Consider the stone wall against which the misfit batters his head:
He uses only his second rate, his third rate, or even less effective mental and physical equipment. He is thus handicapped at the start in the race against those using their best. He is like an athlete with weak legs, but powerful arms and
shoulders, trying to win a foot race instead of a hand-over-hand rope-climbing contest.
Worse than his ineptitude, however, is the waste and atrophy of his best powers through disuse. Thus the early settlers of the Coachela Valley fought hunger and thirst while rivers of water ran away a few feet below the surface of the richly fertile soil.
No wonder, then, that the misfit hates his work. And yet, his hate for it is the real tragedy of his life.
Industry, like health, is normal. All healthy children, even men, are active. Activity means growth and development. Inactivity means decay and death. The man who has no useful work to do sometimes expresses himself in wrong-doing and crime, for he has to do something industriously to live. Even our so-called "idle rich" and leisure classes are strenuously active in their attempts to amuse themselves.
When, therefore, a man hates his work, when he is dissatisfied and discontented in it, when his work arouses him to destructive thoughts and feelings, rather than constructive, there is something wrong, something abnormal, and the abnormality is his attempt to do work for which he is unfitted by natural aptitudes or by training.
The man who is trying to do work for which he is unfitted feels repressed, baffled and defeated. He may not even guess his unfitness, but he does feel its manifold effect. He lacks interest in his work and, therefore, that most vital factor in personal efficiency—incentive. He cannot throw himself into his work with a whole heart.
When Thomas A. Edison is bent upon realizing one of his ideas, his absorption in his work exemplifies Emerson's dictum: "Nothing great was ever accomplished without enthusiasm. The way of life is wonderful—it is by abandonment." He shuts himself away from all interruption in his laboratory; he works for hours oblivious of everything but his idea. Even the demands of his body for food and sleep do not rise above the threshold of consciousness.
Edison himself says that great achievement is a result, not