraham Lincoln.
“If I’d ’a’ been born,” says Sy Slocum to me,
“In some other far-away clime,
Or if I could ’a’ had my existence,” says he,
“In some other long-ago time,
I know I’d ’a’ flourished in pretty fine style
And set folks a-talkin’, I ’low,
But what troubles me is there’s nothin’ worth while
A-doin’ right here and just now.”
Hurry not only spoils work, but spoils life also. – Lubbock.
“Them folks that can dwell in a country,” says Sy,
“Where they don’t have no winter nor storm,
And the weather ain’t ready to freeze ’em or fry,
By gettin’ too cold or too warm,
Have got all the time that they want to sit down
And think out a project so great
That it’s just about certain to win ’em renown
And bring ’em success while they wait.”
I cannot hear what you say for listening to what you are. – Emerson.
Says Sy, “Folks a-livin’ here ages ago,
Before all the chances had flown
For makin’ a hit, wouldn’t stand any show
To-day at a-holdin’ their own.
Good times will come back to our planet, I ’low,
When I’ve faded out of the scene;
But it hurts me to think that right here and just now
Is a sorry betwixt and between.”
At that I got tired a-hearin’ Sy spout,
And says I, “Sy, you like to enthuse
Regardin’ the marvelous work you’d turn out
If you stood in some other man’s shoes;
But while all your ’might-’a’-been’ praises you sing,
It’s worth while recallin’ as how
That no man on earth ever does the first thing
That he can’t do right here and just now!”
Honest labor wears a lovely face. – Decker.
Jean Paul Richter, who suffered greatly from poverty, said that he would not have been rich for worlds.
“I began life with a sixpence,” said Girard, “and believe that a man’s best capital is his industry.”
I am a part of all that I have seen. – Tennyson.
Thomas Ball, the sculptor, whose fine statues ornament the parks and squares of Boston, used as a lad to sweep out the halls of the Boston Museum. Horace Greeley, journalist and orator, was the son of a poor New Hampshire farmer and for years earned his living by typesetting. Thorwaldsen, the great Danish sculptor, was the son of humble Icelandic fisher-folk, but by study and perseverance he became one of the greatest of modern sculptors. In the Copenhagen museum alone are six hundred examples of his art.
If it is not right, do not do it; if it is not true, do not say it. – Marcus Aurelius.
Benjamin Franklin, philosopher and statesman, was the son of a tallow-chandler, and was the fifteenth child in a family of seventeen children. This would seem to go far toward proving that it is no misfortune to be born into a home of many brothers and sisters. Lord Tennyson, too, was the third child in a family of eleven children, all born within a period of thirteen years. They formed a joyous, lively household, amusements being agreeably mingled with their daily tasks. They were all handsome and gifted, with marked personal traits and imaginative temperaments. They were very fond of reading and story-telling. At least four of the boys – Frederick, Charles, Alfred, and Edward – were given to verse-writing.
A thing is never too often repeated which is never sufficiently learned. – Seneca.
Any man may commit a mistake, but none but a fool will continue in it. – Cicero.
John Bunyan, author of “Pilgrim’s Progress,” which is said to have obtained a larger circulation than any other book in English except the Bible, was a tinker. Linnaeus, the great Swedish botanist, and most influential naturalist of the eighteenth century, was a shoemaker’s apprentice.
As a matter of fact, a man’s first duty is to mind his own business. – Lorimer.
George Stephenson, the English engineer and inventor, was in his youth a stoker in a colliery, learning to read and write at a workingmen’s evening school. Sir Richard Arkwright, inventor of the spinning-jenny, and founder of the great cotton industries of England, never saw the inside of a school-house until after he was twenty years of age, having long served as a barber’s assistant.
Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time. – Whipple.
John Jacob Astor began life as a peddler in the streets of New York, where his descendants now own real estate worth hundreds of millions.
Civility costs nothing and buys everything. – Lady Montague.
