“Study yourself,” says Longfellow, “and most of all, note well wherein kind nature meant you to excel.”
It takes a giant to do a giant’s work. What a Morgan or a Carnegie would do with perfect ease and safety, might be as impossible for you to accomplish as to lift yourself by your own boot straps. On the other hand, you may be able to do something which even a Morgan could not do. Study your own adaptations. Try to get a measure of your possibilities.
A man should early take an inventory of his ability and locate himself where he belongs. If he has but one talent he should not try to train with the ten-talent man. He should simply try to make the most of his one talent.
It is impossible to make one talent do the work of ten talents, no matter how ambitious, or how much energy one may fling into his work.
A great brain does a great thing easily. We all do our best work without overstraining. It is dangerous to over-tax one’s faculties.
I have seen a college student who has overstrained his brain until he has seriously marred his mental power in the foolish effort to try to head his class when he was not a natural scholar. He seemed to think that by making a superhuman effort, studying all the time when others were at play, during holidays and Sundays, always plugging, plugging, plugging,—he could overcome any handicap. While he managed to come pretty near leading his class he never completely rallied from the effects of overstraining his brain.
It is a great thing to be able to measure our talents, to understand ourselves so thoroughly that we will undertake just so much as we are able to accomplish, and will not aim at the unattainable.