HE CAN WHO THINKS HE CAN: The Power of Belief in Achieving Success - Orison Swett Marden (1908) - SECRETS OF SUCCESS: Masters’ Greatest Wisdom

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Speaker 1 (00:00):
He can, who thinks he can? By Orison sweat Martin
nineteen o eight one, he can who thinks he can?
I promised my God, I would do it. In September
eighteen sixty two, when Lincoln issued his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation,
the sublimest act of the nineteenth century, he made this
entry in his diary. I promised my God, I would

(00:22):
do it. Does any one doubt that such a mighty
resolution added power to this marvelous man, or that it
nerved him to accomplish what he had undertaken. Neither ridicule
nor caricature, neither dread of enemies nor desertion of friends
could shake his indomitable faith in his ability to lead
the nation through the greatest struggle in its history. Napoleon,

(00:43):
Bismarck and all other great achievers had colossal faith in themselves.
It doubled, trebled, or even quadrupled the ordinary power of
these men. In no other way can we account for
the achievements of Luther Wesley or Savonarola without this sublime faith,
this confidence in her mission. How could the simple country

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maiden Jean Dark have led and controlled the French army.
This divine self confidence multiplied her power a thousandfold, until
even the King obeyed her, and she led his stalwart
troops as if they were children. After William Pitt was
dismissed from office, he said to the Duke of Devonshire,
I am sure I can save this country, and that

(01:24):
nobody else can. For eleven weeks, says Bancroft, England was
without a minister. At length. The king and aristocracy recognized
Pitt's ascendancy and yielded to him the reins. It was
his unbounded confidence in his ability that compelled the recognition
and led to the supremacy in England of Benjamin Disraeli,

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the once despised Jew. He did not quail or lose heart.
When the hisses and jeers of the British Parliament rang
in his ears. He sat down amid the jeering members, saying,
you will yet hear me. He felt within him then
the confidence of power that made him Prime Minister of
England and turns sneers and hisses into admiration and applause.

(02:07):
Much of President Roosevelt's success has been due to his
colossal self confidence. He believes in Roosevelt as Napoleon believed
in Napoleon. There is nothing timid or half hearted about
our great President. He goes at everything with that gigantic assurance,
with that tremendous confidence, which half wins the battle before

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he begins. It is astonishing how the world makes way
for a resolute soul, and how obstacles get out of
the path of a determined man who believes in himself.
There is no philosophy by which a man can do
a thing when he thinks he can't. What can defeat
a strong man who believes in himself and cannot be
ridiculed down, talked down, or written down. Poverty cannot dishearten him,

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misfortune deter him, or hardship turn him a hair's breadth
from his course. Whatever comes, he keeps his eye on
the goal and pushes ahead. What would you think of
a young man ambitious to become a lawyer who should
surround himself with a medical atmosphere and spend his time
reading medical books. Do you think he would ever become
a great lawyer by following such a course. No, he

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must put himself in a law atmosphere, go where he
can absorb it and be steeped in it until he
is attuned to the legal note. He must be so
grafted upon the legal tree that he can feel its
sap circulating through him. How long will it take a
young man to become successful who puts himself in an
atmosphere of failure and remains in it until he is
soaked saturated with the idea? How long will it take

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a man who depreciates himself, talks failure, thinks failure, walks
like a failure, in dresses like a failure, who is
always complaining of the insurmountable difficulties in his way, and
whose every step is on the road to failure. How
long will it take him to arrive at the success goal?
Will any one believe in him or expect him to win?

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The majority of failures began to deteriorate by doubting or
depreciating themselves, or by losing confidence in their own ability.
The moment you harbor doubt and begin to lose faith
in yourself, you capitulate to the enemy. Every time you
acknowledge weakness, inefficiency, or lack of ability, you weaken your
self confidence, and that is to undermine the very foundation

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of all achievement. So long as you carry around a
failure atmosphere and radiate doubt in discouragement, you will be
a failure. Turn about face, cut off all the currents
of failure thoughts, of discouraged thoughts. Boldly face your goal
with a stout heart and a determined endeavor, and you
will find that things will change for you. But you

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must see a new world before you can live in it.
It is to what you see, to what you believe,
to what you struggle incessantly to attain, that you will
approximate trust thyself. Every heart vibrates to that iron string.
I know people who have been hunting for months for
a situation, because they go into an office with a
confession of weakness. In their very manner, they show their

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lack of self confidence. Their prophecy of failure is in
their face, in their bearing. They surrender before the battle begins.
They are living witnesses against themselves. When you ask a
man to give you a position, and he reads this
language in your face and manner, please give me a position.
Do not kick me out. Fate is against me. I

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am an unlucky dog. I am disheartened. I have lost
confidence in myself. He will only have contempt for you.
He will say to himself that you are not a
man to start with, and he will get rid of
you as soon as he can. If you expect to
get a position, you must go into an office with
the air of a conqueror. You must fling out confidence
from yourself before you can convince an employer that you

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are the man he is looking for. You must show
by your very presence that you are a man of force,
a man who can do things with vigor, cheerfulness, and enthusiasm.
Self reliance, which carries great vigorous self faith, has ever
been the best substitute for friends, pedigree, influence, and money.
It is the best capital in the world. It has

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mastered more obstacles, overcome more difficulties, and carried through more
enterprises than any other human quality. I have interviewed many
timid people as to why they let opportunities pass by
them that were eagerly seized by others with much less ability,
and the answer was invariably a confession like the following.
I have not courage, said one. I lack confidence in myself,

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said another. I shrink from trying for fear I shall
make a mistake and have the mortification of being turned down,
said a third. It would look so cheeky for me
to have the nerve to put myself forward, set a fourth. Oh,
I do not think it would be right to seek
a place so far above me, said another. I think
I ought to wait until the place seeks me, or

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I am better prepared. So they run through the whole
gamut of self distrust. This shrinking, this timid or self effacement,
often proves a worse enemy to success than actual incompetence.
Take the lantern in the hand, and you will always
have light enough for your next step, no matter how dark,
for the light will move along with you. Do not

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try to see a long way ahead. One step enough
for me. A physical trainer in One of Our Girls
Colleges says that his first step is to establish the
girls in self confidence, to lead them to think only
of the ends to be attained and not of the means.
He shows them that the greater power lies behind the
muscles in the mind, and points to the fact so

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frequently demonstrated, that a person in a supreme crisis, as
in a fire or other catastrophe, can exert strength out
of all proportion to his muscle. He thus helps them
to get rid of fear and timidity, the great handicaps
to achievement. I believe if we had a larger conception
of our possibilities, a larger faith in ourselves, we could

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accomplish infinitely more. If if we only better understood our divinity,
we would have this larger faith. We are crippled by
the old Orthodox idea of man's inferiority. There is no
inferiority about the man that God made. The only inferiority
in us is what we put into ourselves. What God

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made is perfect. The trouble is that most of us
are but a burlesque of the man God patterned and intended.
A Harvard graduate who has been out of college a
number of years writes that because of his lack of
self confidence, he has never earned more than twelve dollars
a week. A graduate of Princeton tells us that, except
for a brief period, he has never been able to

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earn more than a dollar a day. These men do
not dare to assume responsibility. Their timidity and want of
faith in themselves destroy their efficiency. The great trouble with
many of us is that we do not believe enough
in ourselves we do not realize our power. Man was
made to hold up his head and carry himself like

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a conqueror, not like a slave, as a success, not
as a failure to assert his God given birthright. Self
depreciation is a crime. If you would be superior, you
must hold the thought of superiority constantly in the mind.
A singularly modest man of so retiring a disposition that
at one time he did not show half of his

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great ability, whose shrinking nature and real talent for self
abasement had actually given him an inferior appearance, told me
one day how he had counteracted this tendency towards self depreciation.
Among other things, he said he had derived great benefit
from the practice he had formed of going about the streets,
especially where he was not known, with an air of

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great importance, as though imagining himself the mayor of the city,
the governor of the state, or even the president of
the United States. By merely looking as though he expected
everybody to recognize that he must be a person of note,
he changed not only his appearance but also his convictions.
It raised him a menace sasurably in his own estimation.

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It had a marked effect upon his whole character. Where
he once walked through the streets, shrinking from the gaze
of others and dreading their scrutiny, he now boldly invites,
even demands attention by his evident superiority, For he has
the appearance of one whom people would like to know.
In other words, he has caught a glimpse of his divinity.
He really feels his superiority, and his self respecting manner

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reflects it. Be sure that your success will never rise
higher than your confidence in yourself. The greatest artist in
the world could not paint the face of a madonna
with a model of depravity in his mind. You cannot
succeed while doubting yourself or thinking thoughts of failure. Cling
to success thoughts, fill your mind with cheerful, optimistic pictures,

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pictures of achievement. This will scatter the specters of doubt
and fear and send a power through you which will
transform you into an achiever. No matter how poor or
how hemmed in you may be. Stoutly deny the power
of adversity or poverty to keep you down. Constantly assert
your superiority to environment, believe in yourself, feel that you

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are to dominate your surroundings. Resolve that you will be
the master and not the slave of circumstances. This very
assertion of superiority, this assumption of power, this affirmation of
your ability to succeed, the attitude that claims success as
an inalienable birthright, will strengthen the whole man and give
great added power to the combination of faculties which doubt, fear,

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and lack of confidence under mine self confidence marshals all
one's faculties and twists their united strength into one mighty
achievement cable. It carries conviction. It makes other people believe
in us. What has not been accomplished through its miraculous power?
What triumphs and invention in art and in discovery have

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been wrought through its magic? What does not civilization oh
to the invincible self faith of its inventors, its discoverers,
its railroad builders, its mind developers and city builders. It
has won a thousand victories in science and in war
which were deemed impossible by faint hearted doubters. The fact
that you believe implicitly that you can do what may

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seem impossible or very difficult to others shows that there
is something within you that has gotten a glimpse of
power sufficient to do the thing. Many men who have
achieved great things cannot account for their faith. They cannot
tell why they had the implicit confidence that they could
do what they undertook. But the result was evidence that
something within them had gotten a glimpse of latent resourcefulness,

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reserve power, and possibilities which would warrant that faith. And
they have gone ahead, often when they could not see
a ray of light, with implicit confidence that they would
come out all right, because this faith told them so.
It told them so because it had been in communication
with something within them that was divine, that which had
passed the bounds of the limited and had entered the

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domain of the limitless. When we begin to exercise the
faculties of self faith, self confidence, we are stimulating and
increasing the strength of the very faculties which enable us
to do the thing we have set our heart on.
The very exercise of faith helps us to do what
we undertake, because our greater concentration develops that portion of

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the brain which enables us to accomplish it. Men who
have left their mark on the world have often been
implicit followers of their faith. When they could see no light,
and their faith has led them through the wilderness of
doubt and hardship into the promised land. Our faith often
tells us that we may proceed safely even in the dark,
when we see no light ahead. Faith is a divine

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leader which never misdirects us. We must only be sure
that it is faith and not merely egotism or selfish desire.
Our faith puts us in touch with the infinite, opens
the way to unbounded possibilities, limitless power. It is the
truth of our towing. It is the one thing that
we can be sure will not mislead us. An unwavering

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belief in one's self destroys the greatest enemies of achievement, fear, doubt,
and vacillation. It removes the thousand and one obstacles which
impede the progress of the weak and irresolute. Faith in
one's mission, in the conviction that the Creator has given
us power to realize our life call, as it is
written in our blood and stamped on our brain cells,

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is the secret of all power. Poverty and failure are
self invited. The disasters people dread often come to them.
Worry and anxiety, enfeeble their force of mind and so
blunt their creative and productive faculties that they are unable
to exercise them properly. Fear of failure or lack of
faith in one's ability, is one of the most potent

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causes of failure. Many people of splendid powers have attained
only mediocre success, and some are total failures because they
set bounds to their achievement beyond which they did not
allow themselves to think that they could pass. They put
limitations to their ability. They cast stumbling blocks in their
way by aiming only at mediocrity or predicting failure for themselves,

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talking their wares down instead of up, disparaging their business
and belittling their powers. Thoughts are forces, and the constant
affirmation of one's inherent right and power to succeed will
change in hospitable conditions and unkind environments to favorable ones.
If you resolve upon success with energy, you will very
soon create a success atmosphere and things will come your way.

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You can make yourself a success magnet. If things would
only change, you cry, what is it that changes things?
Wishing or hustling, dreaming or working? Can you expect them
to change while you merely sit down and wish them
to change. How long would it take you to build
a house sitting on the foundation and wishing that it

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would go up. Wishing does not amount to anything unless
it is backed by endeavor, determination, and grit. Webster's father
was much chagrined and pained when Daniel refused a fifteen
hundred dollar clerkship in the Court of Common Pleas in
New Hampshire, which he had worked hard to secure for
him after he left college. Daniel, he said, don't you

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mean to take that office? No, indeed, father, hope, I
can do much better than that. I mean to use
my tongue in the courts, not my pen. I mean
to be an actor, not a register of other men's acts.
Sublime self faith was characteristic of this giant's career. Every

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child should be taught to expect success and to believe
that he was born to achieve, as the acorn is
destined to become an oak. It is cruel for parents
and teachers to tell children that they are dull or stupid,
or that they are not like others of their age.
They should inspire them instead with hope and confidence and
belief in their success birthright. A child should be trained

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to expect great things and should believe firmly in his
God given power to accomplish something worth while in the world.
Without self faith and an iron will, man is but
the plaything of chance, a puppet of circumstances. With these
he is a king. And it is in childhood the
seeds must be sown that will make him a conqueror
in life. If you want to reach nobility, you can

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never do it by holding the thought of inferiority, the
thought that you are not as good as other people,
that you are not as able, that you cannot do this,
that you cannot do that can't. Philosophy never does anything
but tear down. It never builds up. If you want
to amount to anything in the world, you must hold
up your head say to yourself continually, I am no beggar,

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I am no pauper. I am not a failure, I
am a prince, I am a king. Success is my birthright,
and nobody shall deprive me of it. A proper self
esteem is not a vulgar quality. It is a very
sacred one. To esteem oneself justly is to get a

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glimpse of the infinite's plan in us. It is to
get the perfect image which the Creator had in mind
when he formed us, the complete man or woman, not
the dwarf, pinched one which lack of self esteem or
of self confidence sees. When we get a glimpse of
our immortal selves, we shall see possibilities of which we
never before dreamed. A sense of wholeness, of power and

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self confidence will come into our lives, which will transform them.
When we rate ourselves properly, we shall be in tune
with the infinite. Our faculties will be connected with an
electric wire which carries unlimited power, and we shall no
longer stumble in darkness, doubt and weakness. We shall be invincible.
He can who thinks he can? By Orizon sweat Marten,

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nineteen o eight two. Getting aroused, how's the boy gidden on?
Davis asked farmer John Field, as he watched his son
Marsha waiting upon a customer. Well, John, you and I
are old friends, replied Deacon Davis, as he took an
apple from a barrel and handed it to Marshall's father
as a peace offering. We are old friends, and I

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don't want to hurt your feelings, but I'm a blunt man,
and they're goin to tell you the truth. Marshall is
a good, steady boy, all right, but he wouldn't make
a merchant if he stayed in my store a thousand years.
He warn't cut out for a merchant. Take him back
to the farm, John and teach him how to milk cows.

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If Marshall Field had remained as clerk in Deacon Davis's
store in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where he got his first position,
he could never have become one of the world's merchant princes.
But when he went to Chicago and saw the marvelous
examples around him of poor boys who had won success,
it aroused his ambition and fired him with the determination
to be a great merchant himself. If others can do

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such wonderful things, he asked himself, why cannot I. Of course,
there was the making of a great merchant in mister
Field from the start, but circumstances, an ambition arousing environment
had a great deal to do with stimulating his latent
energy and bringing out his reserve force. It is doubtful
if he would have climbed so rapidly in any other

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place than Chicago, in eighteen fifty six. When young Field
went there, this marvelous city was just starting on its
unparalleled career. It had then only about eighty five thousand inhabitants.
A few years before, it had been a mere Indian
trading village. But the city grew by leaps and bounds
and always beat the predictions of its most sanguine inhabitants.

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Success was in the air. Everybody felt that there were
great possibilities there. Many people seem to think that ambition
is a quality born within us, that it is not
susceptible to improvement, that it is something thrust upon us
which will take care of itself. But it is a
passion that responds very very quickly to cultivation, and it
requires constant care and education, just as the faculty for

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music or art does, or it will atrophy. If we
do not try to realize our ambition, it will not
keep sharp and defined. Our faculties become dull and soon
lose their power if they are not exercised. How can
we expect our ambition to remain fresh and vigorous through
years of inactivity, indolence, or indifference If we constantly allow

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opportunities to slip by us without making any attempt to
grasp them. Our inclination will grow duller and weaker. What
I most need, as Emerson says, is somebody to make
me do what I can. To do what I can,
that is my problem. Not what a Napoleon or a
Lincoln could do, but what I can do. It makes
all the difference in the world to me, whether I

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bring out the best thing in me or the worst,
whether I utilize ten, fifteen, twenty five or ninety percent
of my ability. Everywhere we see people who have reached
middle life or later without being aroused. They have developed
only a small percentage of their success possibilities. They are
still in a dormant state. The best thing in them lies

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so deep that it has never been awakened. When we
meet these people, we feel conscious that they have a
great deal of latent power that has never been exercised.
Great possibilities of usefulness and of achievement are all unconsciously
going to waste within them. Some time ago there appeared
in the newspapers an account of a girl who had

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reached the age of fifteen years and yet had only
attained the mental development of a small child. Only a
few things interested her. She was dreamy, inactive, and indifferent
to everything around her most of the time, until one day,
while listening to a hand organ on the street, she
suddenly awakened to full consciousness. She came to herself, Her

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faculties were aroused, and in a few days she leaped
forward years in her development. Almost in a day, she
passed from childhood to budding womanhood. Most of us have
an enormous amount of power, of latent force slumbering within us,
as it slumbered in this girl, which could do marvels
if we would only awaken it. The judge of the

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municipal court in a flourishing western city, one of the
most highly esteemed jurists in his state, was in middle
life before his latent power was aroused, an illiterate blacksmith.
He is now sixty the owner of the finest library
in his city, with the reputation of being its best
reed man, and one whose highest endeavor is to help
his fellow man. What caused the revolution in his life

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the hearing of a single lecture on the value of education.
This was what stirred the slumbering power within him, awakened
his ambition and set his feet in the path of
self development. I have known several men who never realized
their possibilities until they reached middle life. Then they were
suddenly aroused, as if from a long sleep, by reading

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some inspiring, stimulating book, by listening to a sermon or
a lecture, or by meeting some friend, some one with
high ideals who understood, believed in, and encouraged them. It
will make all the difference in the world to you,
whether you are with people who are watching for ability
in you, people who believe in, encourage and praise you,
or whether you are with those who are forever breaking

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your idols, blasting your hopes, and throwing cold water on
your aspirations. The Chief Probation Officer of the Children's Court
in New York, in his report for nineteen o five,
says removing a boy or girl from improper environment is
the first step in his or her reclamation. The New
York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, after

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thirty years of investigation of cases involving the social and
moral welfare of over half a million of children, has
also come to the conclusion that environment is stronger than heredity.
Even the strongest of us are not beyond the reach
of our environment. No matter how independent, strong willed, and
determined our nature, we are constantly being modified by our surroundings.

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Take the best born child with the greatest inherited advantages
and let it be reared by savages, and how many
of its inherited tendencies will remain. If brought up from
infancy in a barbarous, brutal atmosphere, it will of course
become brutal. The story is told of a well born
child who, being lost or abandoned as an infant, was

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suckled by a wolf with her own young ones, and
who actually took on all the characteristics of the wolf,
walked on all fours, held like a wolf, and ate
like one. It does not take much to determine the
lives of most of us. We naturally follow the examples
about us, and as a rule, we rise or fall
according to the strongest current in which we live. The

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poets I am a part of all that I have
met is not a mere poetic flight of fancy. It
is an absolute truth. Everything. Every sermon or lecture or
conversation you have heard, every person who has touched your
life has left an impress upon your character, and you
are never quite the same person. After the association or experience.

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You are a little different, modified somewhat from what you
were before, just as Beecher was never the same man
after reading Ruskin. Some years ago, a party of Russian
workmen were sent to this country by a Russian firm
of ship builders in order that they might acquire American
methods and catch the American spirit. Within six months, the
Russians have become almost the equals of the American artisans

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among whom they worked. They had developed ambition, individuality, personal initiative,
and a marked degree of excellence in their work. A
year after their return to their own country, the deadening,
non progressive atmosphere about them had done its work. The
men had lost the desire to improve. They were again
plotters with no goal beyond the day's work. The ambition

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aroused by stimulating environment had sunk to sleep again. Our
Indian schools sometimes publish side by side photographs of the
Indian youths as they come from the reservation and as
they look when they are graduated, well dressed, intelligent, with
the fire of ambition in their eyes. We predict great
things for them. But the majority of those who go

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back to their tribes after struggling awhile to keep up
their new standards, gradually drop back to their old manner
of living. There are, of course many notable exceptions, but
these are strong characters, able to resist the downward dragging
tendencies about them. If you interview the great army of failures,
you will find that multitudes have failed because they never

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got into a stimulating, encouraging environment, because their ambition was
never aroused, or because they were not strong enough to
rally under depressing, discouraging, or vicious surroundings. Most of the
people we find in prisons and poor houses are pitiable
examples of the influence of an environment which appealed to
the worst instead of to the best in them. Whatever

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you do in life, make any sacrifice necessary to keep
in an ambition arousing atmosphere, an environment that will stimulate
you to self development. Keep close to people who understand you,
who believe in you, who will help you to discover
yourself and encourage you to make the most of yourself.
This may make all the difference to you between a
grand success and a mediocre existence. Stick to those who

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are trying to do something, and to be somebody in
the world. People of high aims, lofty ambition, keep close
to those who are dead in earnest. Ambition is contagious.
You will catch the spirit that dominates in your environment.
The success of those about you who are trying to
climb upward will encourage and stimulate you to struggle harder

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if you have not done quite so well yourself. There
is a great power in a battery of individuals who
are struggling for the achievement of high aims, a great
magnetic force which will help you to attract the eye
object of your ambition. It is very stimulating to be
with people whose aspirations run parallel with your own. If
you lack energy, if you are naturally lazy, indolent, or

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inclined to take it easy, you will be urged forward
by the constant prodding of the more ambitious. He can
who thinks he can. By Orison Sweat Martin, nineteen o eight,
Free Education by absorption. John Wannamaker was once asked to
invest in an expedition to recover from the Spanish Main Doubloons,
which for half a century had lain at the bottom

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of the sea in sunken frigates. Young men, he replied,
I know of a better expedition than this. Right here,
near your own feet lie treasures untold. You can have
them all by faithful study. Let us not be content
to mine the most coal, to make the largest locomotives,
to weave the largest quantities of carpets. But amid the

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sounds of the pick, the blows of the hammer, the
rattle of the looms, and the roar of the machinery,
take care that the immortal mechanism of God's own hand,
the mind, is still full trained for the highest and
noblest service. The uneducated man is always placed at a
great disadvantage. No matter how much natural ability one may have.

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If he is ignorant, he is discounted. It is not
enough to possess ability. It must be made available by
mental discipline. We ought to be ashamed to remain in
ignorance in a land where the blind, the deaf and dumb,
and even cripples and invalids manage to obtain a good education.
Many youths throw away little opportunities for self culture because

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they cannot see great ones. They let the years slip
by without any special effort at self improvement. Until they
are shocked in middle life, or later by waking up
to the fact that they are still ignorant of what
they ought to know. Everywhere we go we see men
and women, especially from twenty five to forty years of age,
who are cramped and seriously handicapped by the lack of

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early training. I often get letters from such people asking
if it is possible for them to educate themselves so
late in life. Of course it is. There are so
many good correspondent schools to day and institutions like Chautauqua,
so many evening schools, lectures, books, libraries, and periodicals that

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men and women who are determined to improve themselves have
abundant opportunities to do so. While you lament the lack
of an early education and think it too late to begin,
you may be sure that there are other young men
and young women not very far from you who are
making great strides in self improvement, though they may not
have half as good an opportunity for it as you have.

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The first thing to do is to make a resolution, strong, vigorous,
and determined that you are going to be an educated
man or woman, that you are not going to go
through life humiliated by ignorance, that if you have been
deprived of early advantages, you are going to make up
for their loss. Resolve that you will no longer be
handicapped and placed at a disadvantage for that which you

(32:01):
can remedy. You will find the whole world will change
to you when you change your attitude toward it. You
will be surprised to see how quickly you can very
materially improve your mind. After you have made a vigorous
resolve to do so, go about it with the same
determination that you would to make money or to learn
a trade. There is a divine hunger in every normal

(32:22):
being for self expansion, a yearning for growth or enlargement.
Beware of stifling this craving of nature for self unfoldment.
Man was made for growth. It is the object, the
explanation of his being, to have an ambition to grow
larger and broader every day, to push the horizon of
ignorance a little further away, to become a little richer

(32:45):
in knowledge, a little wiser and more of a man.
That is an ambition worth. While it is not absolutely
necessary that an education should be crowded into a few
years of school life, the best educated people are those
who are always learning, always absorbing knowledge from every possible
source and at every opportunity. I know young people who

(33:06):
have acquired a better education, a finer culture through a
habit of observation, or of carrying a book in the
pocket to read at odd moments, or by taking courses
in correspondence schools than many who have gone through college.
Youths who are quick to catch at new ideas and
who are in frequent contact with superior minds not only
often acquire a personal charm, but even to a remarkable

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degree developmental power. The world is a great university, from
the cradle to the grave. We are always in God's
great kindergarten, where everything is trying to teach us its lesson,
to give us its great secret. Some people are always
at school, always storing up precious bits of knowledge. Everything
has a lesson for them. It all depends upon the

(33:52):
eye that can see, the mind that can appropriate. Very
few people ever learn how to use their eyes. They
go go through the world with a superficial glance at
things there I pictures are so faint and so dim
that details are lost, and no strong impression is made
on the mind. Yet the eye was intended for a
great educator. The brain is a prisoner, never getting out

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to the outside world. It depends upon its five or
six servants, the senses, to bring it material, and the
larger part of it comes through the eye. The man
who has learned the art of seeing things looks with
his brain. I know a father who is training his
boy to develop his powers of observation. He will send
him out upon a street with which he is not

(34:37):
familiar for a certain length of time, and then question
him on his return to see how many things he
has observed. He sends him to the show windows of
great stores, to museums, and other public places, to see
how many of the objects he has seen the boy
can recall and describe when he gets home. The father
says that this practice develops in the boy a habit
of seeing things instead of merely looking at them. When

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a new student went to the great naturalist professor Agassi
of Harvard, he would give him a fish and tell
him to look it over for half an hour or
an hour, and then describe to him what he saw.
After the student thought he had told everything about the fish,
the professor would say, you have not really seen the fish.
Yet look at it a while longer, and then tell

(35:21):
me what you see. He would repeat this several times
until the student developed a capacity for observation. If we
go through life like an interrogation point, holding an alert,
inquiring mind toward everything, we can acquire great mental wealth, wisdom,
which is beyond all material riches. Ruskin's mind was enriched

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by the observation of birds, insects, beasts, trees, rivers, mountains,
pictures of sunset and landscape, and by memories of the
song of the lark and of the brook. His brain
held thousands of pictures of paintings, of architecture, of sculpture,
a wealth of material which he reproduced as a joy
for all time. Everything gave up its lesson, its secret

(36:05):
to his inquiring mind. The habit of absorbing information of
all kinds from others is of untold value. A man
is weak and ineffective in proportion as he secludes himself
from his kind. There is a constant stream of power,
a current of forces running to and fro between individuals
who come in contact with one another. If they have

(36:26):
inquiring minds, we are all giving taking perpetually. When we
associate together. The achiever today must keep in touch with
the society around him. He must put his finger on
the pulse of the great busy world and feel its
throbbing life. He must be a part of it, or
there will be some lack in his life. A single talent,

(36:47):
which one can use effectively, is worth more than ten
talents imprisoned by ignorance. Education means that knowledge has been
assimilated and become a part of the person. It is
the ability to express the power within one one to
give out what one knows that measures efficiency and achievement.
Pent up knowledge is useless. People who feel their lack

(37:09):
of education and who can afford the outlay, can make
wonderful strides in a year by putting themselves under good
tutors who will direct their reading and study along different lines.
The danger of trying to educate oneself lies in desultory, disconnected,
aimless studying, which does not give anything like the benefit
to be derived from the pursuit of a definite program

(37:29):
for self improvement. A person who wishes to educate himself
at home should get some competent, well trained person to
lay out a plan for him, which can only be
effectively done when the adviser knows the vocation, the tastes,
and the needs of the would be student. Anyone who
aspires to an education, whether in country or city, can
find someone to at least guide his studies. Some teacher, clergyman, lawyer,

(37:54):
or other educated person in the community to help him.
There is one special advantage in c self education. You
can adapt your studies to your own particular needs better
than you could in school or college. Everyone who reaches
middle life without an education should first read and study
along the line of his own vocation, and then broaden
himself as much as possible by reading on other lines.