Shakespeare in his youth was a wool-carder.
Cheerful looks make every dish a feast. – Massinger.
Thousands of other examples might be mentioned to show that lowly birth is no barrier to lofty attainment. It has been truly said that genius ignores all social barriers and springs forth wherever heaven has dropped the seed. The grandest characters known in art, literature, and the useful inventions, have illustrated the axiom that “brave deeds are the ancestors of brave men,” and, as Ballou has told us, “it would almost appear that an element of hardship is necessary to the effective development of true genius. Indeed, when we come to the highest achievements of the greatest minds, it seems that they were not limited by race, condition of life, or the circumstances of their age.”
Character, good or bad, has a tendency to perpetuate itself. – Hodge.
So we see that it is something within the boy rather than conditions about him that is to determine what he is to become. A boy with a good mind with which to think and a determination to do, is pretty sure of doing something worth while. The whole world knows that so much depends on whether or not the boy cultivates a determination to
KEEP A-TRYING
Do not hang a dismal picture on your wall, and do not deal with sables and glooms in your conversations. – Emerson.
Say “I will!” and then stick to it —
That’s the only way to do it.
Don’t build up a while and then
Tear the whole thing down again.
Fix the goal you wish to gain,
Then go at it heart and brain,
And, though clouds shut out the blue,
Do not dim your purpose true
With your sighing.
Stand erect, and, like a man,
Know “They can who think they can!”
Keep a-trying.
Pray for a short memory as to all unkindnesses – Spurgeon.
Do to-day thy nearest duty. – Goethe.
Had Columbus, half seas o’er,
Turned back to his native shore,
Men would not, to-day, proclaim
Round the world his deathless name.
So must we sail on with him
Past horizons far and dim,
Till at last we own the prize
That belongs to him who tries
With faith undying;
Own the prize that all may win
Who, with hope, through thick and thin
Keep a-trying.
CHAPTER IV
OVER AND UNDERDOING
If you will not hear reason, she will surely rap your knuckles. – Franklin.
Learn to do, without overdoing. Too much striving for success is as bad as too little.
Bishop Hall says: “Moderation is the silken string running through the pearl chain of all virtues.”
The only true conquests – those which awaken no regrets – are those obtained over our ignorance. – Napoleon.
“You have too much respect upon the world,” Shakespeare tells us. “They lose it that do buy it with much care.”
Do not cram books into your head until you crowd pleasant thinking out of it.
A moderately informed man standing firmly on his two good legs is a much superior man to the wise professor who is unable to leave his bed.
The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise high with the occasion. – Abraham Lincoln.
“What is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” And what does it profit him if he shall become a multi-millionaire and lose his health of mind or body?
Success that costs more than it is worth is failure.
If you want to be missed by your friends, be useful. – Robert E. Lee.
Make haste slowly. Be ambitious but not foolish.
Learn a few things and learn them well. He who grasps much holds little. Upon investigating the fund of information possessed by a great many young persons it has been found that the matter with it is the “smatter.”
Herbert Spencer says the brains of precocious children cease to develop after a certain age, like a plant that fails to flower.
The man of grit carries in his presence a power which spares him the necessity of resenting insult. – Whipple.
“Those unhappy children who are forced to rise too early in their classes are conceited all the forenoon of their lives and stupid all the afternoon,” says Professor Huxley. “The keenness and vitality which should have been stored up for the sharp struggle of practical existence have been washed out of them by precocious mental debauchery, by book-gluttony and lesson-bibbing. Their faculties are worn out by the strain put upon their callow brains, and they are demoralized by worthless, childish triumphs before the real tasks of life begin.”
If you would create something you must be something. – Goethe.
Carlyle’s words upon this subject are worth remembering: “The richer a nature, the harder and slower its development. Two boys were once members of a class in the Edinburgh Grammar School: John, ever trim, precise, and a dux; Walter, ever slovenly, confused, and a dolt. In due time John became Baillie John, of Hunter Square, and Walter became Sir Walter Scott, of the universe. The quickest and completest of all vegetables is the cabbage.”
