Just glance over the young men you know and see what a small part of their ability goes into their life work, because of their impaired assets, through foolish or vicious living habits. They are selling their integrity, squandering their life capital in all sorts of dissipation, bringing perhaps not more than twenty-five per cent. of their actual ability to their life work.
How often we hear the remark: “Poor fellow! he was always a victim of bad health, but for that he would have accomplished great things.” “Mentally able but physically weak” would make a good epitaph for thousands of failures.
A weakness anywhere in you will mar your career. It will rise up as a ghost all through your life work, at unexpected moments, mortifying, condemning, convicting you. Every indiscretion or vicious indulgence simply opens a leak which drains off your success and happiness possibilities. There is no compensation for waste of health capital. Health raises the power of every faculty and every possibility of the man, and there is no excuse for losing it through carelessness, dissipation or ignorance.
Nor can one plead mere weakness or lack of energy as a handicap, an excuse for failure. Nature is no sentimentalist. If you violate her law you must pay the penalty though you sit on a throne. She demands that you be at the top of your condition, always at your best, and will accept no excuse or apology.
Whatever your work in life, the secret of your success and happiness is locked up in your health, in your brain, your nerves, your muscles, your ambition, your ideal, your resolution. It is up to you to be a whole man. You cannot afford to be less. You cannot afford to dwarf your career or botch it by going to your task with stale brains. You cannot do first-class work with second-class brain power, with a brain that is fed by poison,—blood vitiated by abnormal living or dissipation. You cannot afford to go to your work used up, played out. Trying to sell merchandise with stale brains keeps many a salesman capable of real mastership in a mediocre position. You cannot do a master’s work with a muddy brain which was not renewed, refreshed, by plenty of sound sleep, healthful recreation, and vigorous exercise in the open air.
In other words, if you expect to make the most of yourself you must be good to yourself. Strangled health means strangled ability. If you murder your health you murder all your chances in life.
No man ever does a great thing in this world who does not protect the faculties he is using with jealous care. Watch your generating power. Remember that you see the world largely through your stomach. Its condition will determine the condition of your brain. Poor digestion gives you poor blood, and poor blood a poor brain. Few people realize what a tremendous factor health plays in their success. Men give the brain credit for a large amount of their success which is due to the stomach, which has everything to do with physical health and robust vitality.
Not long ago I was talking to a salesman who said he guessed he was losing his grip; didn’t know how it was, but he was not making sales as he used to. He didn’t have the same grit and enthusiasm; guessed he was sliding down hill, going backward instead of forward. Formerly, he said, he always approached a customer with the expectation of getting an order, but latterly he was in great doubt; he could not get on full steam, a resolute determination to win. Now, when a man gets into this condition he is not fit to solicit business. Nature is calling to him: “Stop, Look, Listen.” It is time for him to call a halt, and see what is the trouble with his engine.
If you would be a master in your specialty heed Nature’s danger signals, which she puts up all through your body. That “tired feeling” is one of them; brain fag, headache, is one of them; indigestion is one of them; apathy, “don’t feel like it,” poor appetite,—all these things are signals to slow down. But instead of slowing down and repairing, most of us try to speed up with all sorts of stimulants and run past these danger signals, with the result that we either wreck our life train or very seriously injure it.