Here is a sad case of a young fellow I know. He had an ambition to shine, but he wasn't willing to do the tedious grinding and polishing so vitally necessary to shining. He had a chance at college, but he also wanted to be a social lion, all too soon. He could not afford it in the first place; he couldn't spare the time from his studies, in the next place; but he spent his dad's money anyhow and he let his classes go bang. He did the social stunt—on credit. Result: he got E's and F's on his grades and he was shipped. The faculty regards that kind of a student as demoralizing to the morale of a first-class institution. In fact he could not be called a student; he was an "inmate," and it is hard to make an alumni out of inmates.
This young fellow landed back home for the summer, "out of luck," in debt, and a cruel disappointment to his doting parents. He had done the social stunt, but he picked the fruit before it was ripe, and now it's hurting him inside.
He flew his kite in the rain!
He decided he would make good by being a civil engineer. He wanted to be a civil engineer right away, but when he started in he found that the first stages of civil engineering consisted in carrying a chain and a rod up and down hill in the heat and taking orders from a smart chap who looked through a telescope and made notes, so within a few days he quit; he wasn't willing to pay the price. He thought he would play the violin, but he wasn't willing to spend hours practising the scales and simple fingering, so he laid aside the violin. He wanted to play Schubert's Serenade right off, but on learning the cost, he contented himself with whistling it.
Fellows, he is of the sort that make up the great throng of fourth-raters in the world to-day, drifting here and there; or settling down with a family on his hands and a little two-by-four job to eke out a bare living. And you fellows may as well face this fact: you've got to stint, if you're going to pull off a stunt. No stint, no stunt. Stinting is only another name for work and patience and economy combined, and it brings its inevitable fruit—Success!
Read Acts 16:6-15.