Manners must adorn knowledge and smooth its way through the world. – Chesterfield.
Many men owe the grandeur of their lives to their tremendous difficulties. – Spurgeon.
We all know that there is a happy medium between too much preciseness and slovenliness; between laziness and an unwarranted degree of mental activity; between ignorance and an intellect ground to an edge too fine to carve its way through a hard world.
The least error should humble, but we should never permit even the greatest to discourage us. – Bishop Potter.
“It is now generally conceded on all hands,” says Professor Mathews, “that the mind has no right to build itself up at the expense of the body; that it is no more justifiable in abandoning itself without restraint to its cravings, than the body in yielding itself to sensual indulgence. The acute stimulants, the mental drams, that produce this unnatural activity or overgrowth of the intellect, are as contrary to nature, and as hurtful to the man, as the coarser stimulants that unduly excite the body. The mind, it has been well said, should be a good, strong, healthy feeder, but not a glutton. When unduly stimulated, it wears out the mechanism of the body, like friction upon a machine not lubricated, and the growing weakness of the physical frame nullifies the power it incloses.”
The most manifest sign of wisdom is continued cheerfulness. – Montaigne.
The foundations for a splendid working constitution are laid during boyhood.
You are laying yours now.
Men are born with two eyes, but with one tongue, in order that they may see twice as much as they say. – Colton.
Is it to be a good, firm, durable foundation that will stand through all the years to come? Or is it being built of faulty material and in a manner so careless that in the by and by when, at great pains and expense you have built your life structure upon it, you will find it untenable or so unstable that it will require a great share of your time and attention to keep it patched up so that you can continue to dwell within it?
The important thing in life is to have a great aim, and to possess the aptitude and perseverance to attain it. – Goethe.
Are you playing and working with moderation or are you so thoughtless that you sometimes, in a single hour, inflict wrongs upon your health and your constitution, the sorry effects of which you cannot overcome during your lifetime?
It may be possible that you are studying too hard at school.
Method is the hinge of business, and there is no method without order and punctuality. – Hannah More.
I know that there are many who will smile at the suggestion that the average American schoolboy sticks too closely to his books, but I am sure that such is frequently the case.
The greatest homage we can pay to truth is to use it. – Emerson.
Sometimes the boy’s parents and teachers are eager to have their boy “show off” to the best advantage possible. They urge him, crowd him, compel him to develop as rapidly as he can. In their eagerness to secure results they employ the formulas that require the least possible time for completing the important task of
MAKING A MAN
The elect are those who will, and the non-elect are those who won’t. – Beecher.
Hurry the baby as fast as you can,
Hurry him, worry him, make him a man.
Off with his baby-clothes, get him in pants,
Feed him on brain-foods and make him advance.
Hustle him, soon as he’s able to walk,
Into a grammar school; cram him with talk.
Fill his poor head full of figures and facts,
Keep on a-jamming them in till it cracks.
Once boys grew up at a rational rate,
Now we develop a man while you wait.
Rush him through college, compel him to grab
Of every known subject a dip and a dab.
Get him in business and after the cash
All by the time he can grow a mustache.
Let him forget he was ever a boy,
Make gold his god and its jingle his joy.
Keep him a-hustling and clear out of breath,
Until he wins – Nervous Prostration and Death!
Much talent is often lost for want of a little courage. – George Eliot.
A sorry picture, isn’t it? No doubt it sets forth, in an extreme manner, the evils that arise from crowding a child into boyhood, and a boy into manhood; still, no one who observes carefully will doubt that such wrongs are constantly being committed by hundreds of ambitious parents and well-meaning teachers.
The crowning fortune of a man is to be born with a bias to some pursuit, which finds him in employment and happiness. – Emerson.
