Pleasure or Pay?
Self-Question 2—Knowing the requirements of this vocation—its tasks, drudgeries, hours of work, concentration and kind of activity—would I choose to follow them in preference to any other kind of activity even if the income were the same?
Would I do these things for the pleasure of doing them and not for the pay?
If, in your heart, you can answer "Yes" to these questions, your problem is settled; you will succeed in that vocation. For you will so enjoy your work that it will be play. Being play, you will do it so happily that you will get from it new strength each day.
Because you are doing what you were built to do, you will think of countless improvements, inventions, ways of marketing them. This will promote you over the others who are there only for the pay envelope; it will raise your salary; it will eventually and inevitably take you to the top.
A man we know aptly illustrates this point. He was a bookkeeper. He had held the same position for twenty-three years and was getting $125 a month. He had little leisure but used all he did have—evenings, Saturday afternoons, Sundays and his ten-day vacations—making things.
In that time he had built furniture for his six-room house—every kind of article for the kitchen, bathroom and porch. And into everything he had put little improving touches such as are not manufactured in such things.
We convinced him that his wife was not the only woman who would appreciate these step-saving, work-reducing, leisure-giving conveniences. He finally believed it enough to patent some of his inventions, and today he is a rich man.