Pushing to the Front

by Orison Swett Marden

There is the greatest difference in the world between the happiness which comes from a sweet, beautiful, unselfish, helpful, sympathetic, industrious, honorable career, and the mean satisfaction which may grow to be a part of your marked self if you have lived a selfish, grasping life.

What we call happiness is the harvest from our life sowing, our habitual thought-sowing, deed-doing. If we have sown selfish, envious, jealous, revengeful, hateful seeds, greedy, grasping seeds, we can not expect a golden happiness harvest like that which comes from a clean and unselfish, helpful sowing.

If our harvest is full of the rank, poisonous weeds of jealousy, envy, dishonesty, cunning, and cruelty, we have no one to blame but ourselves, for we sowed the seed which produced that sort of a harvest.

Somehow some people have an entirely wrong idea of what real happiness is. They seem to think it can be bought, can be had by influence, that it can be purchased by money; that if they have money they can get that wonderful, mysterious thing which they call happiness.

But happiness is a natural, faithful harvest from our sowing. It would be as impossible for selfish seed, greed seed to produce a harvest of contentment, of genuine satisfaction, of real joy, as for thistle seeds to produce a harvest of wheat or corn.

Whatever the quality of your enjoyment or happiness may be, you have patterned it by your life motive by the spirit in which you have worked, by the principles which have actuated you.

A pretty different harvest, I grant, many of us must face, marred with all sorts of hideous, poisonous weeds, but they are all the legitimate product of our sowing. No one can rob us of our harvest or change it very much. Every thought, every act, every motive, whether secret or public, is a seed which no power on earth can prevent going to its harvest of beauty or ugliness, honor or shame. Most people have an idea that happiness is something that can be manufactured. They do not realize that it can no more be manufactured than wheat or corn can be manufactured. It must be grown, and the harvest will be like the seed.

You, young man, make up your mind at the very outset of your career that whatever comes to you in life, that whether you succeed or fail, whether you have this or that, there is one thing you will have, and that is a happy, contented mind, that you will extract your happiness as you go along. You will not take the chances of picking up or developing the happy habit after you get rich, for then you may be too old.

Most people postpone their enjoyment until they are disappointed to find the power of enjoyment has largely gone by and that even if they had the means they could not get anything like as much real happiness out of it as they could have gotten as they went along when they were younger. Take no chances with your happiness, or the sort of a life that can produce it; whatever else you risk, do not risk this. Early form the happy habit, the habit of enjoyment every day, no matter what comes or does not come to you during the day. Pick crumbs of comfort out of your situation, no matter how unpleasant or disagreeable.

I know a man who, although poor, can manage to get more comfort out of a real tough, discouraging situation than any one else I have ever seen. I have often seen him when he did not have a dollar to his name, with a wife to support; yet he was always buoyant, happy, cheerful, consented. He would even make fun out of an embarrassing situation, see something ludicrous in his extreme poverty.