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One can take up alone many studies such as history, English, literature, rhetoric, drawing, mathematics,
and can also acquire by oneself almost as effectively as
with a teacher or reading knowledge of foreign languages. The
daily storing up a valuable information for use later in life.
The reading of books that will inspire and stimulate to

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greater endeavor, the constant effort to try to improve oneself
and one's condition in the world are worth far more
than a bank account to a youth. How many girls
there are in this country who feel crippled by the
fact that they have not been able to go to college,
and yet they have the time and the material close
at hand for obtaining a splendid education. But they waste

(38:59):
their talents and opportunities in frivolous amusements and things which
do not count in forceful character building. It is not
such a very great undertaking to get all the essentials
of a college course at home, or at least a
fair substitute for it. Every hour in which one focuses
his mind vigorously upon his studies at home may be
as beneficial as the same time spent in college. Every

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well ordered household ought to protect the time of those
who desire to study at home. At a fixed hour
every evening during the long winter, there should be, by
common consent, a quiet period for mental concentration for what
is worth while in mental discipline, a quiet hour uninterrupted
by time thief callers. In thousands of homes where the
members are devoted to each other and should encourage and

(39:45):
help each other along, it is made almost impossible for
anyone to take up reading, studying, or any exercise for
self improvement. Perhaps someone is thoughtless and keeps interrupting the
others so that they cannot concentrate their minds, or those
who have nothing in common with your aims or your
earnest life drop in to spend an evening in idle chatter.

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They have no ideals outside of the bread and butter
and amusement questions, and do not realize how they are
hindering you. There is constant temptation to waste one's evenings,
and it takes a stout ambition and a firm resolution
to separate oneself from a jolly, fun loving and congenial
family circle or happy hearted, youthful callers in order to
try to rise above the common herd of unambitious persons

(40:28):
who are content to slide along totally ignorant of everything
but the requirements of their particular vocations. A habit of
forcing yourself to fix your mind steadfastly and systematically upon
certain studies, even if only for periods of a few
minutes at a time, is of itself of the greatest value.
This habit helps one to utilize the odds and ends

(40:50):
of time, which are unavailable to most people because they
have never been trained to concentrate the mind at regular intervals.
A good understanding of the possibilities that live in spare
moments is a great success asset. The very reputation of
always trying to improve yourself, of seizing every opportunity to
fit yourself for something better, the reputation of being dead

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in earnest determined to be somebody and to do something
in the world, would be of untold assistance to you.
People like to help those who are trying to help themselves,
they will throw opportunities in their way. Such a reputation
is the best kind of capital to start with. One
trouble with people who are smarting tinder the consciousness of

(41:31):
deficient education, is that they do not realize the immense
value of utilizing spare minutes. Like many boys who will
not save their pennies and small change because they cannot
see how a fortune could ever grow by the saving.
They cannot see how a little studying here and there
each day will ever amount to a good substitute for
a college education. I know a young man who never

(41:53):
even attended a high school, and yet educated himself so
superbly that he has been offered a professorship in a college.
Most of his knowledge was gained during his odds and
ends of time while working hard at his vocation. Spare
time meant something to him. The correspondent schools deserve very
great credit for inducing hundreds of thousands of people, including clerks,

(42:15):
male operatives, and employees of all kinds, to take their
courses and thus save for study the odds and ends
of time which otherwise would probably be thrown away. We
have heard of some most remarkable instances of rapid advancement
which these correspondent school students have made by reason of
the improvement in their education. Many students have reaped a

(42:36):
thousand percent on their educational investment. It has saved them
years of drudgery and has shortened wonderfully the road to
their goal. Wisdom will not open her doors to those
who are not willing to pay the price in self
sacrifice in hard work. Her jewels are too precious to
scatter before the idol the ambitionless. The very resolution to

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redeem yourself from as ignorance at any cost is the
first great step toward gaining an education. Charles Wagner once
wrote to an American regarding his little boy, May he
know the price of the hours. God bless the rising
boy who will do his best for never losing a
bit of the precious and God given time. There is
untold wealth locked up in the long winter evenings and

(43:21):
odd moments ahead of you, a great opportunity confronts you.
What will you do with it? He ca and who
thinks he can by orison sweat Martin nineteen o eight
for freedom at any cost. Were you to decide to
risk your reputation, your material welfare, your whole future upon

(43:41):
some great physical or mental contest which should extend over
a considerable period of time, you would begin long beforehand
to train or discipline yourself for the decisive conflict. You
would not, if possible, to avoid doing so, go into
it handicapped. Every person who is ambitious to make his
life count, to do what is worth while, is entering

(44:02):
upon just such a contest. In starting upon a conflict
so grave, so significant, and which affects the whole future,
the first thing to do is to get absolute freedom
from everything which strangles ambition, discourages effort, and hinders progress.
Freedom from everything which SAPs vitality, enslaves the faculties, and
wastes energy. To remove every obstruction from the way and

(44:25):
leave a clear path to one's goal. No matter how
ambitious a runner may be to win. If he does
not train off his surplus fat, If he is hampered
with extra clothing or runs with feet cramped and sore,
his race is lost. The trouble with most of us
is that, while ambitious to succeed, we do not put
ourselves in a condition to win. We do not cut

(44:47):
the cords which bind us, or try to get rid
of the entanglements and obstructions that hinder us. We trust
too much to luck. To eliminate everything that can possibly
retard us. To get into as harmonious an environment as
possible is the first preparation for a successful career. There
are tens of thousands of people who have ability and

(45:07):
inclination to rise out of mediocrity and to do something
worth while in the world, but who never do so
because they cannot break the chains that bind their movements.
Most of us are so bound in some part of
our nature that we cannot get free, cannot gain the
liberty to do the larger thing possible to us. We
go through life doing the smaller, the meaner, When the larger,

(45:29):
the grander would be possible. Could we get rid of
the things that handicap us. Every normal man has a
reserve power within him, a mighty coil of force and purpose,
which would enable him to make his life strong and complete,
were he free to express the largest and the best
things in him, were he not fettered by some bond,
physical or moral. You can tie a strong horse with

(45:51):
a very small cord, and he cannot show his greatest
speed or strength till he is free. On every hand
we see people with splendid billie tied down by some
apparently insignificant thing which handicaps all their movements. They cannot
go ahead until they are free. A giant would be
a weakling if he were confined in so small a

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space that he did not have room to exert himself
with freedom. The majority of people live in a cramped
and uncongenial environment, in an atmosphere which dampens enthusiasm, discourages
ambition and effort, scatters energy, and wastes time. They have
not the courage or stamina to cut the shackles that
bind them, to throw away all crutches and props, and

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to rely on themselves to get into an environment where
they can do what they desire. Their ambition finally dies
through discouragement and in action. I recall the case of
a youth with artistic talent who let precious years go
by drifting by accident from one vocation to another, without
encouraging this God given ability, or making any great effort

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to get rid of the little things which stood in
the way of a great career. Although he was always
haunted by a longing for it. He was conscientious in
his everyday work, but his heart was never in it.
His artistic nature yearned for expression, to get away from
the work against which every faculty protested, and to go
abroad in study. But he was poor, and although his

(47:15):
work was drudgery and his whole soul loathed it, he
was afraid of the hardships and the obstacles he would
have to encounter if he answered the call that ran
in his blood. He kept resolving to break away and
to follow the promptings of his ambition, but he also
kept waiting and waiting for a more favorable opportunity, until
after a number of years he found other things crowding

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into his life. His longing for art became fainter and fainter.
The call was less and less imperative. Now he rarely
speaks of his early aspirations, for his ambition is practically dead.
Those who know him feel that something grand and sacred
has gone out of him, and that although he has
been industrious and honest, he has never expressed the real

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meaning of his life, the high thing in him. I
know a woman who, in her youth and early womanhood,
had marked musical ability, a voice, rich, powerful, sympathetic. She
had also a beautiful face and a magnetic personality. Nature
had been very generous to her, and she longed to
express her remarkable powers. But she was in a most

(48:19):
discouraging environment. Her family did not understand her or sympathize
with her ambition, and she finally became accustomed to her shackles, and,
like a prisoner, ceased to struggle for freedom. A songstress
of international fame who heard her voice, said that she
had it in her to make one of the world's
greatest singers, but she yielded to the wishes of her

(48:40):
parents and the fascinations of society, until the ambition gradually
died out of her life. She says that the dying
of this great passion was indescribably painful. She settled down
to the duties of a wife, but has never been
really happy, and has always carried in her face and absent,
far away look of disappointment. Her unused talent was a

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great loss to the world and a loss indescribable to herself.
She drags out a dissatisfied existence, always regretting the past
and vainly wishing that, instead of letting her ambition die,
she had struggled to realize it. Timidity also hinders freedom.
Thousands of able young men and young women in this

(49:22):
country are ambitious to make the most of themselves, but
are completely fettered or held back by an abnormal timidity,
a lack of self faith. They feel great and used
powers within, struggling for expression, but dread that they may fail.
The fear of being thought forward or egotistical seals their lips,
palsies their hands, and drives their ambition back upon itself

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to die of inaction. They do not dare to give
up a certainty for an uncertainty. They are afraid to
push ahead. They wait and wait, hoping that some mysterious
power may liberate them and give them confidence and hope.
Many people are imprisoned by ignorance. They never reach the
freedom which education gives their mental powers are never unlocked.

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They have not the grit to struggle for emancipation, the
stamina to make up for the lack of early training.
They think they are too old to begin. The price
of freedom seems too high to pay at their time
of life, and so they plot upon a low plane
when they could have gained the heights where superiority dwells.
Others are so bound by the fetters of prejudice and

(50:28):
superstition that their lives are narrow and mean. These are
the most hopeless of all. They are so blinded that
they do not even know they are not free, but
they think other people are in prison. If you would
attain that largeness of life, that fullness of self expression
which expands all the faculties, you must get freedom at

(50:48):
any cost. Nothing will compensate you for stifling the best
thing in you. Bring it out at any sacrifice. It
often takes a great deal of friction, of suffer, of
struggling with obstacles and misfortunes, before the true strength of
one's character is brought out. The diamond could never reveal
its depths of brilliancy and beauty but for the friction

(51:11):
of the stone which grinds its facets, polishes it, and
lets in a light which discloses its hidden wealth. This
is the price of its liberation from darkness. Ask the
majority of men and women who have done great things
in the world to what they owe their strength, their
breadth of mind, and the diversity of experience which has
enriched their lives. They will tell you that these are

(51:33):
the fruits of struggle, that they acquired, their finest discipline,
their best character, drill in the effort to escape from
an uncongenial environment, to break the bonds which enslave them,
to obtain an education, to get away from poverty, to
carry out some cherished plan to reach their ideal. Whatever
it was, the efforts we are obliged to make to

(51:54):
free ourselves from the bonds of poverty, or heredity, of passion,
or prejudice, whatever there it is that holds us back
from our heart's desire call to our aid. Spiritual and
physical resources which would have remained forever unused, perhaps undiscovered,
but for the necessity thrust upon us. Unsatisfied longings and
stifled ambitions eat away the very heart of desire. They

(52:18):
sap strength of character, destroy hope, and blot out ideals.
They play havoc with the lives of men and women.
They make them mere shells, empty promises of what they
might have been. I do not believe that anybody, in
any circumstances can be happy until he expresses that which
God has made to dominate in his life, until he
has given vent to that grand passion which speaks loudest

(52:40):
in his nature, until he has made the best use
of that gift which was intended to take precedence of
all his other powers. No man can live a half
life when he has genuinely learned that it is a
half life, said Phillips Brooks. After we have gained a
glimpse of a life higher and better than we have
been living, we must either break the bonds that bind
us and struggle towards the attainment of that which we see,

(53:03):
or development will cease and deterioration set in. Even the
longing to reach an ideal will soon die out if
no effort is made to satisfy it. No one should
follow a vocation except by inevitable compulsion, which does not
tend to unlock his prison house and let out the man.
No one should voluntarily remain in an environment which prevents

(53:24):
his development. Civilization owes its greatest triumphs to the struggles
of men and women to free themselves from the bonds
of circumstance. No man can live a full life while
he is bound in any part of his nature. He
must have freedom of thought as well as freedom of action.
To grow to his full height, there must be no
shackles on his conscience, no stifling of his best powers.

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Be yourself, do not lean or apologize. Few people belong
to themselves. They are slaves to their creditors or to
some entangling alliance. They do not do what they want to.
They do what they are compelled to do, giving up
their best energy to make a living, so that there
is practically nothing left to make a life. There are

(54:10):
plenty of men today working for others who really have
more ability than their employers, but who have been so enslaved,
so entangled and faculty bound by debt or unfortunate alliances,
that they have not been able to get the freedom
to express their ability. Can anything compensate a promising young
man for the loss of his freedom of action, his
liberty of speech, and conviction. Can any money pay him

(54:34):
for cringing and crawling sneaking and apologizing throughout his life
when it is within his power to hold up his
head and without wincing, look the world squarely in the face.
Never put yourself in a position, no matter what the inducement,
whether a big salary or other financial reward, or the
promise of position or influence, where you cannot act the

(54:55):
part of a man. Let no consideration tie your tongue
or purchase your opinion. Regard your independence as your inalienable
right with which you will never part for any consideration.
One talent with freedom is infinitely better than genius tied
up and entangled so that it must do everything at
a disadvantage of what use is a giant intellect so

(55:16):
restrained and hampered that it can only do a pygmy's work.
To make the most of ourselves, we must cut off
whatever drains vitality, physical or moral, and stop all the
waste of life. We must cut off everything which causes friction,
which tends to weaken effort, lower the ideals, and drag
down the life standards, Everything which tends to kill the

(55:38):
ambition and to make us satisfied with mediocrity. Multitudes of
people enslaved by bad physical habits, are unable to get
their best selves into their work. They are kept back
by a leakage of energy and vital force resulting from
bad habits and dissipation. Some are hindered by peculiarities of disposition,

(55:58):
by stubbornness, slovenliness, meanness, revengefulness, jealousy or envy. These are
all handicaps. Others go through life galled by their chains,
but without making any serious, continuous effort to emancipate themselves.
Carrot like the elephants or other wild animals chained in
the menageries. At first they rebel at their loss of

(56:20):
freedom and try hard to break away, but gradually they
become accustomed to slavery and take it for granted that
it is a necessary part of their existence. Then again,
there are entanglements which retard the progress and nullify the
efforts of many business men, such as debt, bad partners,
or unfortunate social alliances. Comparatively few men belong to themselves

(56:43):
or are really free. They go the way they are pushed.
They waste a large part of their energy on that
which does not really count in the main issue of life,
spend their lives paying for a dead horse, clearing up
old debts that came from bad judgment, blunders, or foolish endorsements.
Instead of putting on speed and gaining on life's road,

(57:04):
they are always trying to make up for lost time.
They are always in the rear, never in the vanguard
of their possibilities. An ambitious young man, anxious to do
what is right and eager to make a place for
himself in the world, entangles himself in complications that forward
his life purpose and cripple all his efforts, so that
no matter how hard he struggles, he is never able

(57:26):
to get beyond mediocrity. Hopelessly in debt with a family
to support, he cannot take advantage of the great opportunities
about him, as he could if he were free, if
he had not risked his little savings and tied up
his future earnings for years ahead. His great ambition only
mocks him, for he cannot satisfy it. He is tied
hand and foot like a caged eagle. No matter how

(57:50):
high he might soar into the ether, he must stop
when he strikes the bars. The man who trusts everybody
is constantly crippling himself by entangling alliances He indorses, notes, loans, money,
helps everybody out and usually gets left. He ties up
his productive ability and hampers his work by his poor

(58:10):
judgment or lack of business sense. A most estimable man
of my acquaintance was ruined financially by endorsements and loans,
which would have been foolish even for a boy of fifteen.
For many years it took every dollar he could spare
from the absolute necessities of his family to pay these obligations.
Our judgment was intended to preside over our mental faculties

(58:32):
and to help us discriminate between the wise and the foolish.
That man wins who keeps a level head and uses
sound judgment in every transaction. Whatever you do, do not
get involved. Make it a life rule to keep yourself
clean and clear, with everything safeguarded. Before you go into
anything of importance, think it through to the end. Make

(58:54):
reasonably sure that you know where you are coming out.
Do not risk a competence, or your home and your
liking savings in the hope of getting something for nothing.
Do not be carried away by the reports of those who,
in some venture have made a great deal on a
little money. Where one makes a hundred lose. There is
no greater delusion in the world than thinking that by

(59:15):
putting out a little flyer here and there, you can
make a few hundreds or a few thousands. If you
cannot make money in the vocation which you have chosen
for your life work and in which you have become expert,
if you cannot get rich in the business whose every
detail you understand, how can you expect that somebody else
will take your money and give you a tremendous return
for it when it will not get your personal supervision.

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I know a lawyer in New York now a millionaire
who had worked most of his way through college and
came to the metropolis and utter stranger, taking a little
desk room in a broker's office near Wall Street, who
at the outset made a cast iron rule that he
would always keep himself free from debt and entangling alliances.
By this inflexible rule, it is true he often lost

(59:59):
up or tunities which would have brought him excellent returns,
but he has never tied himself up in any transaction.
The result is that he has not worried himself to death,
but has reserved his strength. Nearly every enterprise he has
gone into has been very successful because he has not
touched anything unless he could see through to the end
and knew how he would come out, even taking into

(01:00:20):
consideration possible shrinkage, accident, and loss. In this way, although
he has never made any very brilliant strides or lucky hits,
and has not gone up by leaps and bounds, he
has never had to undo what he has done and
has always kept in a sure position. He has gained
the confidence not only of men in his profession, but

(01:00:42):
also of capitalists and men of wealth, who have entrusted
large sums to him. Because he has always kept his
head level and himself free from entanglements. People know that
their business and their capital will be safe in his hands.
Through steady growth and persistent pushing of practical certainties, he
has not only become a millionaire but a broad, progressive,

(01:01:03):
comprehensive man of affairs. Develop your judgment early, and exercise
your caution until it becomes reliable. Your judgment is your
best friend. Your common sense is your great life partner,
given you for guidance and to protect your interests. Depend
upon these three great friends, sound judgment, caution, and common sense,

(01:01:25):
and you will not be flung about at the mercy
of adverse winds. Twenty he can who thinks he can?
By Orison sweat Martin nineteen o eight five what the
world owes to dreamers? Once, when Emerson was in a
company of men of affairs who have been discussing railroads, stocks,
and other business matters for some time, he said, gentlemen,

(01:01:48):
now let us discuss real things for a while. Emerson
was called the dreamer of dreams because he had the
prophetic vision that saw the world to be the higher
civilization to come. Tens of thousands of men and women
stand today where he then stood almost alone. Edison is
a dreamer because he sees people half a century, hence

(01:02:09):
using and enjoying inventions, discoveries, and facilities which make the
most advanced utilities of today seem very antiquated. His minds
I seize as curiosities in museums fifty years. Hence those
mechanisms and devices which now seem so marvelous to us. Dreamers,
in this sense are true prophets. They see the civilization

(01:02:31):
that will be long before it arrives, As it was
the dreamers of forty nine who built the Old San
Francisco and made it the greatest port on the western coast.
So after the recent great earthquake and fire, when the
city lay in ashes and three hundred thousand people were homeless,
it was the dreamers of today who saw the new
city in the ashes where others saw only desolation, and who,

(01:02:52):
with indomitable grit and the unconquerable American will that characterize
the pioneers of a half century before, began to play
a restored city greater and grander than the old. It
was in dreams that the projectors of the great transcontinental
railroads first saw teeming cities and vast business enterprises, where
the more practical men without imagination saw only the great

(01:03:15):
American desert, vast alkali plains, sage grass, and impassable mountains.
The dreams of men like Collis P. Huntington and Leland Stanford,
bound together the East and the West with bands of steel,
made the two ocean's neighbors, reclaimed the desert and built
cities where before only desolation reigned. It was the persistency

(01:03:36):
and grid of dreamers that triumphed over the congressmen without imagination,
who advised importing dromedaries to carry the mails across the
Great American Desert, because they said it was ridiculous, a
foolish waste of money to build a railroad to the
Pacific Ocean, as there was nothing there to support a population.
It was such dreamers as those who saw the great
metropolis of Chicago in a straggling Indian village, who saw Omaha,

(01:04:00):
Kansas City, Denver, Salt Lake City, Los Angeles, and San
Francisco many years before they arrived, that made their existence possible.
It was such dreamers as Marshall Field, Joseph Lyder, and
Potter Palmer who saw in the ashes of the burned
Chicago a new and glorified city infinitely greater and grander
than the old. Take the dreamers out of the world's history,

(01:04:23):
and who would care to read it? Our dreamers, They
are the advance guard of humanity, the toilers who, with
bent back and sweating brow cut smooth roads over which
man marches forward from generation to generation. Most of the
things which make life worth living, which have emancipated man
from drudgery, inlifted him above commonness and ugliness, the great

(01:04:45):
amenities of life we owe to our dreamers. The present
is but the sum total of the dreams of the
ages that have gone before, the dreams of the past
made real. Our great ocean liners, our marvelous tunnels are
men magnificent bridges. Our schools, our universities, our hospitals, our libraries,
our cosmopolitan cities with their vast facilities, comforts and treasures

(01:05:10):
of art, are all the result of somebody's dreams. We
hear a great deal of talk about the impracticality of dreamers,
of people whose heads are among the stars while their
feet are on the earth. But where would civilization be
today but for the dreamers. We should still be riding
in the stagecoach or tramping across continents. We should still

(01:05:31):
cross the ocean in sailing ships, and our letters would
be carried across continents by the pony express. It cannot
be done, cries the man without imagination. It can be done.
It shall be done, cries the dreamer, And he persists
in his dreams through all sorts of privations, even to
the point of starvation if necessary, until his visions, his inventions,

(01:05:53):
his discoveries, his ideas for the betterment of the race
are made practical realities. What a pic suture the dreamer
Columbus presented as he went about, exposed to continual scoffs
and indignities, characterized as an adventurer, the very children taught
to regard him as a madman in pointing to their
foreheads as he passed. He dreamed of a world beyond

(01:06:14):
the seas, and in spite of unspeakable obstacles, his vision
became a glorious reality. It was the men who, a
quarter of a century ahead of their contemporaries, saw the
marvelous hope press in the hand press that made modern
journalism possible. Without these dreamers, our printing would still be
done by hand. It was the men who were denounced

(01:06:36):
as visionaries, who practically annihilated space and enabled us to
converse and transact business with people thousands of miles away
as though they were in the same building with us.
How many, matter of fact, unimaginative men who see only
through practical eyes would it take to replace in civilization
O Edison, a Bell or a Marconi. The very practical

(01:06:57):
people tell us that the imagination is all well enough
in artists, musicians, and poets, but that it has little
place in the great world of realities. Yet all leaders
of men have been dreamers. Our great captains of industry,
our merchant princes, have had powerful prophetic imaginations. They had

(01:07:17):
faith in the vast commercial possibilities of our people. If
it had not been for our dreamers, the American population
would still be hugging the Atlantic coast. The most practical
people in the world are those who can look far
into the future and see the civilization yet to be.
Who can see the coming man emancipated from the narrowing, hampering, fetters, limitations,

(01:07:39):
and superstitions of the present day. Who have the ability
to foresee things to come, with the power to make
them realities. The dreamers have ever been those who have
achieved the seemingly impossible. Our public parks, our art galleries,
our great institutions are dotted with monuments and statues which
the world has built to its dreamers, those who saw

(01:07:59):
visions of better things, better days for the human race.
What horrible experiences men and women have gone through in
prisons and dungeons for their dreams, dreams which were destined
to lift the world from savagery and emancipate man from drudgery.
The very dreams for which Galileo and other great scientists
were imprisoned and persecuted, were recognized as science only a

(01:08:21):
few generations later. Galileo's dream gave us a new heaven
and a new earth. The dreams of Confucius, of Buddha,
of Socrates have become realities in millions of human lives.
Christ himself was denounced as a dreamer, but his whole
life was a prophecy, a dream of the coming man,
the coming civilization. He saw beyond the burlesque of the

(01:08:44):
man God intended, beyond the deformed, weak, deficient, imperfect man.
Heredity had made to the perfect man, the ideal man,
the image of Divinity. Our visions do not mock us.
They are evidences of what is to be, the four
glimpses of possible realities. The castle in the air always

(01:09:05):
precedes the castle on the earth. George Stevenson, the poor miner,
dreamed of a locomotive engine that would revolutionize the traffic
of the world while working in the coal pits for
sixpence a day, or patching the clothes and mending the
boots of his fellow workmen, to earn a little money
to attend a night school, and at the same time
supporting his blind father he continued to dream. People called

(01:09:29):
him crazy. His roaring engine will set the houses on
fire with its sparks, everybody cried smoke will pollute the air.
Carriage makers and coachmen will starve for want of work.
See this dreamer in the House of Commons, when members
of Parliament were cross questioning him, What said one member

(01:09:49):
can be more palpably absurd and ridiculous than the prospect
held out of locomotives traveling twice as fast as horses.
We should as soon expect the people of Woolige to
suffer themselves to be fire fired off upon one of
Congreeve's rockets, as to trust themselves to the mercy of
such a machine going at such a rate. We trust
that Parliament will in all the railways it may grant

(01:10:11):
limit the speed to eight or nine miles an hour,
which is as great as can be ventured upon. But
in spite of calumny, ridicule, and opposition, this crazy visionary
toiled on for fifteen years for the realization of his vision.
On the fourth of August nineteen o seven, New York
celebrated the centennial of the dream of Robert Fulton. See

(01:10:33):
the crowd of curious scoffers at the wharves of the
Hudson River at noon on Friday, August fourth, eighteen o seven,
to witness the results of what they thought the most
ridiculous idea which ever entered a human brain, to witness
what they believed would be a most humiliating failure of
the dreams of a crank who proposed to take a
party of people up the river to Albany in a
steam vessel named the Clermont. Did anybody ever hear of

(01:10:57):
such an absurd idea as navigating a against the current
of the Hudson River without sale? Scornfully, said the scoffing
wise acres. Many of them thought that the man who
had fooled away his time and money on the Claremont
was little better than an idiot, and that he ought
to be in an insane asylum. But the Claremont did
sail up the Hudson, and Fulton was hailed as a

(01:11:19):
benefactor of the human race. What does the world not
owe to Morse who gave it its first telegraph? When
the inventor asked for an appropriation of a few thousand
dollars for the first experimental line from Washington to Baltimore.
He was sneered at by congressmen. After discouragements which would
have disheartened most men, this experimental line was completed, and

(01:11:41):
some congressmen were waiting for the message, which they did
not believe would ever come, when one of them asked
the inventor how large a package he expected to be
able to send over the wire. But very quickly the
message did come, and derision was changed to praise. The
dream of Cyrus W. Field, which tied two continents together
by the ocean cable, was denounced as worse than folly.

