Chapter 30
As a rule, a German who expects to engage in business takes a four years' course in some commercial school, and after graduation serves three years' apprentices.h.i.+p without pay, to his chosen business.
Thoroughness and reliability, the German's characteristics, are increasing the power of Germany throughout the civilized world.
Our great lack is want of thoroughness. How seldom you find a young man or woman who is willing to prepare for his life-work! A little education is all they want, a little smattering of books, and then they are ready for business.
"Can't wait," "haven't time to be thorough," is characteristic of our country, and is written on everything--on commerce, on schools, on society, on churches. We can't wait for a high-school, seminary, or college education. The boy can't wait to become a youth, nor the youth to become a man. Young men rush into business with no great reserve of education or drill; of course, they do poor, feverish work, and break down in middle life, while many die of old age in the forties.
Perhaps there is no other country in the world where so much poor work is done as in America. Half-trained medical students perform bungling operations, and butcher their patients, because they are not willing to take time for thorough preparation. Half-trained lawyers stumble through their cases, and make their clients pay for experience which the law school should have given. Half-trained clergymen bungle away in the pulpit, and disgust their intelligent and cultured paris.h.i.+oners.
Many an American youth is willing to stumble through life half prepared for his work, and then blame society because he is a failure.
A young man, armed with letters of introduction from prominent men, one day presented himself before Chief Engineer Parsons, of the Rapid Transit Commission of New York as a candidate for a position. "What can you do? Have you any specialty?" asked Mr. Parsons. "I can do almost anything," answered the young man. "Well," remarked the Chief Engineer, rising to end the interview, "I have no use for anyone who can 'almost' do anything. I prefer someone who can actually do one thing thoroughly."
There is a great crowd of human beings just outside the door of proficiency. They can half do a great many things, but can't do any one thing well, to a finish. They have acquisitions which remain permanently unavailable because they were not carried quite to the point of skill; they stopped just short of efficiency. How many people almost know a language or two, which they can neither write nor speak; a science or two, whose elements they have not fully mastered; an art or two, which they can not practise with satisfaction or profit!
The Patent Office at Was.h.i.+ngton contains hundreds,--yes, thousands,--of inventions which are useless simply because they are not quite practical, because the men who started them lacked the staying quality, the education, or the ability necessary to carry them to the point of practicability.
The world is full of half-finished work,--failures which require only a little more persistence, a little finer mechanical training, a little better education, to make them useful to civilization. Think what a loss it would be if such men as Edison and Bell had not come to the front and carried to a successful termination the half-finished work of others!
Make it a life-rule to give your best to whatever pa.s.ses through your hands. Stamp it with your manhood. Let superiority be your trade-mark, let it characterize everything you touch. This is what every employer is looking for. It indicates the best kind of brain; it is the best subst.i.tute for genius; it is better capital than cash; it is a better promoter than friends, or "pulls" with the influential.
A successful manufacturer says: "If you make a good pin, you will earn more money than if you make a bad steam engine." "If a man can write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mousetrap than his neighbor," says Emerson, "though he build his house in the woods, the world will make a path to his door."
Never allow yourself to dwell too much upon what you are getting for your work. You have something of infinitely greater importance, greater value, at stake. Your honor, your whole career, your future success, will be affected by the way you do your work, by the conscience or lack of it which you put into your job. Character, manhood and womanhood are at stake, compared with which salary is nothing.
Everything you do is a part of your career. If any work that goes out of your hands is skimped, s.h.i.+rked, bungled, or botched, your character will suffer. If your work is badly done; if it goes to pieces; if there is shoddy or sham in it; if there is dishonesty in it, there is shoddy, sham, dishonesty in your character. We are all of a piece. We cannot have an honest character, a complete, untarnished career, when we are constantly slipping rotten hours, defective material and slipshod service into our work.
The man who has dealt in shams and inferiority, who has botched his work all his life, must be conscious that he has not been a real man; he can not help feeling that his career has been a botched one.