Yet, I think you have little to fear along the lines of over-study. You must train your mind to grapple with tasks while you are young, for if you do not begin now you may not, later on, be able to summon that concentration of thought that is necessary for winning success along any line of endeavor.
“Difficulties are the best stimulant. Trouble is a tonic,” says one of our wise essayists.
No one is useless in the world who lightens the burden of it for any one else. – Charles Dickens.
“He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves, and sharpens our skill, our antagonist is our helper,” says Edmund Burke. “This conflict with difficulty makes us acquainted with our object, and compels us to consider it in all its relations. It will not suffer us to be superficial.”
The fewer the words the better the prayer. – Luther.
Life is a grind; a sorry few
Are blunted in their aim,
And some are sharpened, keen and true,
And carve their way to fame.
“Don’t take too much advice – keep at the helm and steer your own ship,” says Noah Porter. All of which is very good advice.
Next to excellence is the appreciation of it. – Thackeray.
The boy that the world wants most is the one who will think for himself at the same time he is hearing words of wisdom from others. A boy who tried to follow all the advice given him would probably find himself unable to do anything at all. Everyone and everything seems eager to give him the short cut to fortune, as I have endeavored to set forth in a bit of nonsense rhyme which I call the secret of
HOW TO WIN SUCCESS
The great are only great because we are on our knees; let us rise up. – Proudhon.
“How shall I win success in life?” the young man asked, whereat:
“Have push,” replied the Button; “And a purr-puss” said the Cat.
“Find out the work you’re sooted for,” the Chimney-Sweeper said,
Just as the Match and Pin remarked: “And never lose your head.”
“Aspire to grater, finer things,” the Nutmeg cried. The Hoe
Said: “Don’t fly off the handle,” and the Snail remarked: “Go slow.”
“Be deaf to all that’s told you,” said the Adder. “’Mid the strife
I’ve found it best,” remarked the Heart, “to beat my way through life.”
Next to acquiring good friends, the best acquisition is that of good books. – Colton.
“Select some proper task and then stick to it,” said the Glue.
“Look pleasant,” said the Camera; “And tied-y,” said the Shoe.
“Have nerve!” exclaimed the Tooth. The Hill remarked; “Put up a bluff!”
“And keep cool,” said the Ice, whereat the young man cried: “Enough!”
Never suffer youth to be an excuse for inadequacy, nor age and fame to be an excuse for indolence. – Haydon.
The right-minded boy will be thoughtful but not so much absorbed that he is unable to take in the educative, uplifting sunshine all about him.
The greatest man is he who chooses with the most invincible reason. – Seneca.
Sharpen your wits as the woodman must sharpen his axe, but counsel moderation. The woodman who would stay at the stone and grind his axe all away in attempting to put a razor edge on it would be deemed very foolish.
Of course you will be, you must be thoughtful, for as Ruskin says: “In general I have no patience with people who talk about ‘the thoughtlessness of youth’ indulgently. I had infinitely rather hear of the thoughtlessness of old age, and the indulgence of that. When a man has done his work, and nothing can in any way be materially altered in his fate, let him forget his toil, and jest with his fate, if he will, but what excuse can you find for wilfulness of thought at the very time when every crisis of fortune hangs on your decision? A youth thoughtless, when all the happiness of his home forever depends on the chances or the passions of an hour! A youth thoughtless, when the career of all his days depends on the opportunity of a moment! A youth thoughtless, when his every action is a foundation-stone of future conduct, and every imagination a fountain of life or death! Be thoughtless in any after years, rather than now, though, indeed, there is only one place where a man may be nobly thoughtless, his death-bed. Nothing should ever be left to be done there.”
Self-conquest is the greatest of all victories. – Plato.
Sloth, like rust, consumes faster than labor wears, while the used key is always bright. – Franklin.
My liveliest delight was in having conquered myself. – Rousseau.
But whatever else we may forget, let us remember that it is not work, but overwork that kills. Exercise gained through good, wholesome work is the greatest life-preserver man has yet discovered.
