There's no short cut to achievement, and work is what'll land you on the top of the heap quicker than anything else, although I've seen a lot of lightweights who spent enough time working hard to avoid work, to succeed with half their energy if spent in the right direction.
That reminds me of a fellow named Clarence I hired some years ago to make himself generally useful around the office. He said he was looking for work and he told the truth all right. He wanted to find out where it was, so he could keep away from it.
I let him stay a couple of months because I rather enjoyed watching his methods. In the morning, he would spend the first two hours scheming how to get the other clerks to do his work for him, and in the afternoon he was so blame busy seeing they had done it, he had little time to do anything else. I had seen people who hated work, but I had never seen anyone before who avoided it as though it were the plague.
The last straw came one afternoon when old Cyrus White of Black & White, the big St. Louis jobbers, walked out of my private office just after giving me an order for three thousand cases and tripped in a cord that fool work avoider Clarence had rigged up, so he could raise or lower the window shade without leaving his desk.
Now old Cy weighs about two twenty and Clarence who had looped one end of the string around his wrist weighed about ninety-eight pounds with a straw hat on, so when Cy went down with a crash that shook the whole factory, he just naturally yanked Clarence right out of his chair, and the two of them became so tangled up in the cord, they lay like a couple of trussed fowls while the water cooler which had also capsized gurgled spring water down old Cy's neck.
You're right, I lost that three thousand case order, and it was ten years before I could sell old Cy another bill of goods, and to make matters worse, I had to pay Clarence $200 damages, for in his rage Cy nearly bit off one of his ears. Ever since, when I find anyone on my pay roll who is working to avoid work, he gets a swift trip to the sidewalk.
Now I'm not going to stop your allowance because you're on probation, I've more heart for the suffering Exeter shopkeepers than to do that. Neither am I going to forbid your going to the Christmas house party: those would be kid punishments and you're no longer a kid, although you've been acting like one for some time.