To spend a life buying and selling lies, dealing in cheap, shoddy shams, or botching one's work, is demoralizing to every element of n.o.bility.
Beecher said he was never again quite the same man after reading
No one can be really happy who does not believe in his own honesty. We are so const.i.tuted that every departure from the right, from principle, causes loss of self-respect, and makes us unhappy.
Every time we obey the inward law of doing right we hear an inward approval, the amen of the soul, and every time we disobey it, a protest or condemnation.
There is everything in holding a high ideal of your work, for whatever model the mind holds, the life copies. Whatever your vocation, let quality be your life-slogan.
A famous artist said he would never allow himself to look at an inferior drawing or painting, to do anything that was low or demoralizing, lest familiarity with it should taint his own ideal and thus be communicated to his brush.
Many excuse poor, slipshod work on the plea of lack of time. But in the ordinary situations of life there is plenty of time to do everything as it ought to be done.
There is an indescribable superiority added to the character and fiber of the man who always and everywhere puts quality into his work. There is a sense of wholeness, of satisfaction, of happiness, in his life which is never felt by the man who does not do his level best every time. He is not haunted by the ghosts or tail ends of half-finished tasks, of skipped problems; is not kept awake by a troubled conscience.
When we are trying with all our might to do our level best, our whole nature improves. Everything looks down when we are going down hill.
Aspiration lifts the life; groveling lowers it.
Don't think you will never hear from a half-finished job, a neglected or botched piece of work. It will never die. It will bob up farther along in your career at the most unexpected moments, in the most embarra.s.sing situations. It will be sure to mortify you when you least expect it. Like Banquo's ghost, it will arise at the most unexpected moments to mar your happiness. A single broken thread in a web of cloth is traced back to the girl who neglected her work in the factory, and the amount of damage is deducted from her wages.
Thousands of people are held back all their lives and obliged to accept inferior positions because they cannot entirely overcome the handicap of slipshod habits formed early in life, habits of inaccuracy, of slovenliness, of skipping difficult problems in school, of slurring their work, s.h.i.+rking, or half doing it. "Oh, that's good enough, what's the use of being so awfully particular?" has been the beginning of a life-long handicap in many a career.
I was much impressed by this motto, which I saw recently in a great establishment, "WHERE ONLY THE BEST IS GOOD ENOUGH." What a life-motto this would be! How it would revolutionize civilization if everyone were to adopt it and use it; to resolve that, whatever they did only the best they could do would be good enough, would satisfy them!
Adopt this motto as yours. Hang it up in your bedroom, in your office or place of business, put it into your pocket-book, weave it into the texture of everything you do, and your life-work will be what every one's should be--A MASTERPIECE.
CHAPTER XXIII
THE REWARD OF PERSISTENCE
Every n.o.ble work is at first impossible.--CARLYLE.
Victory belongs to the most persevering.--NAPOLEON.
Success in most things depends on knowing how long it takes to succeed.--MONTESQUIEU.
Perpetual pus.h.i.+ng and a.s.surance put a difficulty out of countenance, and make a seeming impossibility give way.--JEREMY COLLIER.
"Unstable as water, thou shalt not excel."
The nerve that never relaxes, the eye that never blanches, the thought that never wanders,--these are the masters of victory.--BURKE.
"The pit rose at me!" exclaimed Edmund Kean in a wild tumult of emotion, as he rushed home to his trembling wife. "Mary, you shall ride in your carriage yet, and Charles shall go to Eton!" He had been so terribly in earnest with the study of his profession that he had at length made a mark on his generation. He was a little dark man with a voice naturally harsh, but he determined, when young, to play the character of Sir Giles Overreach, in Ma.s.singer's drama, as no other man had ever played it. By a persistency that nothing seemed able to daunt, he so trained himself to play the character that his success, when it did come, was overwhelming, and all London was at his feet.