(01:12:04):
How long would it take to get the world's day
by day news? But for such dreamers as Field. When
William Murdoch, at the close of the eighteenth century dreamed
of lighting London by means of coal gas conveyed to
buildings and pipes, even Sir Humphry Davy sneeringly asked, do
you intend taking the dome of Saint Paul's for a gessometer.
Sir Walter Scott too ridiculed the idea of lighting London

(01:12:28):
by smoke, but he lived to use this same smoke
dream to light his castle at Abbotsford. What said the
wise scientists alight without a wick impossible. How people laughed
at the dreamer Charles Goodyear, who struggled with hardships for
eleven long years while trying to make India rubber of
practical use. See him in prison for debt, still dreaming

(01:12:51):
while pawning his clothes and his wife's jewelry to get
a little money to keep his children from starving. Note
his sublime courage and devotion to his vision, even when
without money to bury a dead child, while his five
other children were near starvation, and his neighbors were denouncing
him as insane. Women called Elias how a fool and crank,
and condemned him for neglecting his family to dream of

(01:13:14):
a machine which has proved a blessing to millions of
their sex. The great masters are always idealists, seers of visions.
The sculptor is a dreamer who sees the statue in
the rough block before he strikes a blow with his chisel.
The artist sees a vision of the finished painting in
all its perfection and beauty of coloring in form, before

(01:13:35):
he touches a brush to the canvas. Every palace, every
beautiful structure, is first the dream of the architect. It
had no previous existence in reality. The building came out
of his ideal before it was made real. Sir Christopher
Wren saw Saint Paul's Cathedral in all its magnificent beauty

(01:13:55):
before the foundations were laid. It was his dream which
revolutionized the architecture of London. It was the dreaming barren
houseman who made Paris the most beautiful city in the world.
Think what we owe the beauty dreamers for making our
homes and our parks so attractive. Yet there are thousands
of practical men in New York today who, if they

(01:14:16):
could have their way, would cut Central Park up into
lots and cover it with business blocks. The achievements of
every successful man are but the realized visions of his youth,
his dreams of bettering his condition, of enlarging his power.
Our homes are the dreams that began with lovers and
their efforts to better their condition, the dreams of those

(01:14:37):
who once lived in huts and in log cabins. The
modern luxurious railway train is the dream of those who
rode in the old stagecoach not more than a dozen
years ago. The horseless carriage, the manufacture of which now
promises to make one of the largest businesses in the world,
was considered by most people in the same light as
is the airship today. But there has recently been an

(01:14:59):
ex exhibition of these dreams in Madison Square Garden, New York,
on a scale so vast in the suggestiveness of its
possibilities as to stagger credulity. Half a dozen years since,
this invention was looked upon as a mere toy, a
fad for a few millionaires. Twelve years ago, there was
not a single factory in America making cars for the market.

(01:15:22):
Fourteen years ago, there were only five horseless vehicles in
this country, and they had been imported at extravagant prices.
Today there are over a hundred thousand in actual use.
Instead of being a toy for millionaires, the automobile is
now being used in place of horses by thousands of
people with ordinary incomes. This dream is already helping us

(01:15:44):
to solve the problem of crowded streets. It is proving
a great educator as well as a health giver. By
tempting people into the country, the average man will, ultimately,
through its full realization, practically travel in his own private
car in fact, this dream is becoming one of the
greatest joys and blessings that has ever come to humanity.

(01:16:07):
It was the wonderful dream in steel of Carnegie, Schwab
and their associates, together with that of the elevator creator,
that made the modem city with its skyscrapers possible. What
do we not owe to our poet dreamers, who, like Shakespeare,
have taught us to see the uncommon in the common,
the extraordinary in the ordinary. The divinest heritage of man

(01:16:28):
is the capacity to dream. It matters not how much
we have to suffer to day if we believe there
is a better tomorrow. Even stone walls do not a
prison make to those who can dream. Who would rob
the poor of this dreaming faculty that takes the drudgery
out of their dry, dreary occupations. Who would deprive them

(01:16:49):
of the luxuries which they enjoy in their dreams of
a better and brighter future, of a fuller education, of
more comforts for those dear to them. There is no
medicine like hope, no incentive so great and no tonic
so powerful as expectation of something better tomorrow. Dreaming is
especially characteristic of the typical American. No matter how poor

(01:17:11):
or what his misfortune, he is confident, self reliant, even
defiant at fate because he believes better days are coming.
The clerk can live in a store of his own,
which his imagination builds. The poorest factory girl dreams of
a beautiful home of her own. The humblest dream of power.
The ability to lift one's self instantly out of all perplexities, trials, troubles,

(01:17:36):
and discordant environment into an atmosphere of harmony in beauty
and truth is beyond price. How many of us would
have hard enough, hope enough, and courage enough to continue
the struggle of life with enthusiasm if our power of
dreaming were taken away from us. It is this dreaming,
this hoping, this constant expectancy of better things to come,

(01:17:58):
that keeps up our courage, lightens our burdens, and makes
clear the way. I know a lady who has gone
through the most trying and heartrending experiences for many years,
and yet everybody who knows her marvels at her sweetness
of temper, her balance of mind, and beauty of character.
She says that she owes everything to her ability to dream,

(01:18:18):
that she can will lift herself out of the most
discordant and trying conditions into a calm of absolute harmony
and beauty, and come back to her work with a
freshened mind and invigorated body. The dreaming faculty, like every
other faculty, may be abused. A great Many people do
nothing but dream. They spend all their energies in building

(01:18:39):
air castles which they never try to make real. They
live in an unnatural, delusive, theoretical atmosphere until the faculties
become paralyzed from inaction. It is a splendid thing to
dream when you have the grit and tenacity of purpose
and the resolution to match your dreams with realities. But
dreaming without effort, wishing without putting forth exertion to realize

(01:19:00):
the wish, undermines the character. It is only practical dreaming
that counts. Dreaming coupled with hard work and persistent endeavor.
Just in proportion. As we make our dreams realities, shall
we become strong and effective. Dreams that are realized become
an inspiration for new endeavor. It is in the power

(01:19:20):
to make the dream good that we find the hope
of this world. Dreaming making good this was what John
Harvard did when with his few hundred dollars he made
Harvard College possible. The founding of Yale College with a
handful of books was but a dream made good. President
Roosevelt owes everything to his dream of better conditions for humanity,

(01:19:41):
of higher ideals, his dream of a larger, finer type
of manhood, of better government, of a finer citizenship, of
a larger and cleaner manhood and womanhood. The child lives
in dreamland. It creates a world of its own and
plays with the castles it builds. It traces pictures which
are very real to it. It enjoys that which was

(01:20:02):
never on sea or land, but which has a powerful
influence in shaping its future life and character. Do not
stop dreaming. Encourage your visions and believe in them. Cherish
your dreams and try to make them real. This thing
in us that aspires, that bids us to look up,
that beckons us higher, is God given aspiration is the

(01:20:25):
hand that points us to the road that runs heavenward.
As your vision is, so, will your life be? Your
better dream is the prophecy of what your life may
be ought to be. The great thing is to try
to fashion the life after the pattern shown us in
the moment of our highest inspiration, to make our highest
moment permanent. We are all conscious that the best we

(01:20:47):
do is but a sorry apology for what we ought
to do might do. The average man is but a
burlesque of the sublime man God intended him to be.
We certainly were made for something larger, grander, and more
beautiful than we are. We have a feeling that what
we are is out of keeping with, does not fit
the larger, greater life plan which the Creator pattern for us,

(01:21:11):
that it is mean, sordid, stingy, and pinched compared with
the pattern of that divine man shown us in the
moment of our highest vision. It is this creative power
of the imagination, these dreams of the dreamers made good,
that will ultimately raise man to his highest power, that
will break down the barriers of caste, race, and creed,
and make real the poet's vision of the Parliament of Man,

(01:21:33):
the federation of the world. The Golden Age lies onward,
not behind. The pathway through the past has led us up.
The pathway through the future will lead on and higher.
He can who thinks he can by orison sweat Marten
nineteen o eight six the spirit in which you work.

(01:21:54):
It ought not to be necessary to ask a man
if he likes his work. The radiance of his face
should tell that his very buoyancy and pride in his task,
his spirit of unbounded enthusiasm and zest ought to show it.
He ought to be so in love with his work
that he finds his greatest delight in it, and this
inward joy should light up his whole being. A test

(01:22:17):
of the quality of the individual is the spirit in
which he does his work. If he goes to it grudgingly,
like a slave under the lash, if he feels the
drudgery in it, if his enthusiasm and love for it
do not lift it out of commonness and make it
a delight instead of a bore, he will never make
a very great place for himself in the world. The
man who feels his life yoke galling him, who does

(01:22:39):
not understand why the bread and butter question could not
have been solved by one great creative act instead of
every man's being obliged to wrench everything he gets from
nature through hard work. The man who does not see
a beneficent design and a superb necessity in the principle
that every one should earn his own living, has gotten
a wrong view of life and will never get the
splendid results out of his vocation that were intended for him.

(01:23:04):
Multitudes of people do not half respect their work. They
look upon it as a disagreeable necessity for providing bread
and butter, clothing and shelter, as unavoidable drudgery, instead of
as a great man builder a great life university for
the development of manhood and womanhood. They do not see
the divinity in the spur of necessity which compels man

(01:23:25):
to develop the best thing in him, to unfold his
possibilities by his struggle to attain his ambition, to conquer
the enemies of his prosperity in his happiness. They cannot
see the curse in the unearned dollar, which takes the
spur out of the motive. Work. To them is sheer
drudgery and unmitigated evil. They cannot understand why the creator

(01:23:46):
did not put bread ready made on trees. They do
not see the stamina, the grit, the nobility, and the
manhood in being forced to conquer what they get. No
one can make a real success of his life when
he is all the time I'm grumbling or apologizing for
what he is doing. It is a confession of weakness.
What a pitiable sight to see one of God's noblemen

(01:24:09):
may to hold up his head and be a king,
to be cheerful and happy, and to radiate power going
about whining and complaining of his work, even deploring the
fact that he should have to work at all. It
is demoralizing to allow yourself to do a thing in
a half hearted, grudging manner. There is a great adaptive
power in human nature. The mind is wonderfully adjustive to

(01:24:31):
different conditions. But you will not get the best results
until your mind is settled, until you are resolved not
only to like your work, but also to do it
in the spirit of a master and not in that
of a slave. Resolve that whatever you do, you will
bring the whole man to it, that you will fling
the whole weight of your being into it, that you
will do it in the spirit of a conqueror, and

(01:24:51):
so get the lesson and power out of it which
come only to the conqueror. Put the right spirit into
your work. Treat your calling as divine, as a call
from principle. If the thing itself be not important. The
spirit in which you take hold of it makes all
the difference in the world to you. It can make
or mar the man. You cannot afford grumbling service or

(01:25:14):
botched work in your life's record. You cannot afford to
form a habit of half doing things, or of doing
them in the spirit of a drudge, for this will
drag its slimy trail through all your subsequent career, always
humiliating you at the most unexpected times. Let other people
do the poor jobs, the botched work, if they will

(01:25:35):
keep your standards up, your ideals high. The attitude with
which a man approaches his task has everything to do
with the quality and efficiency of his work, and with
its influence upon his character. What a man does is
a part of himself. It is the expression of what
he stands for. Our life. Work is an outpicturing of

(01:25:55):
our ambition, our ideals, our real selves. If you see
a man's work, you see the man. No one can
respect himself or have that sublime faith in himself which
is essential to all high achievement. When he puts mean,
half hearted, slipshot service into what he does, he cannot
get his highest self approval until he does his level best.

(01:26:18):
No man can do his best or call out the
highest thing in him while he regards his occupation as
drudgery or a bore. Under no circumstances, allow yourself to
do anything as a drudge. Nothing is more demoralizing. No
matter if circumstances force you to do something which is distasteful,
compel yourself to find something interesting and instructive in it.

(01:26:41):
Everything that is necessary to be done is full of interest.
It is all a question of the attitude of mind
in which we go to our task. If your occupation
is distasteful, every rebellious thought, every feeling of disgust, only
surrounds you with a failure atmosphere, which is sure to
attract more failure. The magnet that brings success and happiness

(01:27:03):
must be charged with a positive, optimistic, enthusiastic force. The
man who has not learned the secret of taking the
drudgery out of his task by flinging his whole soul
into it has not learned the first principles of success
or happiness. It is perfectly possible to so exalt the
most ordinary business by bringing to it the spirit of

(01:27:23):
a master, as to make of it a dignified vocation.
The trouble with us is that we drop into a
humdrum existence and do our work mechanically with no heart,
no vim and no purpose. We do not learn the
fine art of living, for growth, for mind and soul expansion.
We just exist. It was not intended that any necessary

(01:27:45):
employment should be merely commonplace. There is a great, deep
meaning in it all, a glory in it. Our possibilities,
our destiny are in it, and the good of the world.
Why is it that most people think that the glory
of life does not belong to the ordinary vocations, that
this belongs to the artist, to the musician, to the writer,

(01:28:06):
or to some one of the more gentle and what
they call dignified professions. There is as much dignity and
grandeur in glory in agriculture as in statesmanship or authorship.
Some people never see any beauty anywhere, They have no
soul for the beautiful. Others see it everywhere. Farming to

(01:28:26):
one man is a hundrum existence, an unbearable vocation, monotonous routine,
while another sees the glory and the dignity in it
and takes infinite pleasure in mixing brains with the soil,
and in working with the creator to produce grander results.
I knew a cobbler in a little village who took
infinitely more pride in his vocation than did the lawyer

(01:28:47):
or even the clergyman of that town. I know a
farmer who takes more pride in his crops than any
other person in his community takes in his calling. He
walks over his farm as proudly as a monarch might
travel through his kingdom. This true master farmer will introduce
his visitor to his horses and cows and other animals
as though they were important personages. That is the kind

(01:29:10):
of enthusiasm that takes the drudgery out of the farm
and makes a joy out of a life which to
many is so dull and commonplace. I have known a
stenographer on small pay who put a higher quality of
effort into her work than the proprietor of the great
establishment she worked for, and she got more out of
life than he did. I knew a school teacher in
a little district twenty five miles from a railroad, in

(01:29:32):
a schoolhouse right in the forest, who took more pride
in her work and in the progress of her pupils
than some presidents of colleges whom I have known, appeared
to take in their duties. A girl who declared that
she never would do housework, that she never would cook,
no matter what misfortunes might come to her, married a
man who lost his money, and she was forced to
part with her servants and to do the cooking herself

(01:29:54):
for the family. She thought she never could do it,
but she determined to make bread making an art, to
elevate cooking and make it a science in her home,
and she succeeded. No matter how humble your work may seem,
do it in the spirit of an artist, of a master.
In this way you lift it out of commonness and
rob it of what would otherwise be drudgery. You will

(01:30:16):
find that learning to thoroughly respect everything you do, and
not to let it go out of your hands until
it has the stamp of your approval upon it as
a trade mark, will have a wonderful effect upon your
whole character. The quality of your work will have a
great deal to do with the quality of your life.
If your work quality is down, your character will be down,

(01:30:37):
your standard's down, your ideals down. The habit of insisting
upon the best of which you are capable, and of
always demanding of yourself the highest, never accepting the lowest,
will make all the difference between mediocrity or failure and
a successful career. If you bring to your work the
spirit of an artist instead of an artisan. If you

(01:30:57):
bring a burning zeal an all absorbing enthusias, If you
determine to put the best there is in you in
everything you do, no matter what it is, you will
not long be troubled with a sense of drudgery. Everything
depends on the spirit we bring the task. The right
spirit makes an artist in the humblest task, while the
wrong spirit makes an artisan in any calling, no matter

(01:31:18):
how high that calling may be. There is a dignity,
an indescribable quality of superiority in everything we do, which
we thoroughly and honestly respect. There is nothing belittling or
menial which has to be done for the welfare of
the race. You cannot afford to give the mere dregs,
the mere leavings of your energies to your work. The

(01:31:40):
best in you is none too good for it. It
is only when we do our best, when we put joy, energy, enthusiasm,
and zeal into our work that we really grow, and
this is the only way we can keep our highest
self respect. We cannot think much of ourselves when we
are not honest in our work, when we are not
doing our level best. There is nothing which will compensate

(01:32:03):
you for the loss of faith in yourself, for the
knowledge of your reputation for doing bungling, dishonest work. You
have something infinitely higher within you to satisfy than to
make a mere living, to get through your day's work
as easily as possible. It is your sense of right,
the demand within you to do your level best, to
develop the highest thing in you, to do the square

(01:32:24):
thing to be a man. This should speak so loudly
in you that the mere bread and butter question, the
money making question, should be absolutely insignificant in comparison. Start
out with the tacit understanding with yourself that you will
be a man at all hazards, that your work shall
express the highest and the best things in you, and
that you cannot afford to debase or demoralize yourself by

(01:32:47):
appealing to the lowest, the most despicable, mean side of yourself,
by deteriorating by botching your work. How often we see
people working along without purpose, half committed to their aim,
only intending to pursue their vocation until they strike snags.
They intend to keep at it as long as it
is tolerable, or until they find something they like better.

(01:33:09):
This is a cowardly way to face a life work
which determines our destiny. A man ought to approach his
life task, however, humble, with the high ideals that characterize
a great master, as he approaches the canvas upon which
he is going to put his masterpiece, with a resolution
to make no false moves that will mar the model
that lives in his ideal a sacred thing. This, approaching

(01:33:31):
the uncut marble of life, we cannot afford to strike
any false blows which might mar the angel that sleeps
in the stone. For the image we produce must represent
our life work. Whether it is beautiful or hideous, divine
or brutal, it must stand as an expression of ourselves,
as representing our ideals. It always pains me to see

(01:33:53):
a young person approaching his life work with carelessness and indifference,
as though it did not make much difference to him
how he did his work, if he only got through
with it. And God is paid for it. How little
the average youth realizes the sacredness, the dignity, the divinity
of his calling. There is a higher meaning, something broader, deeper,

(01:34:13):
and nobler in a vocation than making a living or
seeking fame. Making a life is the best thing in it.
It should be a man developer, a character builder, and
a great life school for broadening, deepening, and rounding into symmetry, harmony,
and beauty, all the God given faculties within us. The
part of our life work which gives us a living,

(01:34:34):
which provides the bread and butter and clothes and houses
and shelter, is merely incidental to the great disciplinary, educative
phase of it, the self unfoldment. It is a question
of how large and how grand a man or woman
you can bring out of your vocation, not how much
money there is in it. Your life work is your statue.
You cannot get away from it. It is beautiful or hideous,

(01:34:58):
lovely or ugly, inspiring or debasing. As you make it,
it will elevate or degrade. You can no more get
away from it than you can of your own volition.
Rise from the earth. Every errand you do, every letter
you write, every piece of merchandise you sell, every conversation,
every thought of yours, everything you do or think is

(01:35:20):
a blow of the chisel which mars or beautifies the statue.
The attitude of mind with which we perform our life
work colors the whole career and determines the quality of
the destiny. It is the lofty ideal that redeems the
life from the curse of commonness, and imparts a touch
of nobility to every calling. But a low, sordid aim

(01:35:41):
will take the dignity out of any occupation he can
who thinks he can by orison sweat Martin, nineteen o
eight seven. Responsibility develops power. There is enough latent force
in a maximize torpedo shell to tear a worship to pieces.
But the amount of force or explosive power in one

(01:36:01):
of these terrific engines of destruction could never be ascertained
by any ordinary concussion. Children could play with it for years,
pound it, roll it about, and do all sorts of
things with it. The shell might be shot through the
walls of an ordinary building without arousing its terrible dynamic energy.
It must be fired from a cannon with terrific force

(01:36:23):
through a foot or so of steel plate armor before
it meets with resistance great enough to evoke its mighty
explosive power. Every man is a stranger to his greatest strength,
his mightiest power, until the test of a great responsibility,
a critical emergency, or a supreme crisis in his life
calls it out. Work on a farm, hauling wood, working

(01:36:45):
in a tannery, store keeping West Point the Mexican War,
doing odd jobs about town were not enough to arouse
the sleeping giant. In general Grant, there is no probability
that he would ever have been heard from outside of
his own little community but for the emergency of the
Civil War. There was a tremendous dynamic force in the man,

(01:37:05):
but it required the concussion of the Great Civil War
to ignite it. No ordinary occasion touched his slumbering power.
No ordinary experience could ignite the powder in this giant.
Under common circumstances, he would have gone through life a
stranger to his own ability, just as most of the
great dynamite shells now in existence will probably never be

(01:37:26):
exploded because of the lack of a war emergency great
enough to explode them. Farming, wood, chopping, rail splitting, surveying,
store keeping, the state legislature, the practice of law. Not
even the United States Congress furnished occasions great enough resistant,
strong enough to ignite the spark of power to explode
the dynamic force in Abraham Lincoln. Only the responsibility of

(01:37:50):
a nation in imminent peril furnished sufficient concussion to ignite
the giant powder in perhaps the greatest man that ever
trod the American continent. There is no probability that Lincoln
would have gone down in history as a very great
man but for the crisis of the Civil War. The
nation's peril was the responsibility thrust upon him, which brought
out the last outs of his reserves, his latent power

(01:38:13):
of achievement, the resources which he never would have dreamed
he possessed but for this emergency. Some of the greatest
men in history never discovered themselves until they lost everything
but their pluck and grit, or until some great misfortune
overtook them and they were driven to desperation to invent
a way out of their dilemma. Giants are made in
the stern school of necessity. The strong, vigorous, forceful, stalwart

(01:38:38):
men who have pushed civilization upward are the products of
self help. They have not been pushed or boosted, but
they have fought every inch of the way up to
their own loaf. They are giants because they have been
great conquerors of difficulties, supreme masters of difficult situations. They
have acquired the strength of the obstacles which they have overcome.

(01:39:00):
Many of our giant business men never got a glimpse
of their real power until some great panic or misfortune
swept their property away and knocked the crutches out from
under them. Many men and women never discovered their ability
until everything they thought would help them to success had
been taken away from them, until they had been stripped
of everything that they held dear in life. Our greatest power,

(01:39:21):
our highest possibility, lies so deep in our natures that
it often takes a tremendous emergency, a powerful crisis, to
call it out. It is only when we feel that
all bridges behind us are burned, all retreat cut off,
and that we have no outside aid to lean upon,
that we discover our full inherent power. As long as
we get outside help, we never know our own resources.

(01:39:45):
How many young men and young women owe their success
to some great misfortune which cut off a competence the
death of a relative, the loss of business or home,
or some other great calamity which threw them on their
own resources and compelled them to fight for themselves. Responsibility
is a great power developer. Where there is responsibility, there

(01:40:06):
is growth. People who are never thrust into responsible positions
never develop their real strength. This is one reason why
it is so rare to find very strong men and
women among those who have spent their lives in subordinate
positions in the service of others. They go through life
comparative weaklings because their powers have never been tested or

(01:40:27):
developed by having great responsibility thrust upon them. Their thinking
has been done for them. They have simply carried out
somebody else's program. They have never learned to stand alone,
to think for themselves, to act independently. Because they have
never been obliged to plan for themselves, they have never
developed the best things in them their power of originality, inventiveness, initiative, independence,

(01:40:53):
self reliance, their possible grit and stamina, the power to create,
to make combinations to meet emergencies, the power which comes
from continuous marshaling of one's forces to meet difficult situations,
to adjust means two ends that stamina or power which
makes one equal to the great crisis in the life
of a nation is only developed by years of practical

(01:41:15):
training under great responsibility. There is nothing more misleading than
the philosophy that if there is anything in a youth,
it will come out. It may come out, and it
may not. It depends largely upon circumstances, upon the presence
or absence of an ambition arousing a grid awakening environment.
The greatest ability is not always accompanied by the greatest

(01:41:38):
confidence or the greatest ambition. There is at this moment
enough power latent in the clerks or ordinary employees in
almost any of our business houses to manage them as
well as or better than they are being managed today.
If the opportunity and necessary emergency to call out this
dynamic force should arise. But how can clerks who remain

(01:41:58):
behind counters measuring clock, selling shoes or hosiery year in
and year out, ever know what latent power for organization,
what executive ability or initiative they possess. It is true
that some of the more ambitious and courageous get out
and start for themselves, but it does not follow that
they are always abler than those who remain behind. Sometimes

(01:42:21):
the greatest ability is accompanied by great modesty and even timidity.
Then again, employees conscious of great ability are often deterred
from taking the risk of launching out for themselves because
of possible disaster to those depending upon them for daily bread.
But thrust great responsibility upon a man, drive him to desperation,

(01:42:41):
and the demand will bring out what there is in him.
It will call out his initiative, his ingenuity, his resourcefulness,
his self reliance, his power to adjust means two ends.
If there are any elements of leadership in him, responsibility
will call them out. It will test his power to
do things. I have in mind a young man who

(01:43:03):
developed such amazing ability within six months from the date
of a very important promotion that he surprised everybody who
knew him, even his best friends, did not believe that
it was in him. But the great responsibilities the desperate
situation thrust upon him brought out his reserve power, and
he very quickly showed of what stuff he was made.

