In life, as most of us quickly find out, one of the most important things we have to do is to overcome obstacles. They beset every path and either they must yield or we must. Life is not intended to be easy for any of us. Sometimes we meet persons who give us the impression of being able to conquer any situation or any combination of circumstances in which they may be placed. Whatever they undertake, we know they will carry it through in spite of obstacles. Such people inspire confidence wherever they go. We instinctively feel that they may safely be entrusted with large things. Julia Ward Howe used to say that she never dared to remark to her husband, Dr. Howe, that anything was impossible, for he would go straight off and do it!
I wonder if it was not the discipline in the soldier’s life which made the early apostles speak so often of the Christian life in terms of warfare. Certainly there is nothing else in war that could have appealed to them. The soldier is the embodiment of discipline. He who would command others must first learn to obey. It is through obedience, discipline, that we come to authority. The first claim to a position of leadership in the world is complete mastery of one’s self.
XI
THE SUCCESSFUL LIFE
We may not all agree upon a definition of success, but we shall all agree that whatever it is, we want it; that, indeed, we want it more than anything else in the world. How to secure it is what all the colleges and schools are trying to teach and what all the ministers in all the churches are preaching. If you knew you would sometime have to look back, realizing that you had made a failure of life, you would hardly care to go on living. Many do have this experience. Such a person seems like a disabled vessel being towed into port with broken mast and damaged rigging. Yet that person was once young and hopeful, with life all before him, and he looked forward to something so different! Sometimes we fail to realize that the very purpose of our school days is to get us ready for the voyage; that we are day by day being taught the use of chart and compass; that we are being shown where the danger lies and where the safe paths are to be found.
If you want to know how you can secure for your own life and character those qualities which you most covet, study the lives of those who have these qualities and try to compel them to yield you their secret. As I think, one after another, of the most successful lives of which I have read in history, I find that there are certain characteristics that all seem to have possessed in common. Take a dozen or a score of really successful lives chosen at random and make them a subject of earnest study and comparison. In outward circumstances and conditions of life you will find these lives widely at variance. One person has been a child of fortune and another has had the severest struggle with poverty. One bears an honored name with generations of culture, character, and achievement behind it; another is of obscure origin, with little help from family or early environment. The ends accomplished in life have been as different as the means of accomplishing them; yet in all worthy lives there are certain clearly defined and common characteristics.
In the first place, I think that all the successful people whom I have known or known of have had a definite purpose in life. I see them keeping right on, striving for a certain goal, regardless of enticements by the way. The able mariner knows to what port he is bound. He does not keep changing his course, he does not become disheartened and drift with every chance wind. Unswervingly he steers toward the goal he has in view. Many of the failures in life are caused by purposelessness.
None of these persons whom I have classed among the successful seem to have been seeking pleasure. They have been possessed by great ideas, they have been occupied with large thoughts, they have been devoted to the good of others, to the advancement of mankind. Can you imagine a Lincoln or a Phillips Brooks wrapped up in his own petty concerns, even for a day? The self-centered life is a failure. “He that is greatest among you, let him be the servant of all.” All really successful lives have been moulded on that principle. Such men and women have not cared especially about being great or famous, but how they have longed to serve! There are thousands of unhappy persons who might find happiness and the beginning of success if they would only stop asking whether they are happy and would go and do something for somebody.
All really successful people have faith. They have faith in themselves, faith in their fellow men, and faith in God. It is difficult to see how any life can be strong without such faith.
We must have faith in ourselves because we are likely never to accomplish more than we believe we can accomplish. It is not always modesty on our part to shrink from an undertaking because of our unworthiness; sometimes it is weakness. “Self-trust is the essence of heroism,” said Carlyle. This does not mean that there is no such thing as over-confidence in self. We have all known people who over-estimated their own powers. The conceited person is rightly considered a nuisance and a subject of ridicule. The person who is always attempting some great project which ends in a fiasco is deserving of the condemnation which he receives. Yet most failures are caused by too little confidence in self rather than too much. Our consciousness of weakness ought to be accompanied by a belief in our power to overcome that weakness. The self-distrust which hinders growth becomes a moral wrong. Those who accomplish large things usually have a splendid self-confidence which is as far removed as possible from self-conceit. It is said of Mary Lyon, by one of her biographers, that she had “the rare power of distinguishing between the impossible and the merely difficult.” That is a power we should all cultivate.
One thing that should be impressed upon young people, who have not yet had sufficient experience to make the discovery for themselves, is that we have a right to judge ourselves by the best of which we are capable, not by the worst. There is an ebb and flow of the tides of the spirit. We have our moods of depression and of exaltation. One of sensitive conscience is quite likely to believe that his worst self is his real self. That is not true. This conflict among the many selves that each of us feels crowding for utterance within him is well expressed by one of our minor poets:—