"I am sorry to say that I don't think this is in your line," said Woodfall the reporter, after Sheridan had made his first speech in Parliament. "You would better have stuck to your former pursuits."
With head on his hand Sheridan mused for a time, then looked up and said, "It is in me, and it shall come out of me." From the same man came that harangue against Warren Hastings which the orator Fox called the best speech ever made in the House of Commons.
"I had no other books than heaven and earth, which are open to all,"
said Bernard Palissy, who left his home in the south of France in 1828, at the age of eighteen. Though only a gla.s.s-painter, he had the soul of an artist. The sight of an elegant Italian cup disturbed his whole existence and from that moment the determination to discover the enamel with which it was glazed possessed him like a pa.s.sion. For months and years he tried all kinds of experiments to learn the materials of which the enamel was compounded. He built a furnace, which was a failure, and then a second, burning so much wood, spoiling so many drugs and pots of common earthenware, and losing so much time, that poverty stared him in the face, and he was forced, from lack of ability to buy fuel, to try his experiments in a common furnace. Flat failure was the result, but he decided on the spot to begin all over again, and soon had three hundred pieces baking, one of which came out covered with beautiful enamel.
To perfect his invention he next built a gla.s.s-furnace, carrying the bricks on his back. At length the time came for a trial; but, though he kept the heat up six days, his enamel would not melt. His money was all gone, but he borrowed some, and bought more pots and wood, and tried to get a better flux. When next he lighted his fire, he attained no result until his fuel was gone. Tearing off the palings of his garden fence, he fed them to the flames, but in vain. His furniture followed to no purpose. The shelves of his pantry were then broken up and thrown into the furnace; and the great burst of heat melted the enamel. The grand secret was learned. Persistence had triumphed again.
"If you work hard two weeks without selling a book," wrote a publisher to an agent, "you will make a success of it."
"Know thy work and do it," said Carlyle; "and work at it like a Hercules."
"Whoever is resolved to excel in painting, or, indeed, in any other art," said Reynolds, "must bring all his mind to bear upon that one object from the moment that he rises till he goes to bed."
"I have no secret but hard work," said Turner, the painter.
"The man who is perpetually hesitating which of two things he will do first," said William Wirt, "will do neither. The man who resolves, but suffers his resolution to be changed by the first counter-suggestion of a friend--who fluctuates from opinion to opinion, from plan to plan, and veers like a weather-c.o.c.k to every point of the compa.s.s, with every breath of caprice that blows,--can never accomplish anything great or useful. Instead of being progressive in anything, he will be at best stationary, and, more probably, retrograde in all."
Perseverance built the pyramids on Egypt's plains, erected the gorgeous temple at Jerusalem, inclosed in adamant the Chinese Empire, scaled the stormy, cloud-capped Alps, opened a highway through the watery wilderness of the Atlantic, leveled the forests of the new world, and reared in its stead a community of states and nations. Perseverance has wrought from the marble block the exquisite creations of genius, painted on canvas the gorgeous mimicry of nature, and engraved on a metallic surface the viewless substance of the shadow. Perseverance has put in motion millions of spindles, winged as many flying shuttles, harnessed thousands of iron steeds to as many freighted cars, and set them flying from town to town and nation to nation, tunneled mountains of granite, and annihilated s.p.a.ce with the lightning's speed. It has whitened the waters of the world with the sails of a hundred nations, navigated every sea and explored every land. It has reduced nature in her thousand forms to as many sciences, taught her laws, prophesied her future movements, measured her untrodden s.p.a.ces, counted her myriad hosts of worlds, and computed their distances, dimensions, and velocities.
The slow penny is surer than the quick dollar. The slow trotter will out-travel the fleet racer. Genius darts, flutters, and tires; but perseverance wears and wins. The all-day horse wins the race. The afternoon-man wears off the laurels. The last blow drives home the nail.