(01:43:24):
This promotion and a little stock in the concern which
had been given him aroused his ambition and called out
a mighty power which before he did not dream that
he possessed. Tens of thousands of young men and young
women today are only waiting for a chance to show themselves,
waiting for an opportunity to try their wings, And when
the opportunity the responsibility comes, they will be equal to

(01:43:46):
anything that confronts them. Proprietors of large concerns are often
very much exercised by the death of a superintendent or
lieutenant who has managed with exceptional ability. They are fearful
that very disastrous results may follow, and believe it will
be almost impossible to fill his place. But while they
are looking around to find a man big enough for

(01:44:06):
the place, some one perhaps who is under the former chief,
attends to his duties temporarily and makes even a better
manager than his predecessor. Young men and young women are
rising out of the ranks constantly everywhere who fill these positions,
oftentimes much better than those who drop out and whose
places it was thought almost impossible to fill. Do not

(01:44:28):
be afraid to pile responsibility upon your employees. You will
be amazed to see how quickly they will get out
from under their load, and what unexpected ability they will develop.
Many employers are always looking for people outside of their
own establishment to fill important vacancies. Simply because they cannot
see or appreciate a man's ability until he has actually

(01:44:48):
demonstrated it. But how can he demonstrate it until he
has the chance. There are probably to day scores of
young men in every one of our great business houses
who are as capable as the present heads. There is
no position that cannot be filled as well or better
than it is being filled now by someone who is
still in the ranks, and who has not yet been
heard from in any distinctive way. When some great statesman falls,

(01:45:12):
the people often look about to find that there is
apparently no one to fill his place. But from an
unexpected source, perhaps from a little out of the way town,
from the common ranks, there comes a man who is
equal to the emergency. The way to bring out the
reserve in a man is to pile responsibility upon him.
If there is anything in him, this will reveal it.

(01:45:34):
Some of us never quite come to ourselves in fullness
and power until driven to desperation. It is when we
are shipwrecked, like Robinson Crusoe, upon an island, with nothing
but our own brain and hands, nothing but resources locked
up deep in ourselves, that we really come to complete
self discovery. A captain never knows what is in his

(01:45:54):
men until they have been tested by a gale at
sea which threatens shipwreck. That there are great potencies and
power possibilities within us which we may never know is
proved by the tremendous forces that are aroused in ordinary
people in some great crisis or emergency. The elevator boy
may never have dreamed that there was anything heroic in
his nature. He may never have thought there was a

(01:46:16):
possibility of his rising in the world to the importance
of the men whom he lifted to their offices. But
the building takes fire in this boy, who was seldom
noticed by anyone, who did not show any special signs
of ability, in a few minutes develops the most heroic qualities.
He runs his elevator up through the burning floors, when
choked with smoke, the hot cable, blistering his hands, and

(01:46:38):
rescues a hundred people who, but for him, might have
lost their lives. A ship is wrecked at sea, and
a poor immigrant becomes the hero of the hour, commanding
a lifeboat and giving orders with calmness, authority, and force
when others have lost their heads. A hospital takes fire
in the delicate, timid girl invalid develops in to a

(01:47:00):
heroine almost instantly and does a giant's work in fires
and wrecks. In great disasters or emergencies of all kinds
are enacted deeds of daring and of sublime heroism, which,
before the great test came, would have been thought impossible
by those who did them. No one ever knows just
how much dynamic force there is in him until tested

(01:47:21):
by a great emergency or a supreme crisis. Oftentimes men
reach middle life and even later before they really discover
themselves until some great emergency, loss, or sorrow has tested
their timber. They cannot tell how much strain they can stand.
No emergency great enough to call out their latent power

(01:47:41):
ever before confronted them, and they did not themselves realize
what they would be equal to until the great crisis
confronted them. I have known of several instances where daughters
reared in luxury were suddenly thrown upon their own resources
by the death of their parents and the loss of
their inherited fortunes. They had not been brought up to work,
did not know how to do anything useful, had no trade,

(01:48:04):
and no idea how to earn a livelihood, and yet
all at once they developed marvelous ability for doing things.
The power was there, latent, but responsibility had not hitherto
been thrust upon them. Young men suddenly forced into positions
of tremendous responsibility by accident or death are often not
the same men. In six months, they have developed strong

(01:48:26):
manly qualities which no one ever dreamed they possessed. Responsibility
has made men of them, and it makes women of
inexperienced and untried girls who are suddenly thrust into an
emergency where they are obliged to conduct a business or
support a family. Many people distress their initiative because they
have not had an opportunity to exercise it. The monotonous

(01:48:49):
routine of doing the same work year in and year
out does not tend to develop new faculties. All the
mental powers must be exercised strengthened before we can measure
their possibilities. I know young men who believe in everybody
but themselves. They seem to have no doubt about other
people accomplishing what they undertake, but are always shaky about themselves. Oh,

(01:49:11):
do not put me at the head of this or
that somebody else can do it better than I. They
shrink from responsibility because they lack self faith. The only
way to develop power is to resolve early in life,
never to let an opportunity for doing so go by.
Never shrink from anything which will give you more discipline,
better training, and enlarged experience, no matter how distasteful, Force

(01:49:36):
yourself into it. There is nothing like responsibility for developing ability.
Never mind if the position is hard, take it and
make up your mind that you are going to fill
it better than it was ever before filled. I once
heard a man say he regretted, more than anything else
in his life, that he had indulged his natural inclination
to decline every position of responsibility offered him. He was

(01:49:59):
naturally so that any position which attracted attention or gave
him the least publicity was distasteful to him. His magnificent
possibilities remain undeveloped because he has never had that responsibility
which calls out one's reserves and develops his latent powers.
Many a time he thought he would change his course,
and made up his mind never to let another opportunity

(01:50:20):
for self development go by him unimproved. But the habit
of delaying until he should be better prepared, got such
a hold of him that he could not change. The
result is that, although he is a man of recognized
power with a superb mind, his life has been an
extremely quiet one, very tame and unimportant, compared with what
it would have been had he made it a rule

(01:50:41):
to thrust himself into every position of responsibility which would
have called out the best in him. Many people never
discover themselves or know their possibilities because they always shrink
from responsibility. They leased themselves to somebody else and die
with their greatest possibilities unreleased, undeveloped. Personally, I believe it

(01:51:01):
is the duty of every young person to have an
ambition to be independent, to be his own master, and
to resolve that he will not be at somebody else's
call all his life, come and go at the sounding
of a gong or the touch of a bell. That
he will at least belong to himself. That he will
be an entire wheel and not a cog. That he
will be a whole machine, although it may be a
small one, rather than part of some one else's machine,

(01:51:25):
the very stretching of the mind toward high ideals. Though
looking forward to the time when we shall be our
own masters, working along the lines of a resolution, a fixed,
irrevocable determination, as a strengthening, unifying influence upon all of
the faculties. And you will be a stronger man or woman,
whatever your future, if you keep steadily persistently in mind

(01:51:45):
your own individual declaration of independence. It means freedom. It
means delivery from restraint from a certain feeling of slavery
which attaches to every subordinate position. I do not believe
that it is possible for any one to reach the
same magnitude of manhood or womanhood, to grow to the
same statute after giving up the struggle for absolute independence,

(01:52:07):
or the hope of going into a business or profession
or something else all of one's own. It is true
that not every person has the executive ability or strength
of mind, the qualities of leadership, the moral stamina, or
the push to conduct a business successfully for himself and
stand his ground. There are also many instances of young

(01:52:27):
men who have others dependent upon them, and who are
not in a position to take the risks of going
into business for themselves. A great many, however, work for
others merely because they do not dare to take the
risk of starting on their own responsibility, they lack the
courage to branch out. The fear of possible failure deters them. Moreover,

(01:52:49):
a great many start as boys in certain occupations, work
up to a fairly good salary, and though they may
be ambitious to be independent, are yet held back by
the distrust of their own powers and the advice of
others to let well enough alone, until the habit of
doing the same thing year in and year out becomes
so fixed that it is very difficult to wrench themselves

(01:53:09):
out of their environment again. A great many people prefer
a small certainty to a big uncertainty. There is no
disposition to hazard, no desire to take risks in their
make up. They do not want to assume large responsibilities.
They prefer steady employment and the certainty that every Saturday

(01:53:30):
night they will find fixed sums in their pay envelopes
to the great risks, responsibilities, and uncertainties of a business
of their own. You may not have the ambition, the desire,
or the inclination to take responsibility. You may prefer to
have an easier life and to let somebody else worry
about the payment of notes and debts. The hard times,

(01:53:51):
the dull seasons and the panics. But if you expect
to bring out the greatest possibilities in you, if growth
with the largest possible expansion of your powers is your goal,
you cannot realize your ambition in the fullest and completest
sense while merely trying to carry out somebody else's program
and letting him furnish the ideas. There must be a

(01:54:12):
sense of complete independence, not partial, but complete. In order
to reach the highest growth. We do not attain our
full stature of manhood or womanhood in captivity or in slavery,
but in freedom, in absolute liberty. The eagle must be
led out of the cage, no matter how large or
how comfortable, before it can exhibit all the powers of

(01:54:32):
an eagle. It is the locked up forces within that
lie deep in our natures, not those which are on
the surface that test our metal. It is within everybody's
power to call out these hidden forces, to be somebody
and to do something worth while in the world, and
the man who does not do it is violating his
sacred birthright. Every man or woman who goes through the

(01:54:54):
world with great continence of undiscovered possibilities locked up within
him commits a sin. Against himself, that which borders on
a crime against civilization. Don't be afraid to trust yourself.
Have faith in your own ability to think along original lines.
If there is anything in you self, reliance will bring
it out. Whatever you do, cultivate a spirit of manly

(01:55:17):
independence in doing it. Let your work express yourself. Don't
be a mere cog in a machine. Do your own
thinking and carry out your own ideas as far as possible,
even though working for another. He can who thinks he can?
By Orison sweat Martin, nineteen o eight eight, an overmastering purpose.

(01:55:39):
Before water generates steam, it must register two hundred and
twelve degrees of heat. Two hundred degrees will not do it,
two hundred and ten will not do it. The water
must boil before it will generate enough steam to move
an engine to run a train. Lukewarm water will not
run anything. A great many people are trying to move

(01:56:00):
their life trains with lukewarm water or water that is
almost boiling, and they are wondering why they are stalled,
why they cannot get ahead. They are trying to run
a boiler with two hundred or two hundred and ten
degrees of heat, and they cannot understand why they do
not get anywhere. Lukewarmness in his work stands in the
same relation to man's achievement as lukewarm water does to

(01:56:21):
the locomotive boiler. No man can hope to accomplish anything
great in this world until he throws his whole soul,
flings the force of his whole life into it. In
Phillips Brooks's talks to young people, he used to urge
them to be something with all their might. It is
not enough simply to have a general desire to be something.

(01:56:42):
There is but one way to accomplish it, and that
is to strive to be somebody. With all the concentrated
energy we can muster. Any kind of a human being
can wish for a thing, can desire it. But only strong,
vigorous minds with great purposes can do things. There is
an infinite distance between the wishers and the doers. A

(01:57:03):
mere desire is lukewarm water, which never will take a
train to its destination. The purpose must boil, must be
made into live steam to do the work. Who would
ever have heard of Theodore Roosevelt outside of his immediate
community if he had only half committed himself to what
he had undertaken. If he had brought only a part
of himself to his task, the great secret of his

(01:57:24):
career has been that he has flung his whole life,
not a part of it, with all the determination and
energy in power he could muster into everything he has undertaken.
No dilly dallying, no faint hearted efforts, no lukewarm purpose
for him. Every life of power must have a great
master purpose which takes precedence of all other motives, a

(01:57:45):
supreme principle, which is so commanding and so imperative in
its demands for recognition and exercise that there can be
no mistaking its call. Without this, the water of energy
will never reach the boiling point. The life train will
not get anywhere. The man with a vigorous purpose is
a positive, constructive, creative force. No one can be resourceful, inventive, original,

(01:58:08):
or creative without powerful concentration, and the undivided focusing of
the mind is only possible along the line of the
ambition the life purpose. We cannot focus the mind upon
a thing we are not interested in and enthusiastic about.
A man ought to look upon his career as a
great artist looks upon his masterpiece, as an outpicturing of

(01:58:29):
his best self, upon which he dwells with infinite pride
and a satisfaction which nothing else can give. Yet many
people are so loosely connected with their vocation that they
are easily separated from it. I know young men who
seem anxious to get on in their careers, but in
a single evening they could be induced to give up
their calling for something else. They are always wondering whether

(01:58:52):
they are in the right place or where their ability
will count. Most. They lose heart when they strike obstacles,
or they become discouraged when they hear of some one
else who has made a success in some other line,
and wonder if they had not better try something in
the same line. If one is so loosely attached to
his occupation that he can be easily induced to give

(01:59:12):
it up, you may be sure that he is not
in the right place. If nature has called you to
a position, if the call runs in your blood, it
is a part of your life and you cannot get
away from it. It is not a separate thing from yourself.
It exists in every brain cell, every nerve cell, every
blood corpusal contains some of it. You can no more

(01:59:33):
get away from it than a leopard can get away
from his spots. So when a young man asks me
if I do not think he had better make a change,
I feel very certain that he is not in the
place God called him to. For the thing he was
made for is as much a part of his real
being as his temperament. It is nearer to him than
his heart beat, closer than his breath. There is a

(01:59:54):
photograph of the thing he was made for in every
cell in his body. He cannot get away away from it.
The thing which will make the life distinctive, which will
make it a power, is the one supreme thing which
we want to do and feel that we must do.
And no matter how long we may be delayed from
this aim, or how far we may be swerved aside

(02:00:14):
by mistakes or iron circumstances, we should never give up
hope or a determination to pursue our object. Some people
have not the moral courage, the persistence, the force of
character to get the things out of the way which
stand between them and their ambition. They allow themselves to
be pushed this way and that way into things for
which they have no fitness or taste. Their will power

(02:00:38):
is not strong enough to enable them to fight their
way to their goal. They are pushed aside by the
pressure about them and do the things for which they
have little or no liking or adaptation. If there is
anything in the world a person should fight for, it
is freedom to pursue his ideal, because in that is
his great opportunity for self expression, for the unfoldment of

(02:00:59):
the greatest thing possible to him. It is his great
chance to make his life tell in the largest completest way,
to do the most original, distinctive thing possible to him.
If he does not pursue his ideal, does not carry
out his supreme aim, his life will be more or
less of a failure, no matter how much he may
be actuated by a sense of duty, or how much

(02:01:20):
he may exert his will power to overcome his handicap.
There is great power in a resolution that has no
reservation in it, a strong, persistent, tenacious purpose, which burns
all bridges behind it, clears all obstacles from its path,
and arrives at its goal, no matter how long it
may take, no matter what the sacrifice or the cost,

(02:01:41):
the inspiration of a great positive aim transforms the life
and revolutionizes a shiftless ambitionless dissipated, good for nothing man,
as if some divine energy had worked in him, even
as love sometimes transforms as slovenly purposeless course man into
a clean, methodical, diviner being. When the awakening power of

(02:02:01):
a new purpose, a resolute aim, is born in a man,
he is a new creature. He sees everything in a
new light. The doubts, the fears, the apathy, the vicious
temptations which dogged his steps. But yesterday, the stagnation which
had blighted his past life all vanish, as if by
magic they are dispelled by the breath of a new purpose.

(02:02:24):
Beauty and system take the place of unsightliness and confusion.
Order reigns in the place of anarchy. All his slumbering
faculties awaken to activity. The effect of this new ambition
is like the clarifying change made by a waterway in
a stagnant swampy district. The water clarifies as soon as

(02:02:44):
it begins to move to do something. Flowers spring up
in place of poisonous weeds and vegetation. Beauty, birds and
song make joyous the once miasmic atmosphere. Chemists tell us
that When a compound is broken up and an atom
is released from the attraction of other atoms, it takes
on new energy and immediately seeks combination with another free atom.

(02:03:06):
But the longer it remains alone, the weaker it becomes.
It seems to lose much of its vitality and power
of attraction when idle. When the atom is first freed
from the grasp of its fellows, it is called nascent
new born. It is then that it has its maximum
of gripping power, and if it finds a free atom
immediately after it is released, it will unite with it

(02:03:28):
with greater vigor than ever. The power seems to go
out of it if it delays its union with another atom.
Mythology tells us that Minerva, the goddess of wisdom, sprang
complete full orbed full, grown from Jupiter's brain. Man's highest conception,
his most effective thought, most inventive and resourceful ideas, and

(02:03:50):
grandest visions spring full orbed complete with their maximum of power,
spontaneously from the brain. Men who postpone their visions, who
lay the execution of their ideas, who bottle up their
thoughts to be used at a more convenient time, are
always weaklings. The forceful, vigorous, effective men are those who

(02:04:11):
execute their ideas while they are full of the enthusiasm
of inspiration. Our ideas, our visions, our resolutions come to
us fresh every day, because this is the divine program
for the day, not for tomorrow. Another inspiration, new ideas
will come tomorrow. Today we should carry out the inspiration
of the day. A divine vision flashes across the artist's

(02:04:35):
mind with lightning like rapidity, but it is not convenient
for him to seize his brush and fasten the immortal
vision before it fades. He keeps turning it over and
over in his mind. It takes possession of his very soul,
but he is not in his studio or it is
not convenient to put his divine vision upon canvas, and
the picture gradually fades from his mind. A strong, vigorous

(02:04:58):
conception flashes into the brain of the writer, and he
has an almost irresistible impulse to seize his pen and
transfer the beautiful images and the fascinating conception to paper.
But it is not convenient at the moment, and while
it seems almost impossible to wait, he postpones the writing.
The images and the conception keep haunting him, but he
still postpones. Finally, the visions grow dimmer and dimmer, and

(02:05:23):
it has to fade away and are lost forever. There
is a reason for all this. Why do we have
these strong, vigorous impulses, these divine visions of splendid possibilities.
Why do they come to us with such rapidity and vigor,
such vividness and suddenness. It is because it is intended
that we shall use them while fresh, execute them while

(02:05:45):
the inclination is hot. Our ideas, our visions are like
the manner of the wilderness which the Israelites were obliged
to gather fresh every day. If they undertook to hoard it,
it became stale, the nourishment evaporated, the life went out
of it. They could not use old manna. There is
something about allowing a strong resolution to evaporate without executing

(02:06:08):
it that has a deteriorating influence upon the character. It
is the execution of a plan that makes stamina. Almost
anybody can resolve to do a great thing. It is
only the strong, determined character that puts the resolve into execution.
If we could only make our highest moments permanent, what
splendid things we should do in life, and what magnificent

(02:06:29):
beings we should become. But we let our resolutions cool,
our visions fade until it is more convenient to execute them,
and they are gone. There is no easier way in
which one can hypnotize or deceive himself than by thinking
that because he is always making great resolutions, he is
doing something worth while we're carrying them out. I know
a man who would feel insulted if any one were

(02:06:51):
to intimate that he had not been a hard worker
and had not accomplished a great deal in life. And
yet although he is an able man, his whole life
has been spent in jumping out of one thing and
into another, so quickly that one could scarcely see the change.
Yet every time you see him he carries his head high.
He is as enthusiastic and optimistic as though his whole

(02:07:11):
life had been one triumphant march. His enthusiasm is intense,
but it fades away just as quickly as it came.
The very fact that he always lives in the clouds,
is always dreaming of the great things he is going
to do, seems to convince him that he actually does them.
But he never stays at one thing long enough to
reach effectiveness. His whole life has been spent in starting

(02:07:35):
things brilliantly and enthusiastically. Few men have ever begun so
many things as he, or completed so few. The putting
off habit will kill the strongest initiative. Too much caution
and lack of confidence are fatal enemies of initiative. How
much easier it is to do a thing when the
purpose impels us, when enthusiasm carries us along, than when

(02:07:57):
everything drags in the postponement. One is drudgery, the other delight.
Hungering and striving after knowledge t s what makes a scholar.
Hungering and striving after virtue is what makes a saint.
Hungering and striving after noble action is what makes a
hero and a man. The great successes we see everywhere
are but the realization of an intense longing, a concentrated effort.

(02:08:22):
Everyone is gravitating toward his aim, just in proportion to
the power and intensity of his desire and his struggle
to realize it. One merely desires to do this or that,
or wishes he could or would be glad if he could.
Another knows perfectly well, that if he lives, he is
going to do the thing he sets his heart on,

(02:08:42):
if it is within the limits of human possibility. We
do not hear him whining because nobody will pay his
way to college. He does not say he wishes he
could go. He says, I am going to prepare myself
for a great life work. I have faith in my future.
I have made a vow to myself to succeed, and

(02:09:03):
I am going to do so on a broad gage plan.
I am not going to start out half equipped, half fitted.
I will have a college training. When you find a
boy who resolves within himself that come what will, he
is going to do the thing he sets his heart on,
and that there are no ifs or butts or hands
about it, you may be sure he is made of

(02:09:24):
winning stuff. He will not postpone and postpone the realization
of his vision until too late, until its glory has vanished.
He will lose no time in putting forth all his
energy to make it real. And if it is a
possible thing, he will succeed. He can who thinks he can?
By Orison Sweat Martin nineteen o eight nine, has your vocation,

(02:09:47):
your unqualified approval. I quote the following sentences from a
letter just received in your February editorial. The following paragraph
has impressed me mightily. To spend a life in buying,
in selling lies or cheap shoddy shams is demoralizing to
every element of nobility to excellence in any form. Now,

(02:10:08):
I happen to be in the sham business, and hate
it so heartily that I want to get out of
it as soon as I can do so with justice
to others interests. This young man, who gets more than
ten thousand dollars a year in salary, says that he
is expected to trade upon the credulity of the poorer classes,
who can ill afford to be preyed upon. And he continues,

(02:10:29):
while I need the money, I cannot enjoy this kind
of work, nor can I write with conviction or ambition
on projects which I naturally know to be fakes. Besides,
I am afraid of the very thing pointed out in
your editorial, namely growing down to the work. I hate
hypocrisy worse than any other thing, and I cannot do
my best work in any business based on such a foundation.

