Pushing to the Front

by Orison Swett Marden

Ruskin says that the tendency of the age is to expend its genius in perishable art, as if it were a triumph to burn its thoughts away in bonfires. Is the work you compel others to do useful to yourself and to society? If you employ a seamstress to make four or five or six beautiful flounces for your ball dress, flounces which will only clothe yourself, and which you will wear at only one ball, you are employing your money selfishly. Do not confuse covetousness with benevolence, nor cheat yourself into thinking that all the finery you can wear is so much put into the hungry mouths of those beneath you. It is what those who stand shivering on the street, forming a line to see you step out of your carriage, know it to be. These fine dresses do not mean that so much has been put into their mouths, but that so much has been taken out of their mouths.

Select a clean, useful, honorable occupation. If there is any doubt on this point, abandon it at once, for familiarity with a bad business will make it seem good. Choose a business that has expansiveness in it. Some kinds of business not even a J. Pierpont Morgan could make respectable. Choose an occupation which will develop you; which will elevate you; which will give you a chance for self-improvement and promotion. You may not make quite so much money, but you will be more of a man, and manhood is above all riches, overtops all titles, and character is greater than any career. If possible avoid occupations which compel you to work in a cramped position, or where you must work at night and on Sundays. Don't try to justify yourself on the ground that somebody must do this kind of work. Let "somebody," not yourself, take the responsibility. Aside from the right and wrong of the thing, it is injurious to the health to work seven days in the week, to work at night when Nature intended you to sleep, or to sleep in the daytime when she intended you to work.

Many a man has dwarfed his manhood, cramped his intellect, crushed his aspiration, blunted his finer sensibilities, in some mean, narrow occupation just because there was money in it.

"Study yourself," says Longfellow, "and most of all, note well wherein kind nature meant you to excel."

Dr. Matthews says that "to no other cause, perhaps, is failure in life so frequently to be traced as to a mistaken calling." We can often find out by hard knocks and repeated failures what we can not do before what we can do. This negative process of eliminating the doubtful chances is often the only way of attaining to the positive conclusion.

How many men have been made ridiculous for life by choosing law or medicine or theology, simply because they are "honorable professions"! These men might have been respectable farmers or merchants, but are "nobodies" in such vocations. The very glory of the profession which they thought would make them shining lights simply renders more conspicuous their incapacity.

Thousands of youths receive an education that fits them for a profession which they have not the means or inclination to follow, and that unfits them for the conditions of life to which they were born. Unsuccessful students with a smattering of everything are raised as much above their original condition as if they were successful. A large portion of Paris cabmen are unsuccessful students in theology and other professions and also unfrocked priests. They are very bad cabmen.

"Tompkins forsakes his last and awl
For literary squabbles;
Styles himself poet; but his trade
Remains the same,—he cobbles."

Don't choose a profession or occupation because your father, or uncle, or brother is in it. Don't choose a business because you inherit it, or because parents or friends want you to follow it. Don't choose it because others have made fortunes in it. Don't choose it because it is considered the "proper thing" and a "genteel" business. The mania for a "genteel" occupation, for a "soft job" which eliminates drudgery, thorns, hardships, and all disagreeable things, and one which can be learned with very little effort, ruins many a youth.

When we try to do that for which we are unfitted we are not working along the line of our strength, but of our weakness; our will power and enthusiasm become demoralized; we do half work, botched work, lose confidence in ourselves, and conclude that we are dunces because we cannot accomplish what others do; the whole tone of life is demoralized and lowered because we are out of place.