Increasing Personal Efficiency

by Russell H. Conwell

When you have once decided what is best fitted for you, pursue it ceaselessly and courageously, no matter how far distant it may be, how arduous the labor attending it, or how difficult the ascent. The greater the difficulty surmounted, the more you will value your achievement and the greater power you will have for keeping on with your work after you have reached your goal. Do your utmost to find a friend who is older than you, and consult him freely, and give every man your ear, for the humblest in station and those with the most meager acquirements in other matters may see some few things more clearly than other men, and may be well stored with what you most require. Take each man's advice, but act according to your own judgment. Teachers should be the best advisers of those about to enter upon their life-work, and no service of the schoolmaster or professor can ever be more helpful to the young intrusted to him than that of helping them to choose a career.

The best work real teachers do for their pupils is by no means the teaching of a few minor branches—it is almost always the work he is not paid for, and which nobody outside of those who realize what real education is, seems ever to consider. It is sympathy for their students, getting them to understand the great things that are involved in the process of getting an education, making them realize that true education means growth of all our spiritual faculties—head and heart and will, and that what we get from textbooks is the very least part of an education. It is helping them to understand that knowledge got from books and from schoolmasters is always a menace to a man whose spiritual faculties of head, heart, and will have not been thoroughly disciplined. It is wise counsel in choosing a life career. Instead of looking upon this side of the work as divine, instead of being wise counselors and friendly guides during this great transitional stage from youth to manhood, teachers can be far more interested in their individual concerns or in what they call "research-work"—the research-work may give some temporary glory to themselves, and give some little advertisement to the institutions that employ them; but the supreme duty they owe to their students, to God, and to humanity is to do their utmost to make full men, and worthy and successful men, out of the youths whose education they have taken upon themselves. No traitor is such a traitor to his country and to the whole world as the man who is unfaithful to this sacred trust. Once again, find some sincere and prudent elder counselor, and turn to him in all your difficulties.

Get advice as to the best books to read—a good book is the best of counselors, for it is the best of some good man; and it is a patient counselor whom we may continually consult upon the same subject as often as we wish. But waste no time, especially at the opening of your career, upon books which have no message for your manhood and no helpfulness in the work you shall assume for life. When you have once taken up a book as your counselor, don't put it aside until it has been thoroughly digested and assimilated. One book read is worth a hundred books peeped through; and of all the dilettantes, a literary dilettante is the most contemptible. Bacon says, "Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, some few to be chewed and digested." But it is only the books that are to be chewed and digested that we can afford to peruse at the outset in our career; the literary pleasure—gardens—may come later in life.

Do your utmost to understand poetic expression, for the poets are the greatest teachers in the world as well as the greatest of all legislators. It is they who teach the great in conduct and the pure in thought. Without education that shall enable us to take them as our friends, life bears upon it the stamp of death. The great poets are now the only truth-tellers left to God. They are free, and they make their lovers free; the great poet is nature's masterpiece. At the touch of his imagination words blossom into beauty. A true poet is the most precious gift to a nation, for he feels keenest the glorious duty of serving truth; he cannot strive for despotism of any kind, for it is still the instinct of all great spirits to be free. More than other authors, the poets make us self-forgetful, make life and the whole human race nobler in our eyes; all things are friendly and sacred to them, all days holy, all good men divine.

There is very little worthy work nowadays that does not need some schooling that it may be well done. If you have an opportunity to give yourself this help, don't neglect it. Carefully select the courses that will be most helpful to you in your career, and don't be side-tracked by any of what we sentimentalists term "culture studies." There's nothing better in the world than culture study, if we can afford it and have time for it. But there is not a greater or more wicked waste of valuable time than the time spent upon what some sentimentalists term culture study.

When you have once taken up the studies you have decided upon, keep steadily to your course and shun diversions. Recreations are as essential to the student who intends to do high-class work as food is to the body; but diversions disqualify him for earnest work, and may breed a habit of halfness that shall bring his failure. Don't be foolish and hope to be great in many lines. Who sips of many arts drinks none. In every vocation to-day competition is so keen that the man who will succeed must be content to be supreme in one thing alone.

Halfness weakens all our spiritual powers, and thoroughness is the central passion of all worthy characters.

It is nobler to be confined to one calling, and to excel in that, than to dabble in forty. There is some odor about a dabbler that makes him especially offensive to all clean high-class men and women. But when we have formed the habit of doing carelessly other tasks than our life-work, we shall soon get into the way of doing carelessly the work of our chosen calling. There is nothing that gives us greater assurance that our life-work will be thoroughly done than to habituate ourselves to do the slightest task completely. Sing the last note fully, make the last letter of your name complete. Eat the last morsel deliberately. In a real man's life there are no trifles. Whatever is worth doing by him is worth doing well. The many-sided Edward Everett attributed his being able to do so many things well to his early habit of doing even the least thing thoroughly. He used to say that he prided himself upon the way he tied up the smallest paper parcel.

Although schools may be very helpful, don't forget to emphasize again that they are merely helpers. The man is somebody only when the fight is won within himself. Without the schools men have often reached the pinnacles of success, through their own individual earnestness and energy. Schools make wise men wiser, but they may make fools greater fools than ever. If colleges have fallen somewhat into disrepute, it is largely due to the fact that we may have sent more fools than wise men to college. Many a man has been the better for being too poor to attend school, like Franklin, Lincoln, Peter Cooper, and ten thousand other Americans. Their thirst for what books had to give them forced them to work harder and to deny themselves all the enjoyments that so vulgarize yet so charm the cheaper brood.

All that is won by sacrifice and downright hard work is priceless, and many noble men and women who have risen to high honor and station owe their place and power solely to this. Be always mindful that power is the only safe foundation for reputation. Thoughtful Americans are not concerning themselves about who your ancestors were, and whether or not they were graduated from some college. Like Doctor Holmes, they feel that old families and old trees generally have their best parts underground, and that the only progressive is the man who is bigger in thought and feeling and accomplishment than his father was. They believe that it is unimportant where you buy your educational tools, if you are only doing good work with them.