(02:10:52):
I do not want to remain in an occupation which
pays its highest salaries to the most skillful fakiers. It
is pitiable to say, I see a strong, bright, promising
young man, capable of filling a high position, trying to
support himself and his family in an occupation which has
not received his approval, which is lowering his ideals, which
dwarfs his nature, which makes him despise himself, which strangles

(02:11:15):
all that is best and noblest within him, and which
is constantly condemning him and ostracizing him and his family
from all that is best and truest in life. How
often we hear a young man say I do not
like the business I am in. I know it has
a bad influence on me. I do not believe in
the methods used or the deceptions practiced. I am ashamed

(02:11:38):
to have my friends know what I am doing, and
I say as little about it in public as possible.
I know I ought to change, but it is the
only business I understand in which I can earn as
much money as I need to keep up appearances. For
I have been getting a good salary and have contracted
expensive habits of living, and I have not the force
of character to risk a change. Do not disive yourself

(02:12:00):
with the idea that somebody has got to do this
questionable work, and that it might as well be you.
Let other people do it if they will, there is
something better for you. The Creator has given you a
guarantee written in your blood and brain cells, that if
you keep yourself clean and do that which he has
indicated in your very constitution, you will be a man,

(02:12:20):
will succeed, and will belong to the order of true nobility.
But if you do not heed that edict, you will fail.
You may get a large salary, but this alone is
not success. If the almighty dollar is dragging its slimy
trail all through your career, if money making has become
your one, unwavering aim, you have failed, no matter how

(02:12:41):
much you have accumulated. If your money smells of the
blood of the innocent, if there is a dirty dollar
in it, if there is a taint of avarice in it,
if envy and greed have helped in its accumulation, if
there is a sacrifice of the rights and comforts of
others in it. If there is a stain of dishonor
on your stocks and bonds, or if a smirched character
looms up in your pile. Do not boast of your success,

(02:13:03):
for you have failed. Making money by dirty work is
bad business. Gilded how we will There are a thousand
indications in you that the Creator did not fit you
for what is wrong, but only for the right. Do
the right, and all nature, all law, and all science
will help you. Because the attainment of rectitude is the

(02:13:23):
plan of the universe. It is the very nature of things.
Reverse it, and all these forces are pledged to defeat you.
To the young men who have written for advice, let
me say that if you are making money by forcing
yourself by sheerwell power to do what you loathe, what
does not engage your whole heart, or that into which
you cannot fling your entire being because you fear that

(02:13:45):
it is not quite right, you can do a thousand
times better in an occupation which has your unreserved, unqualified consent.
If you refuse to smirch your ability, no matter what
the reward, you will thereby increase your success power a
thousand five. The very fact that you can come out
of a questionable situation boldly in take a stand for

(02:14:05):
the right, regardless of consequences, will help you immeasurably the
greater self respect, increased self confidence, and the tonic influence
which will come from the sense of victory will give
you the air of a conqueror instead of that of
one conquered. Nobody ever loses anything by standing for the right,
with decision, with firmness, and with vigor. You have a

(02:14:28):
compass within you, the needle of which points more surely
to the right and to the true than the needle
of the mariner points to the pole star. If you
do not follow it, you are in perpetual danger of
going to pieces on the rocks. Your conscience is your compass,
given you when you are launched upon life's high seas.
It is the only guide that is sure to take

(02:14:48):
you safely into the harbor of true success. What if
a mariner should refuse to steer by the pointing of
his compass, declaring it to be all nonsense, that the
needle should always point north, and should pull it around
so that it would point in some other direction, fasten
it there, and then sail by it, he would never
reach port in safety. It takes only a little influence,

(02:15:11):
just a little force, to pull the needle away from
its natural pointing. Your conscience compass must not be influenced
by greed or expediency. You must not trammel it, you
must leave it free. The man who tampers with the
needle of his conscience, who pulls it away from its
natural love, and who tries to convince himself that there

(02:15:31):
are other standards of right, other stars as reliable as
the pole star of his character, and proposes to follow
them in some questionable business, is a deluded fool who
invites disaster. Every little while, I meet young men who
dislike to tell me what their vocation is. They seem
ashamed of what they are doing. One young man I
met some time ago, very reluctantly told me that he

(02:15:54):
was a bartender in a large saloon. I asked him
how long he had been there, and he said about
six years. He said he hated the business, it was degrading,
but that he was making pretty good money, and just
as soon as he could get enough laid up so
that he could afford it, he was going to quit
and go into something else. Now, this young man had

(02:16:15):
been deceiving himself for years by thinking that he was
doing pretty well and that he would soon leave the business.
There is something very demoralizing to the whole nature in
doing that against which the better self protests. An effort
to reconcile the ideal with that which we cannot respect
is fatal to all growth. This is the reason why
men shrivel and shrink instead of expanding when they are

(02:16:38):
out of place. A man does not grow when a
large part of him is entering its protest against his work.
A volunteer makes a better soldier than a drafted man.
A great many young men try to justify themselves and
check inward protests by the perpetual self suggestion that it
is better to keep on for the present in questionable

(02:16:58):
occupations because the great financial reward will put them in
position to do better later. This is a sort of
sedative to the conscience to keep it quiet until they
can afford to listen to it. Do not deceive yourself
by the expectation of making clean money in a dirty occupation.
Do not deceive yourself either by thinking that you can

(02:17:18):
elevate a bad business or make it respectable. Many a
man has been thus dragged down to his ruin. Some
occupations are so demoralizing, brutalizing, and hardening that even a
Lincoln could not make them respectable. If what you are
doing is wrong, stop it, have nothing to do with it.
If you are in doubt, or if you suspect that

(02:17:41):
you are warping your conscience, give yourself the benefit of
the doubt. Take no chances with it. Leave it before
it is too late. Long familiarity with a bad business
will make it seem right to you. If it is
very profitable, it will at last hush your doubts and
blunt your moral faculties. It will make you feel that

(02:18:01):
there is compensation in pursuing it, at least until capital
is accumulated for something else. Besides, the philosophy of habit
is that every repetition of an act makes it more
certain that it will be repeated again and again, quickly,
making the doer a slave. In spite of the protests
of your weakened will, the trained nerves continue to repeat

(02:18:21):
the acts even when you abhor them. What you at
first choose at last compels you. You are as irrevocably
chained to your deeds as the atoms are chained by gravitation. So,
my friends, when you are thinking of engaging in an
occupation which is a little questionable and which does not
get the complete consent of your faculties. Do not forget

(02:18:42):
this tremendous gripping power of habit, which, when you may
wish to change, will pull like a giant to get
you back into the old rut. You have no right
to choose an occupation which calls in to play your
inferior qualities, the lying, cunning, overreaching, scheming, long headed, underhanded quality,
those which covet in grasp and snatch and never give,

(02:19:04):
while all that is noblest in you shrivels and dyes.
If you have already made a wrong choice, why should
you remain in an occupation which does not have your
unqualified approval, or in one of which you are ashamed,
and in which you have to stretch your conscience every
day to make deceitful statements and false representations, to influence
purchasers unduly, to induce them by a smooth manner and

(02:19:25):
a lying tongue, to do that which you know is
not for their advantage, and for which you will reproach
yourself afterwards. Why should you desecrate your manhood and pervert
your ability in a contemptible occupation when there are so
many clean, respectable vocations which are searching for your ability
and hunting for your talent. You say that it is
hard for you to change. Of course, it is hard

(02:19:48):
to jog along in hundrum, toil for the sake of
being honest, when acquaintances all around are getting rich by
leaps and bounds. Of course, it takes courage to refuse
to bend the knee to questionable methods, lies, schemes, and
fraud when they are so generally used. Of course, it
takes courage to tell the exact truth when a little
deception or a little departure from the right would bring

(02:20:10):
great temporary gain. Of course, it takes courage to refuse
to be bribed when it could be covered up by
a little specious mystification. Of course, it takes courage to
stand erect, and by bowing and scraping to people with
a pull you can get inside information which will make
you win what you know others must lose. Of course,
it takes courage to determine never to put into your

(02:20:31):
pocket a dirty dollar, a lying, deceitful dollar, a dollar
that drips with human sorrow, or a dollar that has
made some poor, gullible wretch poor, or has defeated another's
cherished plans, or robbed him of ambition or education. But
this is what character is for, this is what manhood means.
This is what backbone and stamina were given us for

(02:20:54):
to stand for the right and oppose the wrong, no
matter what the results. Wear threadbare clothes if necessary, live
on one meal a day in a house with bare
floors and bare walls if you must. But under no
circumstances ever consent to prostitute your manhood or to turn
your ability to do an unclean thing, dig trenches, carry

(02:21:15):
a hot work as a section hand on a railroad,
shovel coal, anything. Rather than sacrifice your self respect, blunt
your sense of right and wrong, and shut yourself off
forever from the true joy of living and the approbation
which comes only from the consciousness of doing your level
best to reach the highest that is possible to you.
Do not choose that occupation which has the most money

(02:21:36):
in it, the greatest promise of material reward, notoriety, or
fame even, But choose that which will call out the
man in you, and which will develop your greatest strength
and symmetry of manhood personal nobility. Manhood is greater than wealth,
and grander than fame. Personal nobility is greater than any
calling or any reward that it can bring. He can,

(02:21:59):
who thinks he can, by orison sweat Martin nineteen o
eight ten, stand for something. The greatest thing that can
be said of a man, no matter how much he
has achieved, is that he has kept his record clean.
Why is it that, in spite of the ravages of time,
the reputation of Lincoln grows larger in his character means

(02:22:19):
more to the world every year. It is because he
kept his record clean and never prostituted his ability nor
gambled with his reputation. Where in all history is there
an example of a man who was merely rich, no
matter how great his wealth, who exerted such a power
for good, who was such a living force in civilization
as was this poor backwards boy. What a powerful illustration

(02:22:43):
of the fact that character is the greatest force in
the world. A man assumes importance and becomes a power
in the world just as soon as it is found
that he stands for something, that he is not for sale,
that he will not lease his manhood for salary, for
any amount of money, or for any influence or position
that he will not lend his name to anything which
he cannot endorse. The trouble with so many men today

(02:23:06):
is that they do not stand for anything outside their vocation.
They may be well educated, well up in their specialties,
may have a lot of expert knowledge, but they cannot
be depended upon. There is some flaw in them which
takes the edge off their virtue. They may be fairly honest,
but you cannot bank on them. It is not difficult

(02:23:27):
to find a lawyer or a physician who knows a
good deal, who is eminent in his profession, but it
is not so easy to find one who is a
man before he is a lawyer or a physician, whose
name is a synonym for all that is clean, reliable, solid, substantial.
It is not difficult to find a good preacher, but
it is not so easy to find a real man

(02:23:47):
sterling manhood back of the sermon. It is easy to
find successful merchants, but not so easy to find men
who put character above merchandise. What the world wants is
men who have principle underlying their expertness, principle under their law,
their medicine, their business. Men who stand for something outside
of their offices and stores who stand for something in

(02:24:09):
their community, whose very presence carries weight. Everywhere we see smart, clever,
long head, shrewd men. But how comparatively rare it is
to find one whose record is as clean as a
hound's tooth, who will not swerve from the right, who
would rather fail than be a party to a questionable transaction.
Everywhere we see business men putting the stumbling blocks of

(02:24:32):
deception and dishonest methods right across their own pathway, tripping
themselves up while trying to deceive others. We see men
worth millions of dollars, filled with terror, trembling less investigations
may uncover things which will damn them in the public estimation.
We see them cowed before the law, like whipped spaniels,
catching at any straw that will save them from public disgrace.

(02:24:55):
What a terrible thing to live in the limelight of
popular favor, To be envied as rich and powerful, to
be esteemed as honorable and straightforward, and yet to be
conscious all the time of not being what the world
thinks we are, To live in constant terror of discovery,
in fear that something may happen to unmask us and
show us up in our true light, but nothing can

(02:25:15):
happen to injure seriously, the man who lives four square
to the world, who has nothing to cover up, nothing
to hide from his fellows, who lives a transparent, clean
life with never a fear of disclosures. If all of
his material possessions are swept away from him, he knows
that he has a monument in the hearts of his countrymen,
in the affection and admiration of the people, and that

(02:25:37):
nothing can happen to harm his real self because he
has kept his record clean. Mister Roosevelt early resolved that
let what would come, whether he succeeded in what he
undertook or failed, whether he made friends or enemies, he
would not take chances with his good name. He would
part with everything else first, that he would never gamble
with his reputation, that he would keep his record clean.

(02:25:59):
His first amat ambition was to stand for something, to
be a man before he was a politician or anything else.
The man must come first. In his early career, he
had many opportunities to make a great deal of money
by allying himself with crooked, sneaking and scrupulous politicians. He
had all sorts of opportunities for political graft, but crookedness

(02:26:22):
never had any attraction for him. He refused to be
a party to any political jobbery, any underhand business. He
preferred to lose any position he was seeking to let
somebody else have it if he must get smirched into
getting it. He would not touch a dollar, place or
preferment unless it came to him clean, with no trace

(02:26:42):
of jobbery on it. Politicians who had an axe to
grind knew it was no use to try to bribe him,
were to influence him with promises of patronage, money, position,
or power. Mister Roosevelt knew perfectly well that he would
make many mistakes and many enemies. But he resolved to
carry himself in such a way that even his enemies
should at least respect him for his honesty of purpose

(02:27:04):
and for his straightforward, square deal methods. He resolved to
keep his record clean, his name white, at all hazards.
Everything else seemed unimportant in comparison. In times like these,
the world especially needs such men as mister Roosevelt. Men
who hew close to the chalk line of right and
hold the line plumb to truth, Men who do not

(02:27:26):
pander to public favor, men who make duty in truth
their goal and go straight to their mark, turning neither
to the right nor to the left. Though a paradise
tempt them. Who can ever estimate how much his influence
has done toward purging politics and elevating the American ideal.
He has changed the viewpoint of many statesmen and politicians.

(02:27:47):
He has shown them a new and a better way.
He has made many of them ashamed of the old
methods of grafting and selfish greed. He has held up
a new ideal, shown them that unselfish service to their
country is infinitely nobler than an ambition for self aggrandizement.
American patriotism has a higher meaning today because of the
example of this great American. Many young politicians and statesmen

(02:28:12):
have adopted cleaner methods and higher aims because of his influence.
There is no doubt that tens of thousands of young
men in this country are cleaner in their lives and
more honest and ambitious to be good citizens. Because here
is a man who always stands for the square deal,
for civic righteousness, for American manhood. Every man ought to

(02:28:32):
feel that there is something in him that bribery cannot
touch that influence cannot buy something that is not for sale,
something he would not sacrifice or tamper with for any price,
something he would give his life for if necessary. If
a man stands for something worth while compels recognition for
himself alone, on account of his real worth, he is

(02:28:52):
not dependent upon recommendations, upon fine clothes, a fine house,
or a pull. He is his own best recommendation. The
young man who starts out with the resolution to make
his character his capital, and to pledge his whole manhood
for every obligation he enters into will not be a failure,
though he wins neither fame nor fortune. No man ever

(02:29:15):
really does a great thing who loses his character in
the process. No substitute has ever yet been discovered for honesty.
Multitudes of people have gone to the wall trying to
find one. Our prisons are full of people who have
attempted to substitute something else for it. No man can
really believe in himself when he is occupying a false

(02:29:35):
position and wearing a mask, when the little monitor within
him is constantly saying, you know you are a fraud.
You are not the man you pretend to be. The
consciousness of not being genuine, not being what others think
him to be, robs a man of power. Honeycombs the
character and destroys self respect in self confidence, when Lincoln

(02:29:56):
was asked to take the wrong side of a case,
he said, I could not do it. All the time
while talking to that jury, I should be thinking, Lincoln,
you're a liar. You're a liar, And I believe I
should forget myself and say it out loud. Character, as capital,
is very much underestimated by a great number of young men.
They seem to put more emphasis upon smart ness, shrewdness,

(02:30:19):
long headedness, cunning influence a pull, than upon downright honesty
and integrity of character. Yet why do scores of concerns
pay enormous sums for the use of the name of
a man who perhaps has been dead for half a
century or more. It is because there is power in
that name, because there is character in it, because it

(02:30:39):
stands for something, because it represents reliability and square dealing.
Think of what the name of Tiffany, of Park and Tilford,
or any of the great names which stand in the
commercial world as solid and immovable as the rock of Gibraltar,
are worth Does it not seem strange that young men
who know these facts should try to build up a
business on a foundation of cunning, scheming, and trickery instead

(02:31:03):
of building on the solid rock of character, reliability, and manhood.
Is it not remarkable that so many men should work
so hard to establish a business on an unreliable, flimsy
foundation instead of building upon the solid masonry of honest goods,
square dealing, reliability. A name is worth everything until it
is questioned, but when suspicion clings to it, it is

(02:31:26):
worth nothing. There is nothing in this world that will
take the place of character. There is no policy in
the world to say nothing of the right or wrong
of it that compares with honesty in square dealing. In
spite of, or because of, all the crookedness and dishonesty
that is being uncovered, of all the scoundrels that are
being unmasked, integrity is the biggest word in the business

(02:31:50):
world today. There never was a time in all history
when it was so big, and it is growing bigger.
There never was a time when character meant so much
in business, when it stood for so much everywhere as
it does today. There was a time when the man
who was the shrewdest and sharpest and cunningest in taking
advantage of others, got the biggest salary. But today the

(02:32:11):
man at the other end of the bargain is looming
up as never before. Nathan Strauss, when asked the secret
of the great success of his firm, said it was
their treatment of the man at the other end of
the bargain. He said, they could not afford to make enemies.
They could not afford to displease, or to take advantage
of customers, or to give them reason to think that
they had been unfairly dealt with. That in the long run,

(02:32:34):
the man who gave the squarest deal to the man
at the other end of the bargain would get ahead fastest.
There are merchants who have made great fortunes, but who
do not carry weight among their fellow men, because they
have dealt all their lives with inferiority. They have lived
with shoddy and sham so long that the suggestion has
been held in their minds, until their whole standards of

(02:32:55):
life have been lowered, their ideals have shrunken, their characters
have partaken of the quality of their business. Contrast these
men with the men who stood for half a century
or more, at the head of solid houses, substantial institutions,
Men who have always stood for quality in everything, who
have surrounded themselves not only with ability, but with men
and women of character. We instinctively believe in character. We

(02:33:20):
admire people who stand for something, who are centered in
truth and honesty. It is not necessary that they agree
with us. We admire them for their strength, the honesty
of their opinions, the inflexibility of their principles. The late
Karl Schuurs was a strong man and antagonized many people.
He changed his political views very often, but even his

(02:33:43):
worst enemies knew there was one thing he would never
go back on. Friends or no friends, party or no party,
and that was his devotion to principle. As he saw it,
There was no parleying with his convictions. He could stand
alone if necessary, with all the world against him. His inconsistencies,
his many changes in parties and politics, could not destroy

(02:34:06):
the universal admiration for the man who stood for his convictions.
Although he escaped from a German prison, fled his country
where he had been arrested on account of his revolutionary principles.
When but a mere youth, Emperor William the first had
such a profound respect for his honesty of purpose and
his strength of character that he invited him to return
to Germany and visit him, gave him a public dinner,

(02:34:27):
and paid him great tribute. Who can estimate the influence
of President Eliot in enriching and uplifting our national ideas
and standards Through the thousands of students who go out
from Harvard University. The tremendous force and nobility of character
of Philip's Brooks raised every one who came within his
influence to higher levels. His great earnestness in trying to

(02:34:49):
lead people up to his lofty ideals swept everything before it.
One could not help feeling, while listening to him and
watching him, that there was a mighty triumph of character,
a grand expression of super manhood. Such men as these
increase our faith in the race, in the possibilities of
the grandeur of the coming man. We are prouder of
our country because of such standards. It is the ideal

(02:35:12):
that determines the direction of the life, And what a
grand sight, what an inspiration are those men who sacrifice
the dollar to the ideal. The principles by which the
problem of success is solved. Are right and justice, honesty
and integrity, and just in proportion. As a man deviates
from these principles, he falls short of solving his problem.

(02:35:34):
It is true that he may reach something, he may
get money, but is that success. The thief gets money,
but does he succeed? Is it any honester to steal
by means of a long head than by means of
a long arm. It is very much more dishonest because
the victim is deceived and then robbed, a double crime.

(02:35:55):
We often receive letters which read like this, I am
getting a good salary, but I do not feel right
about it. Somehow I cannot still the voice within me
that says wrong, wrong to what I am doing. Leave it.
Leave it, We always say to the writers of these letters,
do not stay in a questionable occupation, no matter what

(02:36:17):
inducement it offers. Its false light will land you on
the rocks if you follow it. It is demoralizing to
the mental faculties, paralyzing to the character to do a
thing which one's conscience forbids. Tell the employer who expects
you to do questionable things that you cannot work for
him unless you can put the trademark of your manhood,
the stamp of your integrity upon everything you do. Tell

(02:36:41):
him that if the highest thing in you cannot bring success,
surely the lowest cannot. You cannot afford to sell the
best thing in you, your honor, your manhood, to a
dishonest man or a lying institution. You should regard even
the suggestion that you might sell out for a consideration
as an insult. Resolve that you will not be paid

(02:37:01):
for being something less than a man. That you will
not lease your ability, your education, your inventiveness, your self
respect for salary to do a man's lying for him,
either in writing advertisements, selling goods, or in any other capacity.
Resolve that whatever your vocation, you are going to stand
for something. That you are not going to be merely

(02:37:21):
a lawyer, a physician, a merchant, a clerk, a farmer,
a congressman, or a man who carries a big money bag,
but that you are going to be a man first, last,
and all the time. He can who thinks he can.
By Orison Sweat Martin, nineteen o eight eleven, happy if not,
why not? We have seen many painful examples during the

(02:37:44):
past few months of the failure of wealth to produce happiness.
We have seen that a fortune without a man behind
it does not stand for much. The x rays of
public investigation have revealed some ghastly spectacles of a number
of rich men who were in positions of great responsibility
in trust at the beginning of the recent financial panic.

(02:38:04):
Some have committed suicide, others have died from the effects
of the disgrace which they had brought upon themselves and
their families. And still others have suffered tortures, not so
much because of their wrong doings as from the fear
of disclosure. A few months ago. These men were supposed
to possess the things which make men happy. They had
what all the world is seeking so strenuously money. They

(02:38:28):
lived in palatial homes and were surrounded with luxuries. And
yet the moment misfortune came, what they called happiness fled
as though it had the wings of a bird. These
men felt secure because they had that which most people
are struggling so hard to get. They had supposed themselves
so firmly entrenched in the wherewithal of life, so buttressed

(02:38:49):
by their solid investments, that nothing could shake them. But
almost in the twinkling of an eye, their foundations slipped
from under them, their reputations vanished, and instead of being
the big men they thought they were, they not only
found that they were nobodies, but also that their happiness
had flown with their reputations. Happiness is not such a

(02:39:10):
transient visitor as that If these men had had the
genuine article, no panic could have shaken it, no fire
burned it out, no ocean swallowed it up. Real happiness
is not of fluttering fly away on reality. It is
not superficial. It does not live in things, It does
not depend upon money. It inheres in character, in personality.

(02:39:36):
It consists in facing life the right way, And no
one who faces it the wrong way, no matter how
much money he may have, can ever be happy. The
trouble with many of the men who went down in
the panic was that they put the emphasis upon the
wrong thing. Man is built upon the plan of honesty,
of rectitude, the divine plan. When he perverts his nature

(02:39:58):
by trying to express dishonesty, chicanery and cunning, of course
he cannot be happy. The very essence of happiness is honesty, sincerity, truthfulness.
He who would have real happiness for his companion must
be clean, straightforward, and sincere. The moment he departs from
the right, she will take wings and fly away. What

(02:40:20):
a pitiable thing it is to see the human race
chasing the dollar material things, trying to extract happiness, to
squeeze joy out of money alone. How little people realize
that the very thing they are hunting lives in themselves
or nowhere, that if they do not take happiness with them,
they may hunt the earth over without finding it. Happiness

(02:40:40):
is a condition of mind. It is a fundamental principle,
and he who does not understand the principle cannot possibly
be happy. All the misery and the crime of the
world rest upon the failure of human beings to understand
the principle that no man can really be happy until
he harmonizes with the best thing in him, with the divine,
and not with the brute. No one can be happy

(02:41:02):
who tries to harmonize his life with his animal instincts.
The God. The good in him is the only possible
thing that can make him happy. Real happiness cannot be
bribed by anything sordid or low. Nothing mean or unworthy
appeals to it. There is no affinity between them. Founded

(02:41:23):
upon principle. It is as scientific as the laws of mathematics,
and he who works his problem correctly will get the
happiness answer. There is only one way to secure the
correct answer to a mathematical problem, and that is to
work in harmony with mathematical laws. It would not matter
if half the world believed there was some other way
to get the answer. It would never come until the

(02:41:44):
law was followed with the utmost exactitude. It does not
matter that the great majority of the human race believe
there is some other way of reaching the happiness goal.
The fact that they are discontented, restless, and unhappy shows
that they are not working their problems scientifically. We are
all conscious that there is another man inside of us,

(02:42:05):
that there accompanies us through life, a divine, silent messenger,
that other, higher, better self, which speaks from the depths
of our nature, and which gives its consent, its amen
to every right action, and condemns every wrong one. Men
and women in all times have tried to bribe this
constant monitor, to purchase its approval, to silence it in

(02:42:25):
nervous excitement, to drown it in vicious pleasure with drink
and with drugs, But all in vain Men in every
age have disregarded its warning, have tried in every possible
way to get away from its tormenting reproofs when they
have done wrong, But no amount of dissipation or excitement
has ever been able to silence its voice. It always
continues to give its unbiased, unbribed approval or disapproval to

(02:42:49):
whatever we do. There is nothing in which people deceive
themselves so much as in the pursuit of happiness. There
is only one way to find it. That is by
obeying the laws upon which we are built. We are
constructed along the lines of truth and justice, and we
cannot reach felicity by disobeying these the very laws of

(02:43:10):
our nature. So long as we continue to do evil
to get money by unfair means, by robbing others or
taking advantage of them, so long as our ambition is
to get rich anyway, we can never attain true happiness
because we are going in the wrong direction. We are
introducing discord into our natures, encouraging the very opposite to

(02:43:30):
what we are seeking. It is just as impossible for
a person to reach the normal state of harmony while
he is practicing selfish grasping methods as it is to
produce harmony in an orchestra with instruments that are all
jangled and out of tune. To be happy, we must
be in tune with the infinite within us, in harmony
with our better selves. There is no way to get

(02:43:52):
around it. The idea that we can practice wrong in
our vocations, in our dealings with men, or in our pleasures,
and and periodically seek forgiveness in our prayers or through
our churches. The idea that a man can do wrong
and be forgiven without remedying the wrong or without forsaking
the sin has done more harm than almost any other
thing in civilization. A clear conscience, a clean life, the

(02:44:16):
elimination of selfishness, jealousy, envy, and hatred are necessary to
all high enjoyment. One trouble with many of us is
that we try to make happiness too complicated an affair,
but happiness really flees from complication, ceremony, and pretense. Nature
has fixed her everlasting edict against complicated living. You can

(02:44:40):
never force pleasure. It must be natural, It must come
from same living. Real happiness is so simple that most
people do not recognize it. They think it comes from
doing something on a big scale, from a big fortune,
or from some great achievement, when in fact it is
derived from the simplest, the quietest, the most unpretentious things

(02:45:01):
in the world. Our great problem is to fill each
day so full of sunshine, of plain living and high thinking,
that there can be no commonness or unhappiness in our lives.
Little kindnesses, pleasant words and helps by the way, trifling
courtesies and encouragements, duties faithfully done, unselfish service, work that

(02:45:22):
we enjoy, friendships, love and affection. All these are simple things,
yet they are what constitute happiness. The great sanitariums, the
noted springs of the world are crowded with rich people,
sent there by their physicians to get rid of the
effects of complicated living. They tried to force their pleasures
and came to grief. Not long ago I dined in

(02:45:45):
the home of a very rich man, and it took
two hours and a half to serve the dinner. There
were thirteen courses, made up of the richest kinds of food,
and many of them absolutely incompatible with one another. In
addition to this, there were seven kinds of wine. Think
of any one being healthy or happy living upon such
a diet. What are the enjoyments of the average rich.

(02:46:09):
Is there anything more vapid, insipid, unsatisfying than the chasing
after that indefinite, mysterious something which they call happiness, that willow,
the wisp which is always beckoning them on, but ever
eluding their grasp, that rainbow which recedes as they approach.
They may enjoy the titillation of the nerves for a moment,
the temporary excitement and exhilaration which come from even vicious pleasures,

(02:46:33):
But what of it all? It is only animal enjoyment.
Nothing but regret, disappointment, and disgust follow. There is within
every normal person a strong desire to do something and
to be something in the world, And every idler knows
that he is violating the fundamental demand of his nature,
that he is really cheating himself out of a very

(02:46:53):
sacred prize, the getting of which would mean more to
him than everything else in the world. I have talked
with idle rich young men who said they knew that
it was all wrong for them to refuse to do
their part of the world's work, that it was a
mistake for them not to enter into the activities of
life and struggle for a prize which the creator had
fitted them to take, but that the paralyzing effect of

(02:47:14):
not being obliged to work had undermined their inclination. Recently,
a rich young man was asked why he did not work.
I do not have to, he said, do not have
to has ruined more young men than almost anything else.
The fact is Nature never made any provision for the
idle man. Vigorous activity is the law of life. It

(02:47:36):
is the saving grace. The only thing that can keep
a human being from retrograding activity along the line of
one's highest ambition is the normal state of man, and
he who tries to evade it pays the penalty in
deterioration of faculty, in paralysis of efficiency. Do not flatter
yourself that you can be really happy unless you are useful.

