If you start for success you must expect to pay its price. It can not be won by feeble, half-way efforts, neither is it to be acquired because sought for in a dozen different directions. It demands that you bring to your chosen profession or calling energy, industry, and, above all, that singleness of purpose which is willing to devote the energies of a life-time to its accomplishment. Mere wishing and sighing brings it not. Many little calls of society on your time must pass unheeded. You can not expect to live tranquilly and at your ease, but to be up and doing, with all your energies devoted to the one point kept constantly in view. Cultivate this habit of concentration if you would succeed in business; make it a second nature. Have a work for every moment, and mind the moment's work. Whatever your calling, master all its bearings and details, all its principles, instruments, and applications. We have so much work ahead of us that must be done if we would reach the point desired that we must save our strength as much as possible. Concentration affords a great safe-guard against exhaustion. He who scatters himself on many objects soon loses his energy, and with his energy his enthusiasm—and how is success possible without enthusiasm?
It becomes, then, of importance to be sure we have started right in the race for distinction. Every beginner in life should strive early to ascertain the strong faculty of his mind or body fitting him for some special pursuit, and direct his utmost energies to bring it to perfection. There is no adaptation or universal applicability in man; but each has his special talent, and the mastery of successful men is in adroitly keeping themselves where and when that turn shall need oftenest to be practiced.
Though one must be wholly absorbed to win success, still singleness of aim by no means implies monotony of action; but if we would be felt on this stirring planet, if we would strike the world with lasting force, we must be men of one thing. Having found the thing we have to do we must throw into it all the energies of our being, seeking its accomplishment at whatever hazard or sacrifice. But that does not prevent us from participating in the enjoyments of life. If you are sent on business to some foreign land, though bent on business, still you can admire, as you hurry along, the beautiful scenery from the car windows; you can note the strange places through which you pass; you can observe the wondrous sublimity of the ocean without being distracted from the main objects of your travels. So it is not to be inferred from what has been said that concentration means isolation or self-absorption. There may be a hundred accessories in life, provided they contribute to one result.
In urging the importance of concentration, and of sticking to one thing, we do not mean that any man should be a mere lawyer, a mere doctor, or a mere merchant or mechanic, and nothing more. These are cases of one-sidedness pushed too far. There is no more pitiable wreck than the man whose one giant faculty has drowned the rest. Man dwarfs himself if he pushes too far the doctrine of the subdivision of labor. Success is purchased too dear if to attain it one has subordinated all his faculties and tastes to one master passion, and become transformed into a head, a hand, or an arm, instead of a man. Every man ought to be something more than a factor in some grand formula of social or economical science, a cog or pulley in some grand machine.
Let every one take care, first of all, to be a man, cultivating and developing, as far as possible, all of his powers on a symmetrical plan; and then let him expend his chief labors on the one faculty, which nature, by making it prominent, has given a hint should be especially cultivated. There is, indeed, no profession upon which a high degree of knowledge will not continually bear. Things which, at first glance, seem most remote from it will often be brought into close approximation to it, and acquisitions which the narrow-minded might deem a hindrance will sooner or later yield something serviceable. Nothing is more beautiful than to see a man hold his art, trade, or calling in an easy, disengaged way, wearing it as the soldier does his sword, which, once laid aside, the accomplished soldier gives you no hint that he has ever worn. Too often this is not the case, and the shop-keeper irresistibly reminds you of the shop, and the scholar, who should remind you that he has been on Parnassus only by the odors of the flowers he has crushed, which cling to his feet, affronts you with a huge nosegay stuck in his bosom.
One can make all his energies bear on one important point and yet show himself a man among men by his interest in matters of public concern. He can endear himself to the community by kindly acts to the distressed, as well as completely mastering, in all its bearings, the one great work which he has taken upon himself as his life's work. Then take up your task. Remember that you must marshall all your forces at one point, and move in one direction, if you would accomplish what your desires have painted; but also remember that you are a human being, and not a machine, and that as you pass on the journey of life you should, as far as possible, without insuring defeat, take note of the wonders which nature has spread before you, should ponder on what history says of the past, should muse over the solemn import of life, and thus, while winning laurels for your brow, and achieving your heart's desire, develop in you the faculties which go to make, in its complete meaning, a man or woman.
Decision