(02:47:57):
Happiness and usefulness were born to ain. To separate them
is fatal. It is as impossible for a human being
to be happy who is habitually idle as it is
for a fine chronometer to be normal when not running.
The highest happiness is the feeling of well being which
comes to one who is actively employed in doing what
he was made to do, carrying out the great life

(02:48:19):
purpose patterned in his individual bent. The practical fulfilling of
the life purpose is to man what the actual running
and keeping time are to the watch. Without action, both
are meaningless. There is no tonic like that which comes
from doing things worthwhile. There is no happiness like that
which comes from doing our level best every day everywhere,

(02:48:41):
no satisfaction like that which comes from stamping our superiority,
putting our royal trademark upon everything which goes through our hands.
Man was made to do things. Nothing else can take
the place of achievement in his life. Real happiness without
achievement of some worthy aim is unthinkable. One of the
greatest satisfactions in this world is the feeling of enlargement,

(02:49:05):
of growth, of stretching upward and onward. No pleasure can
surpass that which comes from the consciousness of feeling one's
horizon of ignorance being pushed farther and farther away, of
making headway in the world, of not only getting on,
but also of getting up. Happiness is incompatible with stagnation.
A man must feel his expanding power lifting tugging away

(02:49:28):
at a lofty purpose, or he will miss the joy
of living. The discords, the bickerings and divorces, the breaking
up of rich homes and the resorting to all sorts
of silly devices by many rich people in their pursuit
of happiness, prove that it does not dwell within them.
That happiness does not abide with low ideals, with selfishness, idleness,

(02:49:49):
and discord. It is a friend of harmony, of truth
and beauty, of affection and simplicity. Multitudes of men have
made fortunes, but have murdered their capacit for enjoyment in
the process. How often we hear the remark he has
the money, but cannot enjoy it. A man can have
no greater delusion than that he can spend the best

(02:50:11):
years of his life coining all of his energies into dollars,
neglecting his home, sacrificing friendships, self improvement, and everything else
that is really worth while for money, and yet find
happiness at the end. If a man coins his ability,
his opportunities into dollars, and during all the years he
is accumulating wealth neglects the cultivation of the only faculties

(02:50:33):
which are capable of appreciating the highest happiness, he cannot
effectively revive his atrophied brain cells his enjoyment. After he makes,
his money must come from the exercise of the same
faculties which he has employed in making it. He cannot
undo the results of a life habit after he retires
from business. If you have not kept alive your ability

(02:50:54):
to appreciate the beautiful, the good, and the true, you
will be as surprised to find that it has left
you as Darwin was when in middle life he discovered
all at once that he had lost his power to
appreciate Shakespeare and music. We ought to be able to
get a good living, even to make fortunes, and yet
have a jolly good time every day of our lives.

(02:51:15):
This idea of being a slave most of the time
and of only occasionally enjoying a holiday is all wrong.
Every day should be a holiday, a day of joy
and gladness, a day of supreme happiness, And it would
be if we lived sanely, if we knew the secret
of right thinking and normal living. Isn't it strange that
so few people ever think of making happiness a daily duty,

(02:51:38):
That they should put this everlasting emphasis upon their vocations
on money making, and let the thing for which they
really live come incidentally or without planning. The making of
a life should be emphasized infinitely more than the making
of a living. Few people ever learn the art of
enjoying the little things of life as they go along.

(02:51:58):
Yet it is the little every day enjoyments and satisfactions
that count most in a lifetime. Almost every person I
know is living in anticipation, not in reality. He is
not actually living the life he has always looked forward
to or expected to attain, but is just getting ready
to live, just getting ready to enjoy it. When he

(02:52:19):
gets a little more money, a little better house, a
little more of the comforts of life, a little more leisure,
a little more freedom from responsibility, he will then be
ready to enjoy life. It is a rare thing to
find a person who can truthfully say I am really living.
This is the life I have been striving for, the
life that I have looked forward to, as being as

(02:52:40):
near my ideal as I am likely to find in
this world. It is a great thing so to cultivate
the art of happiness, that we can get pleasure out
of the common experiences of every day. The happiness habit
is just as necessary to our best welfare as the
work habit, or the honesty or square dealing habit. No
one can do best his highest work who is not

(02:53:02):
perfectly normal, and happiness to a fundamental necessity of our being.
It be an indication of health, of sanity, of harmony.
The opposite is a symptom of disease, of a basterisk normality.
There are plenty of evidences in the human economy that
we were intended for happiness, that it is our normal condition,
that suffering, unhappiness, discontent are absolutely foreign and abnormal to

(02:53:27):
our natures. There is no doubt that our life was
intended to be one grand, sweet song. We are built
upon the plan of harmony, and every form of discord
is abnormal. There is something wrong when any human being
in this world, tuned to infinite harmonies and beauties that
are unspeakable, is unhappy and discontented. One of the most

(02:53:49):
inexplicable mysteries that has ever puzzled the selfish rich is
their failure to find happiness where they had expected to
find it. The bitterest disappointment that comes to people who
have made fortune is that the wealth did not bring
the happiness which it promised, or anything like it. They
find that the affections do not feed on material things,
that the heart would starve in the midst of the

(02:54:10):
greatest luxuries alone. They find that while money can do
many things, it has little power to satisfy the heart yearnings,
the heart hunger. How many women there are impalatial homes
in this country who are starving for happiness, and who
would gladly exchange all their luxuries for the love of
a good man, even if he had not a dollar
in the world. No selfish life can ever be happy.

(02:54:35):
I am acquainted with a self made man who has
made a fortune, who tells me that the greatest enigma
and disappointment of his life lie in the fact that,
although he has made millions, he is not happy. He
says that somehow he has never been able to make
many friends, that people avoid him, that he has never
been able to get the confidence of others to any
very great extent, and that he is not popular even

(02:54:57):
among his own neighbors. He cannot unders stand why he
is not happy, for he tells me, he has tried
very hard to find happiness. The trouble with him is
that he has always done everything with reference to himself.
He did not mean to be selfish, but the whole
passion of his life has been to make money, because
he thought that would bring everything else that is desirable.

(02:55:20):
He has chosen his friends for their ability to advance
his interests, and has considered every step in life with
reference to the effect it would have upon him. What
is there in it for me? Seems to have been
the interrogation point in his life. Now. Happiness is a reflection,
an echo, a part of what we do and think.
It does not depend upon our material possessions. Thoreau's cabin

(02:55:44):
at Walden Pond cost only thirty one dollars, and yet
Thoreau was rich and happy because he had a rich mind.
It is as impossible for the selfish, greedy, grasping thought,
the thought always centered upon one's own interest, to produce
a happy state of mind, as it is for thistle
seeds to produce wheat. But if we sow helpfulness, kindness, unselfishness,

(02:56:08):
we shall reap a harvest of satisfaction. Harmony and happiness.
Selfishness and real happiness never go together. They are fatally antagonistic,
an inordinate ambition, a desire to get ahead of others,
a mania to keep up appearances at all hazards. Whether
we can afford it or not. All these things feed selfishness,

(02:56:29):
that corrosive acid which eats away our possible enjoyment and
destroys the very sources of happiness. The devouring ambition to
get ahead of others in money making, to outshine others
socially develops assorted, grasping disposition, which is the bane of happiness.
No man with greed developed big within him can be happy.

(02:56:50):
Neither contentment, satisfaction, serenity, affection, nor any other member of
the happiness family can exist in the presence of greed.
It is as an impossible for a man who has
been dishonest, who has gotten his wealth by crushing others
and by taking advantage of them, to be happy, as
it is for a person really to enjoy himself while
walking with pebbles in his shoes, or while constantly being

(02:57:13):
nettled with pin pricks. No man can be happy who
is conscious of being a drone, of shirking his share
in the great world's work, who knows that he is
taking all the good things he can get hold of
in life's great granary put there by the toilers, and
is putting nothing back. A debauched mind that has departed
from the principles of right thinking and right living has

(02:57:33):
incapacitated itself for real enjoyment. The only way to get
the happiness that is worth while is to live a straight, clean, pure, honest,
useful life. There is no power in the universe that
can make a human being happy along any other lines. Straightforward,
honest work, a determined endeavor to do one's best, an

(02:57:54):
earnest desire to scatter flowers instead of thorns, to make
other people a little better off, a little happier because
of our existence. These are the only recipes for real happiness.
No man can be happy when he despises his own acts,
when he has any consciousness of wrong, whether of motive
or act. No man can be happy when he harbors

(02:58:15):
thoughts of revenge, jealousy, envy, or hatred. He must have
a clean heart and a clean conscience, or no amount
of money or excitement can make him happy. He can
who thinks he can? By orison sweat Martin, nineteen o
eight twelve. Originality, No human being ever yet made a

(02:58:36):
success trying to be somebody else, Even if that person
was a success. Success cannot be copied, cannot be successfully imitated.
It is an original force, an individual creation. Every man
will be a failure just in proportion as he gets
away from himself and tries to be somebody else and
to express somebody else instead of himself. Power comes from

(02:58:58):
within or from nowhere. Be yourself. Listen to the voice within.
There is room for improvement in every profession, in every trade,
and in every business. The world wants men who can
do things in new and better ways. Don't think because
your plan or idea has no precedent, or because you

(02:59:19):
are young and inexperienced, that you will not get a hearing.
The man who has anything new and valuable to give
to the world will be listened to and will be followed.
The man of strong individuality, who dares to think his
own thought and originate his own method, who is not
afraid to be himself and is not a copy of
some one else, quickly gets recognition. Nothing else will attract

(02:59:42):
the attention of an employer or the rest of the
world so quickly as originality and unique ways of doing things,
especially if they are effective. Blaze your own way, make
your own path, or you will never make any impression
on the world. It is striking originality that attracts attention.
The world admires the man who has the courage to

(03:00:03):
lift his head above the crowd, who dares to step
to the front and declare himself. Never before was originality
so much at a premium. The world makes way for
the man with an idea. It is the thinker, the
man with original ideas and new and up to date methods,
who is the real productive force in a community. He

(03:00:24):
is wanted everywhere, but there is very little demand for
human machines. The world is full of followers, leaners and
taggers who are willing to walk in old trails and
to have their thinking done for them. But it is
seeking the man with original force who leaves the beaten
track and pushes into new fields. The physician who departs
from the precedent of those who have gone before him,

(03:00:46):
the lawyer who conducts his case in an original way,
the teacher who brings new ideas and methods into the
school room. And the clergyman who has the courage to
proclaim the message which God has given to him, not
that given to some other man who has put it
into a book. The world wants preachers who get their
sermons out of life, not out of a library. There

(03:01:08):
are a thousand people who will do faithfully what they
are told to one who can lay out a program
or execute it, a thousand who can only follow, to
one who can lead. It is a rare thing to
find a young man who has the power of initiative
and the ability to put a thing through with the
force of originality. Whatever your work in life, do not
follow others, Do not imitate. Do not do things just

(03:01:32):
as everybody else has done them before, but in new,
ingenious ways. Show the people in your specialty that precedents
do not cut much of a figure with you, and
that you will not make your own program. Resolve that
whether you accomplish much or little in the world, it
shall be original your own. Do not be afraid to
assert yourself in a bold individual way. Originality is power life,

(03:01:57):
Imitation is death. Do not be afraid to let yourself out.
You grow by being original, never by copying, by leading,
never by following. Resolve that you will be a man
of ideas, always on the lookout for improvement. Think to
some purpose. There is always a place for an original man.

(03:02:18):
There is nothing else which will kill the creative faculty
and paralyze growth. More quickly than following precedents in everything
and doing everything in the same old way. I have
known progressive young men to stop growing, become hopelessly ruddy,
and lose all their progressiveness by going into their fathers stores, factories,
or places of business, where everything was done in the

(03:02:39):
same old fashioned way and precedents were followed in everything.
They lost all expansiveness. There was no motive for reaching
out for the new and the original, because their fathers
would not change. I have seen splendid fellows who might
have become great and grand men shriveled to pigmies in
their fathers ruts. How many of our business houses are

(03:03:01):
weighted down with machinery, old antiquated methods, ponderous bookkeeping, and
out of date appliances. When new devices or new methods
with short cut ways of doing things would enable them
to economize greatly on room and to get along with
much less help, but they cling to the old with
a fatal tenacity. This is why so many old concerns,

(03:03:22):
which have been strong and powerful for generations, gradually shrink, shrivel,
get into ruts, and fail, while their newer competitors, the
bright young men who have gone out from these houses,
do things in a new way, adopt up to date methods,
keep up with the times, and go on to greater success.
There is a great advertising quality in originality or uniqueness.

(03:03:45):
The man who does business like the great majority of men,
although he may have superior ability, does not attract much attention.
But if he makes his own path, adopts original and
progressive methods, puts his specialty in a class by itself
and attracts attention. Everybody who patronizes him is a traveling
advertisement for him. There is a specialty store in Boston

(03:04:08):
whose progressive proprietors make a study of original ways of
doing everything. For example, all change is given in brand
new money direct from the United States Treasury or Mint.
This does not cost much and causes but little trouble.
Yet it is a very shrewd advertisement. It is especially
attractive to women and children, and has brought a great

(03:04:29):
deal of trade. Aside from the danger of handling old
soiled money, which has been no one knows where, it
gives a sense of pleasure to handle new crisp bills
and brand new bright coins. This is only one of
the many unique methods this concern adopts people flock to
the most up to date establishments, for they know that

(03:04:51):
the newest styles, the latest and freshest goods, the greatest variety,
the best display of taste, and the most appropriate things
are to be found there. It is well known that
those up to date houses pay the largest salaries and
have the best buyers. There is a hotel in New
York which needs no advertising. It is one of the

(03:05:11):
institutions which people visit out of interest, and they are
always talking about it. Other things being equal, they will
patronize it if they cannot afford to have rooms there.
They will go there to dine, to see the fashions
and prominent people. The amount of free advertising which this
hotel has had, in addition to what perhaps other first

(03:05:33):
class hotels get, would probably have cost if paid for
half as much as the hotel is worth. The same
is true in every line of endeavor. It is the
newest and the most up to date concern that has
the latest devices and the freshest and most original ideas
that draws the people. Do not, however, make the mistake

(03:05:54):
of thinking that if you simply do things in new
ways you will necessarily be successful. It is effect originality
that counts. There are thousands of men who are always
chasing new ideas, new ways of doing things, who never
accomplish anything of note because they are not effective, not practical.
I know a man who adopts every new device that

(03:06:15):
comes along, and has thus practically run through a large
estate left him because he did not have the judgment
or the sagacity to select really effective devices or methods
in the management of his affairs. The shrewdest thing a
young man can do, to say nothing of the influence
upon his character, is to put the greatest possible originality,
in the highest possible excellence, into everything he does. To

(03:06:38):
make a resolution at the very outset of his career
to stamp his individuality upon everything that goes out of
his hands, and to determine that everything he does shall
have the imprint of his character upon it as a
trademark of the highest and best that is in him.
If he does this, he will not require a large
amount of capital to start a business and to advertise it.

(03:07:00):
His greatest resources will be in himself. Originality is the
best substitute for advertising, as well as the best thing
to advertise, if quality goes with it. Some men are
absolutely afraid to do things in a new way. They
must follow somebody else. What was good enough for my
father and grandfather is good enough for me, seems to

(03:07:22):
be their motto. They cannot see any reason for changing.
They must have a precedent for everything, or they reject it.
They cannot appreciate a new idea or a new way
of doing things. They think there must be something the
matter with it if it has not been used before.
They have a peculiar love for the old. The antique

(03:07:42):
appeals to them. They think the value of things lies
in their age. These people, with high bound intellects, stand
in the way of progress. Every town has these precedent
men in the same old sized stores, with the same old,
out of date show windows, the same method of displaying goods,
the same old cumbersome systems in the counting room. They

(03:08:05):
are progress proof. New ideas frighten them. The precedent man
is always nonplussed, embarrassed by anything new, or when confronted
with a condition which requires something original, he must get
hold of something which has been used before, or he
is powerless. Many people think it is unfortunate to be

(03:08:25):
unlike others in their personalities. They are always afraid of
being thought peculiar or eccentric. Yet the Creator never made
two things alike, nor any two people alike. Nature breaks
her mold at every new birth. Great characters always have
strong individuality and originality, characteristics which mark them from the crowd.

(03:08:48):
To be eccentric is not to be weak, but more
often it is a sign of strength. Lincoln had eccentricities,
but they were inseparable from his great character. Eccentricities which
do not make a person disagreeable or repulsive, are often
advantageous rather than disadvantageous. What is more monotonous than a
dead level, insipid character that has no strongly marked features

(03:09:12):
which individualize it. We all love a great nature, a strong, vigorous,
rugged personality which impresses us with power, something colossal, which
looms above us and inspires us with awe and admiration,
such as we feel when standing under some mighty mountain
cliff towering above us into the clouds. We do not
wish the rugged crags smoothed off. They add to the

(03:09:35):
peak sublimity. They suggest majesty and power. Why should we
want to plane off the eccentricities of a great character,
or the individuality which characterizes him and distinguishes him from
all others. We believe in the original man or woman,
who does not remind us of others, who makes a new, strong,
vigorous and lasting impression upon us, who does not imitate

(03:09:59):
or follow, who he makes his own program, who acts
upon his own judgment, who leans upon nobody, and who
does not ask advice, but acts fearlessly, boldly, independently. We
know there is force there that can do things, that
can achieve, a reserve power that makes its possessor a master.
Fearlessness is a quality absolutely necessary to great achievement. Courage

(03:10:22):
always a companies force. It is a marked quality of
the original man. Imitators are timid weak. Do not be
afraid of being original. Be an independent, self reliant new man,
not just one more individual in the world. Do not
try to be a copy of your grandfather, your father,

(03:10:43):
or your neighbor. That is as foolish as for a
violet to try to be like a rose, or for
a daisy to ape a sunflower. Nature has given each
a peculiar equipment for its purpose. Every man is born
to do a certain work in an original way. If
he tries to copy some other man, or to do
some other man's work. He will be an abortion, a misfit,

(03:11:05):
a failure. Do not imitate even your heroes. Scores of
young clergymen attempted to make their reputations by imitating Beecher.
They copied his voice and conversation, and imitated his gestures
and his habits. But they fell as far short of
the great man's power as the chromo falls short of
the masterpiece. Where are those hundreds of imitators now? Not

(03:11:29):
one of them has ever made any stir in the world.
The world puts its ban upon all imitations. It despises
a man who tags on to somebody else, leans or imitates.
He is always classed as a weakling without force, power,
or individuality. We hear a great deal about the dangers

(03:11:49):
of the one man power in our great corporations. People
say that they should be managed by large committees or
boards of directors, that too much power should not be
put into the hands of one man. But there is
one original, dominating character in every committee, on every board
of directors, who towers above all the others and ultimately rules.

(03:12:11):
It is impossible to get away from the domination of
a strong, original, forceful character. Just be yourself. The consciousness
that you are not another in the slightest degree, that
there is no suggestion of being a copy of somebody
else about you, is a great power in itself. It
increases your confidence. The very reputation of being original buttresses

(03:12:34):
you in any community. It helps you to have people
say after talking with you, there I met an original
man today who did not even remind me of anybody
else I have ever seen. It is refreshing to talk
with a man who never reminds you of others, who
uses no cant who is not the slave of precedent,
who walks on his own legs, who has no use

(03:12:55):
for crutches, and who never leans A man of force,
who radiates power. Why try to be somebody else? To
be yourself, or to express yourself with originality and power,
is the greatest thing you can do. You cannot be another.
If you try, it only makes you unnatural and ridiculous,
and robs you of the power which comes from self expression,

(03:13:18):
from being yourself. The more you differ from another man
by nature, the more ridiculous you will make yourself by
attempting to imitate him. Real strength inheres in personality. He
can who thinks he can by orison sweat Martin nineteen
o eight thirteen had money but lost it. A prominent

(03:13:39):
New York lawyer of wide experience says that, in his opinion,
ninety nine out of every hundred of those who make
money or inherit it lose it sooner or later. What
a spectacle everywhere in this land of plenty of inexhaustible
resources and unlimited opportunity where every man ought to be
a king. To see God's nobleman living like European presas

(03:14:00):
since because they never learned to do business in a
business way. How many thousands of good, honest men and
women there are in this country who have worked very
hard and made all sorts of sacrifices of comfort and
luxury in order to lay up something for the future,
and yet have reached middle life or later without having
anything to show for it, many of them indeed finding

(03:14:20):
themselves without a home or any probability of getting won,
without property or a cent of money laid by forsickness
for the inevitable emergency or for their declining years. It
seems incredible that a strong, sturdy, self made man who
has had to fight his way up from poverty, and
who feels the back ache in every dollar he has earned,

(03:14:41):
should let his savings slip through his fingers in the
most foolish investments, with scarcely any investigation, often sending his
money thousands of miles away to people he has never
seen and about whom he knows practically nothing, except through
an advertisement which has attracted his attention, or through the
wiles of some smooth, unprincipled promoter. Great numbers of vast

(03:15:03):
fortunes in this country have been and are being built
up on the very ignorance of the masses in regard
to business methods. The schemers bank on it that it
is easy to swindle people who do not know how
to protect their property. They thrive on the ignorance of
their fellows. They know that a shrewd advertisement, a cunningly
worded circular, a hypnotic appeal, will bring the hard earnings

(03:15:26):
of these unsuspecting people out of hiding places into their
own coffers. For the sake of your home, for the
protection of your hard earnings, for your peace of mind,
your self respect, your self confidence, whatever else you do,
do not neglect a good, solid business training and get
it as early in life as possible. It will save

(03:15:46):
you from many a fall, from a thousand embarrassments, and
perhaps from the humiliation of being compelled to face your
wife and children and confess that you have been a failure.
It may spare you the mortification of having to move
from a good home to a poor one, of seeing
your property slip out of your hands, and of having
to acknowledge your weakness and your lack of foresight and thoughtfulness.

(03:16:06):
Or it may prevent your being made the dupe of sharpers.
Many men who once had good stores of their own
are working as clerks, floor walkers, or superintendents of departments
in other people's stores, just because they risked and lost
everything in some venture. As they now have others depending
on them, they do not dare to take the risks
which they took in young manhood to get a new start,

(03:16:28):
and so they struggle along in mediocre positions, still mocked
with ambitions which they have no chance to gratify. How
many inventors and discoverers have fought the fight of desperation
amidst poverty and deprivation for years and years, and have
succeeded in giving the world that which helps to emancipate
man from drudgery and to ameliorate the hard conditions of civilization,

(03:16:49):
and yet have allowed others to snatch their victories away
from them and leave them penniless, just because they did
not know how to protect themselves. Thousands of people who
were once in easy circumstances are living in poverty and
wretchedness today because they failed to put an understanding or
an agreement in writing, or to do business in a
business way. Families have been turned penniless out of house

(03:17:12):
and home because they trusted to a relative or a
friend to do what was right by them without making
a hard and fast, practical business arrangement with him. It
does not matter how honest people are, they may forget,
and it is so easy for misunderstandings to arise that
it is never safe to leave anything of importance to
a mere oral statement. Reduce it to writing. It costs

(03:17:36):
but little in time or money, and when all parties
interested are agreed, that is the best time to formulate
the agreement in exact terms. This will often save lawsuits, bitterness,
and alienations. How many friendships have been broken because understandings
were not put in writing. Thousands of cases are in

(03:17:56):
the courts today for this reason, and a large part
of lawyer's incomes is derived from them. Many people have
a foolish idea that others, especially friends or relatives, will
be sensitive and think their honesty questioned if they are
asked to put their proposition or agreement or understanding in writing.
It is not a question of confidence. It is a

(03:18:17):
question of business, and business should be done in a
business way so that in case of death or some
other unforeseen event, every possibility of complication or misunderstanding will
be eliminated. The very people you may think will be
sensitive or offended because you are so exacting, will really
think more of you for your straightforward business methods and
your carefulness in avoiding misunderstanding. Many a cultured girl has

(03:18:41):
been thrown suddenly on her own resources by the failure
or the death of her father, and has found herself
wholly incapable of administering his affairs or of earning a living.
Many women, their husbands having died suddenly, are left with
large business responsibilities which they are utterly unfit to assume.
They are at the mercy of designing lawyers or dishonest

(03:19:02):
business men who well know that they are mere babies
in their hands. When it underscore comes to important transactions,
business talent is as rare as a talent for mathematics.
We find boys and girls turned out of school and college,
full of theories and of all sorts of knowledge or
smatterings of knowledge, but without the ability to protect themselves

(03:19:23):
from human thieves who are trying to get something for nothing.
No girl or boys should be allowed to graduate, especially
from any of the higher institutions, without being well grounded
in practical business methods. Parents who send their children out
in life without seeing that they are well versed in
ordinary business principles do them an incalculable injustice. I have

(03:19:45):
heard a young woman boast that she did not know
anything about money matters and had no desire to. She
said that she had no idea of the value of
a dollar, that she could spend all the money she
could get, but that it was distasteful to her to
discuss economy. Many such women object to any common sense
consideration of the financial question. They think it is not

(03:20:07):
necessary for them to know anything about money from the
purely business point of view, as they consider that phase
of life belongs wholly to their fathers, or brothers or husbands.
An instructive example of the result of such spirit and
ignorance I found in a lady who had lost her
property through a lack of business knowledge. She told me
that she knew nothing whatever about business. She had never

(03:20:30):
known the value of money. Her husband died and left
her with a large property, and it was her custom
to sign any paper or document that her lawyer or
agents presented to her, usually without reading. The people who
had charge of her property knew that she knew nothing
about business and took advantage of her ignorance. They got
her property away from her, and she did not have

(03:20:52):
enough left even to conduct a legal fight to get
it back. Thousands of girls are sent out into the
world with what is called finished educationations who cannot even
give a proper receipt for money, to say nothing of
drawing a promissory note, a draft, or a bill, or
understanding the significance and importance of business contracts. Such a

(03:21:12):
woman presented a check for payment to the paying teller
of her bank. He passed it back to her with
the request that she be kind enough to indorse it.
The lady wrote on the back of the check, I
have done business with this bank for many years, and
I believe it to be all right, missus. James B. Brown,
a society woman in New York, presented a check for

(03:21:34):
payment at a bank and the teller told her that
it was not signed. Oh do they have to be signed?
She responded, What an awful lot of red tape there
is about the banking business. I know of a lady
whose husband made a deposit for her in a bank
and gave her a check book so that she could
pay her bills without calling on him for money. One day,

(03:21:55):
she received a notice from the bank that her account
was overdrawn. She went to the bank and told the
teller that there must be a mistake about it, because
she still had a lot of checks left in her book.
She knew so little about business methods that she thought
she could keep drawing any amount until the checks were
all gone. This sounds ridiculous and almost incredible. Yet the

(03:22:17):
very girl who laughs that it may make even more
absurd blunders. Many an accomplished woman, when given a pen
and asked to sign an important document drawn up by
an attorney or a long headed business man, will sign
it without reading it or even asking to be informed.
Of its contents, only to learn afterwards, by disastrous results,
that she has signed away her property and turned herself

(03:22:38):
out of her home. Only a short time ago I
read of a lady who had won a suit involving
about twenty thousand dollars. New evidence, however, was brought forward,
which caused the court immediately to reverse its decision. It
was proved that the lady had sworn falsely. She was
perfectly innocent of any such intention, but she had sworn

(03:23:00):
that she had never signed her name to a certain document.
The document was produced, and to her utter astonishment, she
saw her signature affixed to it. She acknowledged at once
that the signature was hers, although she had just sworn
that she had never signed the paper in question. It
appeared that during her husband's lifetime, whenever papers were to

(03:23:21):
be signed, he told her where to write her name,
and she did as she was told, without having the
slightest idea of the contents of the papers. Many people
have come to grief by giving full power of attorney
to their lawyer or business agent. Very few impractical people,
especially women, understand the significance of a full power of attorney,

(03:23:41):
which authorizes the person so empowered to deal with your
property in all respects as if it were his own,
or as if he had, for the time being, assumed
your personality. He may sign your name to any instrument.
He may bind you to anything he pleases. He may
draw money from your bank. He may impersonate you in
all business transactions. In short, as far as business arrangements

(03:24:03):
are concerned, he stands practically and legally for yourself. This
is a tremendous power to place in the hands of another,
and people should be very careful to whom they assign it.
It should never be conferred on any person but one
whose honesty is above suspicion, and whose knowledge of business
and of men and affairs has been tried and proved. Oh,

(03:24:25):
I signed a paper giving full power of attorney to
my lawyer before I went abroad. I trusted everything to him,
and when I came back, practically everything was gone. My
business affairs were so complicated that I have not had
the money to fight the man I trusted. This was,
in brief, the story of one man's wrecked finances, as

(03:24:45):
he told it to me. Women will often pay out
large sums of money and never think of asking for
a receipt, especially if they are dealing with friends or
people they know well. Intelligent women, however, ought to know
that our government is a good example of how we
should do business. It does not doubt President Roosevelt's honesty,

(03:25:05):
and yet he must sign a voucher for his salary,
just the same as the cheapest government employee. The justices
of the United States Supreme Court, who are considered to
be the soul of honor and are the final arbiters
of all great questions, must also sign a receipt for
their salaries. If every child in America had a thorough
business training, tens of thousands of promoters, long headed, cunning

(03:25:28):
schemers who have thriven on the people's ignorance would be
out of an occupation. I believe that the business colleges
are among the greatest blessings in American civilization today, because
through their teaching, they have been the means of saving
thousands of homes and have made happy and comfortable tens
of thousands of people who might otherwise be living in
poverty and wretchedness. This ignorance of practical business principles is

(03:25:53):
very common among professional men. I know clergymen journalists, authors, doctors, teachers,
men in every profession who are constantly subjected to serious
embarrassment by their incapacity in business matters. Some of them
do not know how to interpret the simplest business forms.
Not long ago, a Harvard graduate occupying a very important

(03:26:16):
position as a teacher, went to the president of a
commercial school and asked him to give him some lessons
on how to handle money, notes, et cetera. He said
that when he went to his bank and asked them
how much money he had there, they laughed at him,
and that when a bank draft came to him, he
did not know what to do with it. Nothing will
stand you in better stead in the hard, cold, practical,

(03:26:38):
everyday world than a good, sound business education. You will
find that your success in any trade, occupation or profession
will depend as much on your general knowledge of men
and affairs as on your technical training. No matter what
your vocation may be, you must be a business man first,
or you will always be placed at a great disadvantage

(03:26:58):
in the practical affairs of life. We cannot entirely ignore
the money side of existence any more than we can
the food side, and the very foundation of a practical,
successful life is the ability to know how to manage
the money side effectively. It is infinitely harder to save
money and to invest it wisely than to make it.
And if even the most practical men, men who have

(03:27:20):
had a long training in scientific business methods, find it
a difficult thing to hold on to money after they
make it, what is likely to happen to people who
have had practically no training in business methods? He can
who thinks he can? By Orison Sweat Martin, nineteen o
eight fourteen, sizing up people. After Alexander the Great had

(03:27:41):
conquered the Persians, he became suddenly very ill. One of
his generals sent him a letter saying that his attending
physician had resolved to poison him. He read the letter
without the slightest sign of emotion, and put it under
his pillow. When the physician came and prepared medicine, Alexander
said he would not take it to just then, but
told him to put it where he could reach it,

(03:28:02):
and at the same time gave him the letter from
his general. Alexander raised himself on his elbow and watched
the physician's face with the most searching scrutiny, looking into
his very soul, but he did not see in it
the slightest evidence of fear or guilt. He immediately reached
for the medicine bottle and without a word, drank its contents.

(03:28:24):
The amazed physician asked him how he could do that
after receiving such a letter. Alexander replied, because you are
an honest man. Alexander was a remarkable student of human nature.
He knew men and the motives which actuated them. He
could read the human heart as an open book. The

(03:28:44):
art of all arts for the leader is this ability
to measure men, to weigh them, to size them up,
to estimate their possibilities, to place them so as to
call out their strength and eliminate their weakness. This is
the epitaph which Andrew Carnegie has chosen for himself. Heure
lies a man who knew how to get around him
men much cleverer than himself. People wonder how a Morgan,

(03:29:06):
a Hareman, Oriyon a Wannamaker can carry on such prodigious enterprises.
The secret lies in their ability to project themselves through
a mighty system, and to choose men who will fit
the places they are put in, men who can carry
out their employer's program to the letter. Marshall Field was
always studying his employees and trying to read their futures.

(03:29:28):
Nothing escaped his keen eye. Even when those about him
did not know that he was thinking of them. He
was taking their measure at every opportunity. His ability to
place men, to weigh and measure them to pierce all pretense,
amounted to genius. When he missed a man from a
certain counter, he would often ask his manager what had
become of him. When told that he was promoted, he

(03:29:51):
would keep track of him until he missed him again,
and then would ask where he was. He always wanted
to see how near the man came to his estimate
of him. He thus kept track of men of promise
in his employ and watched their advancement. In this way,
he became an expert in human nature reading. Mister Field
would sometimes pick out a man for a position, the

(03:30:13):
choice of whom his advisers would tell him they thought
a mistake. But he was nearly always right because he
had greater power of discernment than the others. He did
not pay much attention to the claims of the applicant
or to what he said, because he could see through
the surface and measure the real man. He had a
wonderful power for taking a man's mental caliber. He could

(03:30:34):
see in which direction his strength lay, and he could
see his weak points as few men could. A man
who had been his general manager for many years once
resigned very suddenly to go into business for himself. Without
the slightest hesitation or concern, mister Field called to his
office a man whom he had been watching, unknown to
the man for a long time. With very few words,

(03:30:58):
he made him general manager. And so great was his
confidence that he had measured the man correctly that the
very next day he sailed for Europe. He did not
think it necessary to wait and see how his new
manager turned out. He believed he had the right man,
and that he could trust him. He was not disappointed.

(03:31:19):
Men who are capable of succeeding in a large way
are shrewd enough to know that they do not know
at all, shrewd enough to employ men who are strong
where they are weak, to surround themselves with men who
have the ability which they lack, who can supplement their
weakness and shortcomings with strength and ability. Thus, in their
combined power, they make an effective force. Many men, because

(03:31:41):
of their inability to read human nature, duplicate their own
weaknesses in their employees, thus multiplying their chances of failure.
Few men are able to see their own weaknesses and limitations,
and those who do not surround themselves with men who
have the same weak links in their character, and the
result is that their whole, whole institution is weak. The

(03:32:02):
leader must not only be able to judge others, but
he must also be able to read himself to take
an inventory of his own strong points and weak points.
Men who have been elected to high office or to
fill very important positions at the head of great concerns
because of their recognized ability, have often disappointed the expectations
of those who placed their hopes in them, simply because

(03:32:23):
they could not read people. They may have been well educated,
well posted, strong intellectually, may have had a great deal
of general ability, but they lacked the skill to read men,
to measure them, to weigh them, to place them where
they belonged. Grant was cut out for a general, a
military leader, but when he got into the White House,
he felt out of place. He was shorn of his

(03:32:45):
great power. He could not use his greatest ability. He
was obliged to depend too much upon the advice of friends.
The result was that as president he did not maintain
the high reputation he had made as a general. If
he had had the same ability to read politicians and
to estimate men for government positions that he had for

(03:33:06):
judging of military ability, he would have made a great president.
But he felt his weakness in the position which he
was not fitted by nature to fill, and made the
fatal mistake of putting himself into the hands of his friends.
The young man starting out for himself ought to make
a study of his power of penetration, of his character,
reading ability. He ought to make it a business to

(03:33:26):
study men, to estimate their capabilities and the motives which
actuate them. He should scrutinize their actions, watch their tendencies
in little things, and learn to read them as an
open book. The involuntary acts and natural manner of a
man indicate more than does his studied conversation. The eye
cannot lie. It speaks the truth in all languages. It

(03:33:51):
often contradicts the tongue. While the man is trying to
deceive you with words, his eyes are telling you the truth.
His actions are indicative of the real man, while the
tongue may only represent the diplomat, the man who is acting.
A very successful business man in New York, noted for
his ability to read men, will sometimes study an applicant

(03:34:11):
for an important position for a long time, talking very
little himself, but all the time trying to call the
man out, watching every movement, scrutinizing every word, trying to
read the motive behind every glance of the eye, His manner,
everything are all letters of the alphabet by which he
spells out the real man. I have been in his
office when he was measuring a man. It was a

(03:34:34):
great lesson to watch his face as he seemed to
read the applicant through and through, weigh him on the
scale of his judgment, penetrate to the very marrow of
his being, and estimate his capabilities and possibilities to a nicety.
After a few minutes conversation and the man had passed out,
he would tell me just how large that man was,
what he was capable of doing, what his future would be,

(03:34:56):
and what were his limitations. And he seldom makes a mistake.
I have never known a man to succeed to any
extent when he said there was nothing in him, and
I have never known one to turn out badly when
he endorsed him without reserve. We all know heads of
business houses who work like slaves, dig and save, and
yet do not make much headway, simply because they do

(03:35:18):
not know how to surround themselves with the right men.
Some men seem incapable of projecting system and order through
their establishments. They may do their own work well, and
then they strike their limitations. They are not good judges
of human nature. Their discernment is not sharp. They are
misled by conversational powers, display of education, and often place

(03:35:41):
a theoretical man where only practical talent could succeed. They
are likely to place a man of great refinement, sensitiveness,
delicate make up in a position where a strong, robust,
thick skinned man is required, where an over sensitive soul
will chafe and shrink from the cold, aggressive business method
it's necessary to effective efficient management. People are continually being

(03:36:05):
led into all sorts of unfortunate positions, entangling alliances, and
mortifying embarrassing situations because of their lack of ability to
read human nature and to estimate character at a glance.
Good people everywhere are being imposed upon and are losing
their money in all sorts of foolish investments. Because of
their ignorance of human nature, they are not able to

(03:36:27):
see the rascal, the scoundrel behind the mask. They have
not developed the power of discernment, the ability to see
the wolf in sheep's clothing. The knowledge of human nature
as a protector of money, of character as a protector
against frauds and imposition is inestimable. Gullible people are proverbially
poor readers of human nature, and hence they are always

(03:36:49):
open to imposition. Oily cunning promoters are keen observers of
human nature, and they can tell very quickly when they
strike a good natured, large hearted professor, scholar, clergyman, or
artist who knows very little about business matters and who
trusts everybody. They know that if they can only get
an opportunity, they can very quickly make such a man

(03:37:10):
believe almost anything they know. He will be an easy
prey to their wiles and their keener knowledge of men.
These promoters would not think of tackling a shrewd, level
headed business man for their nefarious schemes, because he is
too keen, too sharp, too good a judge of human nature.
Such a man would be likely to penetrate the mask

(03:37:30):
and see the real motive beneath the oily, honeyed words,
the smooth, seductive manner. The ability to read people at
sight is a great business asset. Expertness in reading human
nature is just as valuable to a young lawyer as
a knowledge of law. It is as valuable to a
physician as a knowledge of medicine. The man who can

(03:37:50):
read human nature, who can size up a person quickly,
who can arrive at an accurate estimate of character, no
matter what his vocation or profession, has a great advantage
over others. With some men, the power to read people
or right amounts to an instinct. They look through all pretenses,
they tear off all masks. They see the man as

(03:38:11):
he is, his reality, and measure him for what he
is worth. A man possessing this power of character reading
pays little attention to what a person seeking employment may
say of himself. He can see for himself. Human nature
is to him an open book, while to others it
is a sealed book. They do not have the faculty

(03:38:32):
of going back of pretensions. They are largely at the
mercy of what he claims for himself, and they are
always being duped. They make very poor employers. I know
a popular business man, a very able man in many respects,
and one much beloved by everybody who knows him. But
he has always been the victim of his ignorance of

(03:38:52):
human nature. He cannot read motives, weigh or estimate the
ability of others to do certain things. If an applicant
for a position talks well, he immediately jumps to the
conclusion that he is a good man for the position
and hires him, usually to be disappointed. He has a
great weakness for clergymen who have lost their positions through

(03:39:13):
failing health or for other reasons, and also for ex
teachers and professors. The result is that he has a
lot of impractical people about him who know nothing of progressive,
scientific business building. It is an education in itself to
form the habit of measuring, weighing, estimating the different people
we meet. For in this way we are improving our

(03:39:34):
own powers of observation, sharpening our prospective faculties, improving our judgment.
The ability to read human nature is a cultivable quality,
and we have a great opportunity in this country, with
its conglomerate population to study the various types of character.
What a wonderful school most of us are in practically
all of the time, especially in large cities where we

(03:39:56):
are constantly coming in contact with strangers. What a chance
to become experts in reading human nature. In studying motives,
the face, the eye, the manners, the gestures, the walk.
All these are hieroglyphics which, if we can only decipher them,
spell out the character. Sometimes a single glance of the

(03:40:16):
eye when one is unconscious will give you a glimpse
into his innermost soul and reveal secrets which he would
never dare to utter with his tongue. The facial expression
in the manner, especially when people are off their guard
or unconscious that they are being watched, are great revealers
of character. You will find as you become an expert
in face study, in reading character human nature, that you

(03:40:40):
will develop marvelous skill in seeing things which you never
noticed before. You will be able to protect yourself from
the promoter, the insinuating man who is trying to persuade
you into something which may not be to your benefit,
but which will be to his. You will be able
to discriminate between friendship and duplicity, you will be able
to protect yourself from a thousand annoyances and embarrassments and

(03:41:03):
humiliations which might cripple your career. How many people are
living in poverty, are wretched homeless to day because they
could not read human nature and were robbed of their
property and their rights. To discern the difference between the
false and the true, To place the right values upon men,
to emphasize the right thing in them, To discriminate between

(03:41:23):
the genuine and the pretended, is an accomplishment which may
be worth infinitely more to you than a college education.
Without this practical power, and may make all the difference
to you between success and failure, happiness and misery. He
can who thinks he can? By Orison Sweat Martin, nineteen
o eight fifteen, does the world owe you a living?

(03:41:45):
A fifteen year old bell boy was arrested in Cleveland
for stealing eight dollars. When asked in court why he stole,
he said, because the world owes me a living. No doubt,
the youth had heard this many times from older lips.
When the armies of Louis the fourteenth were devastated in Flanders,
the monarch exclaimed has God forgotten all that I have

(03:42:08):
done for him. A vast number of people seem to
think that God and the world are under great obligations
to them, and that the world owes them a living
without any return service from them. Not long ago I
heard a young woman say that she did not consider
that she owed the world anything, that she was thrust
into it without being consulted, that she proposed to get
out of it what she could with as little effort

(03:42:30):
as possible, and that she did not feel under the
slightest obligation to the past. Did you ever think, my
idle friend, what you really owe the world for the
privilege of living in it? Did you ever think that
all the civilizations of the globe have been working for
you through all the ages up to the present moment,
and that you are reaping the harvest of all the
hard working, sacrificing, suffering, drudging sours that have preceded you.

(03:42:54):
Can you look the workers of the world in the
face and tell them that you intend to have all
the benefits of their labor, to enjoy all the good
things of the world, without doing anything to compensate for them.
The man who does not feel his heart throb with
gratitude every day of his life for being born in
the very golden age of the world. And who does
not feel that he owes a tremendous debt to the past,

(03:43:14):
to all the people who have struggled and striven and
sacrificed before him. Is not made of the right kind
of stuff. In other words, he is not a man,
and he ought to be treated as a drone, a
thief of other men's labors. Everything that has gone before
you enters into your life and time you enjoy the
sum of all the past every moment of your life.

(03:43:36):
Think of the untold thousands who have laid down their
lives to make possible the comforts, the blessings, and the
immunities you now enjoy. Think of the rivers of blood
that have been spilt of the thousands who have perished
or lived in a misery of prison and dungeon to
purchase the liberties of speech and freedom of action which
you enjoy today. How many lives have been lived in

(03:43:57):
solitude and misery in order to develop which are today
beacon lights of the world. And think what multitudes of
people are engaged in producing, manufacturing, and forwarding your clothing,
your furniture, your food, the tropical fruits on your table,
the foreign textiles, the bric a brac, and all the
things which come from foreign lands to minister to your

(03:44:18):
comfort and convenience. You buy an orange on the street
for two or three cents, but did you ever think
of what it has cost to bring it to you?
Did you ever think of the number of people who
have aided in its production and its transportation, so that
you might buy it for a few pennies. You get
a yard of cotton cloth for ten cents, But did
you ever think of the toil and the hardships of

(03:44:39):
the poor people in the south, of the operatives in
the mill, the packers, shippers and clerks who have handled
and re handled and shipped it by steamship and railroad,
that you might buy it for a song. Suppose these
people who say that they owe the world nothing, were
obliged to make all the comforts and luxuries they enjoy,
how long would it take them to produce even a

(03:45:00):
lead pencil, a sheet of writing paper, a jackknife, a
pair of spectacles, a pair of shoes, or a suit
of clothes, representing an untold amount of drudgery and sacrifice
there is toil, struggle, and sacrifice in everything you purchase,
everything you enjoy. How many thousands of people have worked
like slaves to make it even possible for you to

(03:45:22):
ride on a railroad or on a steamship, And how
many lives have been sacrificed in order to reach the
perfection and safety attained by modern trains and steamers, and
to enable you to enjoy the comforts and luxuries which
they provide wherever you go. Tens of thousands of people
have been preparing the way and getting things ready, guarding
against danger, saving you trouble and drudgery. And yet you

(03:45:44):
say that you do not consider yourself in debt to
the world. If all the workers and all the wealth
of the world today had been employed for thousands of
years for your special benefit, to prepare for your reception
upon the earth, they could not have provided the comforts,
the conveniences, the facil the immunities, the luxuries which you
found waiting for you when you were born, and for

(03:46:05):
which you gave not even a penny or a thought.
And yet you say that the world owes you this
and the other, and that you owe it nothing. Did
you ever think, my idle friend that there are some
things which are not purchasable with money. Do not deceive
yourself by thinking that you will get something for nothing.
All the laws of the universe are fighting such a theory.

(03:46:26):
You must open an account with the world personally. No
one else can pay the debt you owe. Whatever money
or advantages your father or any one else gets by
his own efforts, nature has stamped untransferable. The law of
the universe recognizes only one legal tender, and that is
personal service. Whatever you get of real value, you must

(03:46:48):
pay for. The things that are done for you are delusions.
You are a personal debtor to the world. When you
were born, Civilization opened an account with you. On one
side of the ledger you find John Smith Deador to
all the past ages for the sum total of the
results of the toil of the men and the women
who have lived and toiled before him Deador to the privations,

(03:47:12):
the sufferings, and the sacrifices of those who have bought
freedom from bondage, immunity from slavery, emancipation from drudgery. You
are debtor to all the inventions that have ameliorated the
hard conditions of mankind, and which have emancipated you from
the same hard drudgery in stern conditions, the same narrow,
limited life of your prehistoric ancestors. Who are you, mister idler,

(03:47:34):
that you claim a living from the world when you
have not earned the clothing you have on your back
or the shelter which covers your head. Why should tens
of thousands of people drudge and endure hardships and privations
to produce all of the useful things, the beautiful things,
the luxuries for you to enjoy without effort? You say,
the world owes you a living. What if the sheep

(03:47:56):
should refuse to furnish its wool to cover your lazy back,
the earth refuse to produce the crops to fill your
lazy stomach, the army of laborers refuse to let you
take all the good things out of the world's great
granary without putting anything back. What would become of you,
who have never lifted your finger to learn a trade,
or to prepare yourself for a career, or to do
work of any kind if an edict were to come

(03:48:18):
from the skies that would force you henceforth to do
your share of the world's work or starve? Is he
not a thief, an enemy of civilization, who thrusts his
arm into the great world storehouse, pulling out all the
good things he wishes, and refusing to put anything back
in exchange. We hear a great deal about indiscriminate giving
making paupers. But what shall we say about the giving

(03:48:39):
of fortunes to youth who have never been taught that
they should give anything in return for all they receive.
What are the chances of growth in character in sturdy manhood?
For the boy who knows that a fortune is waiting
for him when he is twenty one, and who is
told every day that his father is rich, and that
he is a fool to work, that he should just
make a business of having a good time, what are

(03:49:01):
the chances of his developing a rugged, sturdy independence, resourcefulness, originality, inventiveness,
and all the other qualities that make for vigorous manhood.
It is cruel, little less than criminal to leave vast
fortunes to youth without stamina of character, a superb practical training,
or the experience or wisdom to use them Wisely, things

(03:49:23):
are so arranged in this world that happiness as a
profession must ever be a failure. It cannot be found
by seeking. It is reflex action. It is incidental, a
product which comes from doing noble things. It is impossible
for a person to be really happy by making pleasure
a profession. No idle life can produce a real man.

(03:49:46):
A life of luxury calls out only the effeminate destructive qualities.
The creative forces are developed only by stern endeavor to
better one's condition in the world. No wealth or efforts
of the parents can being the latent energies out in
the sun which make for sturdy manhood. He must work
out his problem himself. It can never be done for him.

(03:50:09):
How little Harry Thaw's parents realize the cruelty of bringing
their son up in idleness, without a trade or a profession,
helpless to earn his own living in case of necessity,
One would think they would have learned wisdom from the
tens of thousands of lessons which ruined lives have taught
that there is no getting around God's fiat, no evading
the law. That work, exercise of faculty, self effort are

(03:50:32):
the only things that will develop a real man. The
Creator has put an enormous penalty upon idleness, the penalty
of weakness, of deterioration, of destruction, of annihilation, use or
lose is nature's edict. The idle man is like an
idle machine. It destroys itself very quickly. A score of

(03:50:54):
enemies are in readiness to attack anything as soon as
it is at rest rust, Decay, and all sorts of
disintegrating processes start in a man just as soon as
he becomes idle self. Destruction begins in the mind the
moment it ceases to work. There is no power in
heaven or on earth that can save an idle brain
from deterioration, no power that can make a man strong

(03:51:17):
and vigorous unless he obeys the natural laws of his
life written in his very constitution. Work, steady, persistent, with
a purpose, with zeal, with enthusiasm, with a love for
it is the only thing that can save a man
from the disgrace of being a nobody. Work is the
inexorable law of growth. There is no getting away from it.

(03:51:40):
The time will come when an able bodied man who
has the audacity the presumption to try to get all
the good things out of the world and give nothing
in return, will be looked upon as a monstrosity, an
enemy to civilization and will be ostracized by all decent people.
The youth who thinks he is going to go through
this world on what somebody else has produced or done

(03:52:00):
and still develop into the highest type of a man,
is attempting to fight against his maker. The very laws
of the universe have made it forever impossible. Leave this vast, living,
complicated machine idle. If you will try to divert it
to some other use, try to make a pleasure machine
out of it when it was intended for a work machine.

(03:52:20):
But all nature protests. One of the most demoralizing features
of our American civilization to day is found in the
influence of the idle rich, great human drones, who refuse
to work, but who demand the best products of other
men's labor and brains. I have heard rich fathers boast
that necessity was the spur which made men of them,

(03:52:40):
which gave them the foresight, the stamina, the shrewdness, the
creative power, the ability necessary to make and protect their fortune.
And yet they turn right around and leave a fortune
to a son which is likely to take away his energy,
to take the spring out of his ambition, to rob
him of the zest. The enthusiasm, which can only come
from the ex exercise of earnest, honest effort. No man

(03:53:03):
is so rich, no matter how honestly he got his
money as to be able to confer immunity from work
upon his offspring. The very nature of things, the eternal
law of the universe, has made it forever impossible for
you to transfer the stamina, the vigorous manhood, the stability,
the character, everything that is of real value which you
have gained in your struggle to get on in the

(03:53:24):
world to your son or daughter. Your offspring owes a
debt to civilization which goes back of the parent. It
is a debt which can only be wiped out by
the individual. It cannot be discharged by proxy. Personal effort
is the condition of the child's development. It is the
inevitable price of manhood. No, there are some things you

(03:53:47):
rich fathers cannot do for your boy. There is a
law of nature which prohibits it, an omnipotent principle which
protests against it. If a phrenologist should examine the heads
of the idol grown up of rich men, he would
find very marked deficiencies and under development of nearly all
of the qualities which make strong men. He would usually

(03:54:08):
find selfishness very largely developed, self reliance, originality, inventiveness, resourcefulness,
and all the other qualities which are drawn out and
strengthened only by self help and the struggle to make
one's way in the world little developed. If he should
compare them with the heads of their self made fathers,
he would find very marked inferiority, so marked that there

(03:54:30):
would apparently be no relationship between the owners of the heads.
The contrast would be as great as that between the hard, tough,
firm fiber of the mountain oak and the fiber of
the soft, spongy sapling, which never struggled with the storm
and tempest because sheltered by surrounding trees. How little a
father realizes that it is one of the crudest things

(03:54:50):
he could do to his boy to practically rob him
of the opportunity of making a real man of himself,
of developing qualities which make strength, power, which build vigorous
stalwarts manhood. There is something about the actual making of
one's way in the world, of burning behind one all
bridges which others have built, throwing away all crutches, and
refusing to lean to be boosted, refusing all assistance, and

(03:55:13):
standing erect upon one's own feet, thinking his own thoughts,
fighting his own battles, bringing out his own latent possibilities
by actual exercise, bringing into action every bit of one's inventiveness, resourcefulness, ingenuity,
and originality. Tact that makes a man strong, vigorous, and stalwart,

(03:55:33):
which indicates that this is the normal life of a man,
the only life which can develop the true man. The
army of inefficients, the namby pambies, the dressed up nobodies
with soft hands and softer heads, who are expert only
in saying silly nothings to silly women, or in the
practice of some useless fad that amount to nothings. Everywhere

(03:55:54):
ought to convince you that there is no way of
getting something for nothing. If you will not do a
man's work, if you will not pay a man's price
for manhood, you will be only an apology for a man.
Of course, you can live the life of the idol
if you will. If you are the son of a
foolish rich father, no one may be able to hinder you.
But you must take the idler's reward. You must go

(03:56:17):
through life branded with the shame labeled with the weakness,
marked with the deformities of idleness. You must pay the
penalty of your choice and be a nobody he can
who thinks he can by orison sweat Martin, nineteen o
eight sixteen. What has luck done for you? Fortune brings
in some boats that are not steered. People may say

(03:56:39):
what they will about there not being any such thing
as luck or chance, But we must all admit there
is such a thing. We must all concede that things
over which a man has no control, unforeseen happenings, or
events with which he has had nothing to do and
on which he had not calculated, often change the whole
course of his career. Good positions do not all come

(03:57:00):
by merit or as the result of one's own direct efforts.
It is now a poor laboring man or washerwoman who
falls heir to a fortune by the death of some relative.
Or again it is a poor girl who is suddenly
raised to wealth and what the world calls high position
by marrying a man of rank or fortune. Every schoolboy
knows that there is a great advantage in being in

(03:57:22):
the right place in just the nick of time, and
that being there is often a matter of chance. Men
are constantly being moved up into positions which they did
not get wholly by merit. Their elevation is due perhaps
to a railroad accident, a stroke of paralysis, or the
death of men in high places. We had a striking

(03:57:42):
instance of this recently in the death of two presidents
of the Long Island Railroad within a few months, which
led to unexpected promotions. Everyone knows that men are constantly
being put at the head of large concerns because of
kinship with the owners of the business, when perhaps a
score of those who are working in the establishments at
the time are much better fitted to fill the positions.

(03:58:05):
But after all, who will be foolish enough to say
that man is the toy of chance, or that true
success is the result of accident or fate. No, luck
is not God's price for success, nor does he dicker
with men. When we consider the few who owe fortune
or position to accident or luck in comparison with the
masses who have to fight every inch of the way

(03:58:26):
to their own loaves, what are they in reality? But
the exceptions to the rule that character merit, not fate
or luck or any other bogie of the imagination controls
the destinies of men. The only luck that plays any
great part in a man's life is that which inheres
in a stout heart, a willing hand, and an alert brain.

(03:58:47):
What has chance ever done in the world? Has it
invented a telegraph or telephone? Has it laid an ocean cable?
Has it built steamships or established universities, asylums hospitals? Has
it tunneled mountains, built bridges, or brought miracles out of
the soil? What did luck have to do with making

(03:59:08):
the career of Washington, of Lincoln, of Daniel Webster, of
Henry Clay, of Grant, of Garfield, or of ellhue Root?
Did it help Edison or Marconi with his inventions? Did
it have anything to do with the making of the
fortunes of our great merchant princes? Do such men as
John Wannamaker, Robert Ogden or Marshall Field owe their success

(03:59:30):
to luck? Many a man has tried to justify his
failure on the ground that he was doomed by the
cards which fate dealt him, that he must pick them
up and play the game, and that no effort, however great,
on his part, could materially change the result But my
young friend, the fate that deals your cards is in
the main your own resolution. The result of the game

(03:59:52):
does not rest with fate or destiny, but with you.
You will take the trick if you have the superior energy, ability,
and determination requisite to take it. You have the power
within yourself to change the value of the cards which
you say fate has dealt you. The game depends upon
your training, upon the way you are disciplined to seize

(04:00:13):
and use your opportunities, and upon your ability to put
grit in the place of superior advantages. Just because circumstances
sometimes give clients to lawyers and patients to physicians, put
commonplace clergymen in uncommon pulpits, and place the sons of
the rich at the head of great corporations even when
they have only average ability in scarcely any experience, while

(04:00:34):
poor youths with greater ability and more experience often have
to fight their way for years to obtain ordinary situations.
Are you justified in starting out without a chart or
in leaving a place for luck in your program? What
would you think of a captain of a great liner
who would start out to see without any port in
view and trust to luck to land his precious cargo safely?

(04:00:58):
Did you ever know of a strong young man making
out his life program and depending upon chance to carry
out any part of it. Men who depend upon luck
do not think it worth while to make a thorough
preparation for success. They are not willing to pay the
regular price for it. They are looking for bargains, They
are hunting for short cuts to success. We hear a

(04:01:20):
great deal about Roosevelt's luck, But what would it have
availed him if he was not ready for the opportunity
when it came, if he had not trained himself three
years of persistent drill to grasp it, if he had
not been prepared to make the best use of it.
I have never known a man to amount to much
until he cut out of his vocabulary such words as
good luck and bad luck, and from his life maxims

(04:01:42):
all the I can't words and the I can't philosophy.
There is no word in the English language more misused
and abused than luck. More people have excused themselves for
poor work and mean, stingy, poverty stricken careers by saying
luck was against them than by any other. That door
ahead of you, young man, is probably closed because you

(04:02:05):
have closed it, closed it by lack of training, by
a lack of ambition, energy, and push. While perhaps you
have been waiting for luck to open it, a pluckier,
grittier fellow has stepped in ahead of you and opened
it himself. Power gravitates to the man who knows how
luck is the tide nothing more. The strong man rose

(04:02:28):
with it if it makes toward his port, he rose
against it if it flows the other way. When Governor
John and Johnson of Minnesota was asked, how do you
account for your success, he answered simply, I just tried
to make good. You will find nine hundred and ninety
nine times out of a thousand that the man who
tries to make good is the lucky man. Young Johnson

(04:02:51):
had to fight against poverty, predity, and environment, everything that
could be put forward as an excuse for bad luck
or no chance. Yet in his hard back battle with fate,
he never once faltered or whined or complained that luck
was against him. One of the most unfortunate delusions that
ever found its way into a youth's brain is that
there is some force or power outside of himself that will,

(04:03:13):
in some mysterious way, and with very little effort on
his part lift him into a position of comfort and luxury.
I never knew any one who followed the ignis fatuus
luck who did not follow it to his ruin. Good
luck follows good sense, good judgment, good health, but gritty determination,
a lofty ambition, and downright hard work. When you see

(04:03:36):
horses in a race, you know perfectly well that the
one in the lead is ahead because he has run
faster than the others, And you would not have much
sympathy for the horse behind if he should bemoan his
fate and declare that the horse ahead had a snap.
When you see any one doing better than you are
doing under similar circumstances, just say to yourself, there must
be some reason for it. There is a secret back

(04:03:58):
of it, and I must find out. Do not try
to ease your conscience or low your ambition by pleading
hard luck for yourself or good fortune for another. Napoleon
said that God is always on the side of the
strongest battalions. He is always on the side of the
best prepared, the best trained, the most vigilant, the pluckiest,

(04:04:19):
and the most determined. If we should examine the career
of most men who are called lucky. We should find
that their success has its roots far back in the past,
and has drawn its nourishment from many a battle in
the struggle for supremacy over poverty and opposition. We should
probably find that the lucky man is a closer thinker
than the unlucky man, that he has a finer judgment,

(04:04:41):
that he has more system and order, that his brain
acts more definitely and concisely, that he thinks more logically,
more vigorously, and that he is more practical. Life is
not a game of chance. The Creator did not put
us where we would be the sport of circumstances, to
be tossed about by a cruel fate regardless of our
own efforts. He can who thinks he can? By Orison

(04:05:05):
Sweat Martin nineteen o eight seventeen, success with a flaw.
Just now, the American people are receiving some painful lessons
in practical ethics, said President Nicholas Murray Butler. Recently they
are having brought home to them with severe emphasis, the
distinction between character and reputation. Of late, we have been

(04:05:26):
watching reputations melt away like snow before the sun. Put
bluntly the situation which confronts the American people to day,
is due to the lack of moral principle. Never before
in the history of our country have the American people
received a greater shock to their faith in human nature
than during the past year by the exposure of the
diabolical methods practiced by men in high places upon an

(04:05:49):
admiring and unsuspecting people. Every little while, the public press
throws x rays upon the characters of men who have
long stood high and spotless in the public eye, and
have been looked up to as models of manhood, men
of honorable achievement, revealing great ugly stains of dishonor, which,
like the blood spot on Lady Macbeth's hands, all the

(04:06:10):
oceans of the globe cannot wash out. A tiny flaw
sometimes cuts the value of an otherwise thousand dollars diamond
down to fifty dollars or less. The defect is not
noticeable to the average person. It is only the fatal
magnifying glass that will detect it, and yet its presence
is a perpetual menace to the commercial value of the stone.

(04:06:32):
A great many human diamonds, which a little while ago
were thought to be flawless brilliants of the first water
and which dazzled the financial and social world. When the
microscope of official scrutiny was turned upon them, were found
to contain great ugly flaws. A United States Senator seventy
years of age was recently sentenced to serve a term

(04:06:52):
in prison, besides paying a fine for his connection with
great land frauds. Still another senator and several reps presentives
have been indicted for crooked work in connection with their
exalted positions. Congressmen have been convicted of land frauds, and
army officers of peculation. The exposure of Post Office contracts

(04:07:12):
and the notorious Cotton statistics leak not long ago showed
that minor officials had sold themselves to manufacturers and Wall
Street brokers. Think of the men at the head of
great public trusts juggling with sacred funds, not only taking
for themselves from the hard earned savings of the poor,
salaries two or three times as great as that of

(04:07:32):
the President of the United States, but also giving enormous
salaries to a large number of their relatives out of
these same sacred funds. Of those who have struggled for
years to make possible a better condition for those who
should survive them. Think of their paying out hundreds of
thousands of dollars for secret services of a suspicious nature,
and using trust funds to affect stock manipulations for private gain.

(04:07:56):
Was there ever before such a shameful story spread before? Americans?
Were people ever before so mercilessly betrayed by men they
looked up to, admired and implicitly trusted. Never before has
there been such colossal stealing carried on so brazenly and
openly by men in high positions. Some of these men,

(04:08:16):
when they appeared in public a year ago, were applauded
to the echo. Wherever they went, they were followed by
admiring crowds. Some months ago I saw one of them,
a man who has been for many years a great
public favorite. At a reception in the White House. He
was pointed out by guests and seemed to attract almost
as much attention as the President himself. People seemed to

(04:08:39):
regard it as a great honor to be introduced to him. Now,
he would hardly dare to appear before an audience for
fear of being hissed. What a humiliation for those whose
names have been household words for a quarter of a
century or more, to be asked to withdraw from trusteeships
or directorships in institutions which perhaps worked for years to
secure these men on account of their great influence and

(04:09:02):
high reputations. What is there left worth living? For when
a man has lost the finest, the most sacred thing
in him, and when he has forfeited the confidence and
respect of his fellow men, is there any quality which
inheres in dollars that can compensate for such a loss?
Is there anything which ought to be held more precious
than honor, or more sacred than the esteem and confidence

(04:09:24):
of friends and acquaintances. The man who has nothing which
he holds dearer than money or some material advantage is
not a man. The brute has not been educated out
of him. The abler a man. The more money he has,
the more we despise him if he has gotten that
money dishonestly, because of the tremendous contrast between what he
has done and what he might have done. What the

(04:09:47):
world demands of you, whatever your career, whether you make
money or lose it, whether you are rich or poor,
is that you be a man. It is the man
that gives value to achievement. You cannot afford success with
a flaw in it. You cannot afford to have people
say of you, mister Blank has made money, but there
is a stain on it. It is smirched. It has

(04:10:10):
cost him too much. He exchanged his manhood for it.
Every human being has it within his power to keep
the foundation under him, his manhood absolutely secure under all circumstances.
Nothing can shake that but himself. The citadel can never
be taken until he him self surrenders the keys. Calumny, detraction, slander,

(04:10:34):
or monetary failure cannot touch this sacred thing. Every man,
whether in private or public life, should so carry himself
before the world, that he will show in his very
face and manner, that there is something within him not
for sale, something so sacred that he would regard the
slightest attempt to debauch it as an unpardonable insult. He
should so carry himself that no one would even dare

(04:10:57):
to suggest that he could be bought or bribed. Who
was so corrupt during the Civil War that he would
have dared to attempt to bribe Abraham Lincoln? There was
something in that face that would have cowed the hardest character,
who would be bold enough to presume to bribe our
present president. Many a one has failed because he was
not a man before he was a merchant, or a lawyer,

(04:11:19):
or a manufacturer or a statesman, because character was not
the dominating influence in his life. If you are not
a man first, if there is not a man behind
your book, behind your sermon, behind your law brief or
your business transaction, if you are not larger than the
money you make, the world will expose and despise your
pretense and discount your success. History will cover up your memory,

(04:11:41):
no matter how much money you may leave. That is
the lesson of the startling disclosures of late. These men
whose reputations have melted away so rapidly, men who have
had such a drop in the public regard, were not
real men to start with. There were flaws in their
character foundations, and the superstructures of their achievement have fallen

(04:12:02):
before the flood of public indignation. Those criminals in high
places are beginning to realize that no smartness, brilliancy genius, scheming,
long headed cunning, bluffing, or pretense can take the place
of manhood or be a substitute for personal integrity. There
are men in New York to day whose names have
been a power, who would give every dollar they have

(04:12:24):
for a clean record, if they could wipe off all
they are underhanded, questionable methods from the slate in start
anew But there is no way to buy a good name.
It is above riches and beyond the price of rubies.
How many men there are today in high positions who
are in perpetual terror lest something should happen to expose
the real facts of their lives, something which would pierce

(04:12:47):
their masks and reveal them in their true light. How
must a man feel who is conscious that he is
walking all the time on the thin crust of a
volcano which is liable to open at any moment and
swallow him. There is one thing no money or influence
can buy. That is the heart's approval of a wrong
deed or a questionable transaction. It will be bobbing up

(04:13:09):
all along the future to remind you of your theft,
of your dishonesty, or of your unfair advantage. It will
take the edge off your enjoyment. It will appear like
Banquo's ghost at every feast to which you sit down.
Methinks that some of the men who have been exposed
recently must have had strange dreams and horrid nightmares during

(04:13:29):
their sleep, when the ghosts of the poor people whom
they have wronged appeared to them and haunted their rest.
Methinks they must have had strange visions as these sacred
dollars intended for widows and orphans slipped through their fingers
for luxuries and amusements, dollars which have been run out
of the lives of those who trusted them. What a
pitiable picture those great financial giants made under investigation in

(04:13:52):
courts of inquiry, squirming, ducking, dodging, and resorting to all
sorts of ingenuity to avoid telling the exact truth to
keep from uncovering their tracks or exposing their crooked methods.
No man has a right to put himself in a
position where he has to cover up anything, or where
he must be afraid of the truth. Every man should
live so that he can hold up his head, look

(04:14:14):
his kind in the face without wincing, and defy the world.
A man went to President Roosevelt before the last presidential
election and told him that someone had unearthed a letter
of his which would be extremely damaging to his canvas
where it made public, and that with a little diplomacy,
the damaging part of the letter could be suppressed. After
listening to the man, the Great President said, I have

(04:14:37):
never written a letter which I am afraid to have published.
Let them print the letter, the whole of it. I
have nothing to conceal. I am not afraid to face
anything I have ever done. How many of our public
men dare take that attitude? Isn't it a disgrace to
this fair land that there are men in our Senate
and House of Representatives, and in almost every legislature whose

(04:15:00):
votes and influence can be bought, and upon whose honor
there is a price. If there is anything which a
man in a responsible position ought to prize, it is
the esteem of the young men who look up to
him as their idol or hero. Is it strange when
our youth find their idols smashed and their heroes betraying them,
that their ideals should become blurred and twisted? Is it

(04:15:22):
strange that they should ignore the old fashioned methods of
slow fortune making when they see the smooth, oily diplomatic
schemers getting rich in a few months and young men
who were mere clerks a year ago, now riding in
costly automobiles, giving expensive entertainments, and living in fine houses.
Why should they not catch the spirit and try to
do the same thing themselves, You wrongdoers in high places.

(04:15:46):
If you should live as long as Methuselah, should devote
every minute of the balance of your lives to doing good,
and should give every farthing of your wealth to charity,
you could not repair the damage you have done in
crushing the ideals of these tens of thousands of youths
have looked up to you as their models of successful men.
How can you escape responsibility for the crookedness which may

(04:16:06):
be repeated in their lives when they shall come to
fill these high positions which you now hold. They thought
that square dealing, honesty, and integrity had been the secrets
of your success, and now they see that it was
won by your smooth, oily cunning dishonesty, your ability to deceive,
to cover your tracks, and to live a double life.
Who but yourselves will be responsible for the cracks in

(04:16:29):
their characters which may come from the terrible shaking of
their confidence in humanity. But young men don't lose your
faith in humanity. Don't let your fallen idols shake your
faith in your fellow men, For the great majority of
people are honest. Let these terrible examples that have recently
been held up to you make you all the more
determined to build your own superstructure on the eternal rock

(04:16:51):
of right and justice. Let the man in you stand
out so boldly in every transaction that the deed or
task you do, however great, will look insignificant in comparison.
Get what you can and keep your own good name.
Not a penny more a dollar more than that would
make your whole fortune valueless. If there is a pitiable

(04:17:12):
sight in the world, it is that of a man
with the executive ability, sagacity, and foresight to make a
clean fortune, yet using his energies and abilities in making
a dirty one, a fortune which denounces and condemns him,
and is a perpetual disgrace to himself and his family.
The right ought to thunder so loudly in a man's ears,

(04:17:32):
no matter what the business or transaction in which he
is engaged, that he cannot hear the wrong or baser suggestion.
Men have two kinds of ambition, one for dollar making,
the other for life making. Some turn all their ability, education, health,
and energy toward the first of these, dollar making, and
call the result success. Others turn them toward the second

(04:17:56):
into character, usefulness, helpfulness, life making. And the world sometimes
calls them failures, but history calls them successes. No price
is too great to pay for an untarnished name. The
highest service you can ever render the world. The greatest
thing you can ever do is to make yourself the largest,
completest and squarest man possible. There is no other fame

(04:18:19):
like that, no achievement like that. He can who thinks
he can? By Orison Sweat Martin, nineteen o eight eighteen,
Getting Away from Poverty. Those who have the misfortune to
be rich men's sons are heavily weighted in the race,
says Andrew Carnegie. The vast majority of rich men's sons
are unable to resist the temptations to which wealth subjects them,

(04:18:42):
and they sink to unworthy lives. It is not from
this class that the poor beginner has rivalry to fear.
The partner's sons will never trouble you the poor boys much,
But look out that some boys poorer, much poorer than yourselves,
whose parents cannot afford to give them an any schooling.
Do not challenge you at the post, and pass you

(04:19:03):
at the grand stand. Look Out for the boy who
has to plunge into work directly from the common school,
and who begins by sweeping out the office. He is
the probable dark horse that will take all the money
and win all the applause. The struggle to get away
from poverty has been a great man developer. Had every
human being been born with a silver spoon in his mouth,

(04:19:25):
had there been no necessity put upon him to work,
the race would still be in its infancy. Had everybody
in this country been born wealthy, ours would be one
of the dark ages. The vast resources of our land
would still be undeveloped. The gold would still be in
the mines, and our great cities would still be in
the forest and the quarry. Civilization owes more to the

(04:19:47):
perpetual struggle of man to get away from poverty than
to anything else. We are so constituted that we make
our greatest efforts and do our best work while struggling
to attain that for which the heart longs. It is
practically impossible for most people to make their utmost exertions
without imperative necessity for it. It is the constant necessity

(04:20:08):
to improve his condition that has urged man onward and
developed the stamina and sterling character of the whole race.
History abounds in stories of failures of men who started
with wealth, and on the other hand, it is illuminated
with examples of those who owe everything to the spur
of necessity. A glance at the history of our own
country will show that the vast majority of our successful

(04:20:30):
men in every field were poor boys at the start.
Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Andrew Jackson, Henry Clay, Daniel Webster,
Abraham Lincoln, Horace Mann, George Peabody, Ulysses S. Grant, James H. Garfield.
To mention, but a few of the great names of
past generations rose to distinction from an iron environment and

(04:20:52):
direst poverty. Our most useful and successful men of today
have also been evolved from the school of wanton stern necessity.
Our great merchants, railroad presidents, university presidents and professors, inventors, scientists, manufacturers, statesmen,
men in every line of human activity, have for the

(04:21:12):
most part been pushed forward by the gode of necessity,
and led onward by the desire to make the most
of themselves. A youth born and bred in the midst
of luxury, who has always leaned upon others, who has
never been obliged to fight his way up to his
own loaf, and who has been coddled from his infancy,
rarely develops great stamina or staying power. He is like

(04:21:34):
the weak sapling in the forest, compared with the giant oak,
which has fought every inch of its way up from
the acorn by struggling with storms and tempests. Power is
the result of force overcome. The giant is made strong
in wrestling with difficulties. It is impossible for one who
does not have to struggle and to fight obstacles to
develop fiber or stamina. To live without trial is to

(04:21:58):
die but half a man. Strength of character is a
thing which must be wrung out of obstacles overcome. Life
is a great gymnasium, and no man who sits in
a chair and watches the parallel bars and other apparatus
ever develops muscles or endurance. A father, by exercising for
his son while he sits down, will never develop his muscle.

(04:22:21):
The son will be a weakling until he uses the
dumbbells and pulley weights himself. How many fathers try to
do the exercises for their boys while they sit on
soft benches or easy chairs, watching the process, And still
those fathers wonder that their boys come out of the
gymnasium week with as soft and flabby muscles as they
had when they entered. Isn't it strange that so many

(04:22:45):
successful men, who take pride in having made themselves and
consider it the most fortunate thing in the world that
they were thrown upon their own resources and were obliged
to develop their independence and stamina and self reliance, should
work so hard to keep their children from having the
same experience. Isn't it strange that they should provide crutches
so that it will be all the more difficult for

(04:23:05):
them to walk alone, That they should take away the
strongest possible motive for the development of power by making
it unnecessary for them to strive, by providing for every want,
in guarding them on all sides by wealth. A famous artist,
who was asked if he thought a young man who
was studying with him would make a great painter, replied no,
never he has an income of six thousand pounds a year.

(04:23:29):
This artist knew how the great struggle against thwarting difficulties
brings out power, and how hard it is to develop
a strong, manly fiber in the sunshine of wealth. How
many young immigrants have come to this country uneducated, ignorant
of our language, friendless, and penniless, and yet have risen
to positions of distinction and wealth, putting to shame tens

(04:23:49):
of thousands of native born youths who possessed every advantage
of wealth, education, and opportunity, but who have never been
heard from. I have in mind a young man of
this class, who came to this country a comparatively short
time ago, but who has already risen to a very
important position wholly unaided. He is a remarkable example of
a self educated, self trained, self disciplined man, and in

(04:24:13):
the persistent process of his development, he has evolved a
very strong, positive, aggressive character. He has brought out his
latent powers and strengthened his weaker faculties. He has pruned
out of his mentality and habits those things which would
embarrass and hinder his progress, and has gained such a
strong momentum that there seems to be scarcely any limits

(04:24:34):
to what he is likely to become. His is an
inspiring example of the possibilities of manhood in America, one
which explodes all excuses of the poor boy and girl
who think they have absolutely no chance to get up
in the world. I am no advocate of the blessings
of poverty. Considered as a finality, Poverty is of no

(04:24:54):
value except as a vantage ground for a starting point.
It is only good, as is the app spparatus in
the gymnasium, to develop the man in itself. It is
a curse slavery, but it is the great thing to
get away from. And it is the getting away from it,
if honestly and conscientiously done, that calls out the man
that develops the human giant. We did not always see

(04:25:18):
at the time that what we got incidentally on the
way up from poverty was infinitely better and more precious
than the thing we were aiming for, a living, a competence,
that the development of a strong man in the mighty
struggle with necessity was a thousand times more valuable than
the living, the money, or the property gained. Grover Cleveland,
who was once a poor clerk at a salary of

(04:25:39):
fifty dollars a year. In speaking of poverty, as a
developer says, there is surely no development of mental traits,
and no stimulation of the forces of true manhood so
thorough and so imperiously effective as those produced by the
combination of well regulated ambition with the healthful rigors of poverty.
It is the student who has to struggle hardest to
obtain it an education that gets the most discipline and good

(04:26:02):
out of it. Boys who are born scholars and who
only need to read a lesson over to know it
and to be able to pass an examination upon it,
do not derive half so much from their college course
as do those who have to fight hard for everything
they get. It is not, as a rule, the youth
who has a regular income in every want supplied by
indulgent parents, who makes the most of his opportunities at college,

(04:26:25):
but the one who has to work his way through,
who has to toil in college and out to make
his expenses, or else go without an education. What would
the average youth do if he were not compelled by
necessity to work, if he were not obliged to exert
himself in order to get the thing he wants. If
he already has all he wants, why should he struggle
for more? Not one in ten thousand would go through

(04:26:48):
the struggle with poverty, the wrestling with necessity, just to
produce character and make himself a stronger man. But he
would do it for selfish reasons, to satisfy his ambition
and get that which he longs for him and those
he loves. I'm not wasting my sympathy on the children
of the poor, says you, s Senator J. P. Dolliver
wants a poor boy himself. What little sympathy I have,

(04:27:12):
I will give to the children of the rich. If
you have one hundred thousand dollars and give it to
a boy to start him out in life, he doesn't start.
I suggest keeping that hundred thousand and that boy apart.
It will be better for the boy. The cabin where
Abraham Lincoln was born did not shelter the childhood of
a king, but something better than a king, a man.

(04:27:34):
The boy, who is conscious that he has a fortune
awaiting him, says to himself, what is the use of
getting up early in the morning and working one's life out.
I have money enough coming to me to take care
of me as long as I live. So he turns
over and takes another nap. While the boy, who has
nothing in the world but his own self to depend upon,
feels the spur of necessity forcing him out of bed

(04:27:55):
in the morning. He knows there is no other way
open for him but the way of struggle. He has
nobody to lean on, nobody to help him. He knows
that it is a question either of being a nobody
or getting tip and hustling for dear life. Thus, shrewd Nature,
in making man get that which he wants most by
the way of necessity, brings about her great ends of civilization, character,

(04:28:19):
development of the race. The money, the property, the position
are small things in comparison with the man. She is after.
What price will Nature not pay for a man? She
will put him through the hardest school of discipline and
train him for years in the great university of experience
in order to perfect her work. The mere money or

(04:28:40):
property the man gets on the way is only incidental.
Nature is after the man. She does not care a
fig for the money in comparison, but she will pay
any price for a human giant

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HE CAN WHO THINKS HE CAN: The Power of Belief in Achieving Success - Orison Swett Marden (1908)

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}HE CAN WHO THINKS HE CAN: The Power of Belief in Achieving Success - Orison Swett Marden (1908)