Confidential Chats with Boys

by William Lee Howard

You do not all want to be mere office clerks, bundle wrappers, or what is far worse for your future, mere political petitioners hanging on to your job by petty and ofttimes crooked work. No, be something, do something that means a future for you.

“But,” you say, “how do I really know what I want to do, how can I find out for myself what my future SHOULD be? You say not to always follow the advice of successful men if such advice does not agree with my ideas of what I should like to do.”

Yes, here is a difficulty. Let us see if we cannot solve it.

Don’t make the mistake so many thousands of boys have made in the past, of confusing what you would LIKE to BE with what you are CAPABLE of DOING. Here is where so much of the trouble has arisen. You have in your mind, as an example, the success a young man is making in writing for the magazines and papers. You remember him when he was a youth and you were a small boy.

His success has stimulated you, and you think that you will be a writer or reporter. Now the ambition is all very well, you have made up your mind what you WANT to be, but, and here comes the problem: Are you fitted by nature, temperament and TALENT for such work? This is a matter you must solve for yourself, at least at first.

If you have done any writing at school, been connected with the school’s paper, or in any way found more pleasure in writing than you have in mathematics, more fun in reading than in loafing, real pleasure in putting together words and sentences so that they really sing to you, then you probably have the talent for the hardest vocation or profession in the world—journalism or literature.

If all this is well proven to you—if you feel that you MUST write—then all the hard work at first will be willingly accepted. If the drudgery, petty details of learning the art of writing, is disagreeable, then it shows that while you have perhaps a desire to see your work in print you really have not the inborn talent.

Now we come again to that question, “Shall I go to college?” If you are going to make a strenuous attempt to become a writer, the answer is yes, by all means. Even if after leaving college, and after a year’s trial at newspaper work, you find the petty details disagreeable and determine to drop the work, the college experience will be valuable to you, for your tastes show that in some line of intellectual work, you will be a success. And you will finally drop into just the vocation you are intended for, and finally make good.

If the inclinations of your tastes are towards mechanics, or electrical engineering, if every bit of your studies at the high school where language, literature or logic was a disagreeable task—if you fairly hated such studies—don’t think of going to a classical college. In such a case what you need is a technical education. If you have the mechanical or scientific mind a course at a technical school puts you at once in the position to DO.

In art, music, literature, however, the situation is somewhat different. Take the case of one who desires to be a writer, and the facts are the same for the other arts. A college education will not make a writer out of anyone. Most men could spend their whole lives studying HOW to write, but in the end never be ABLE to write. In other words, a college education simply gives you the tools for writing and shows you how to use these tools. The tools for writing are such lines of reading, thinking and verbal construction as education gives you. Teaching you how to think clearly, calmly and justly, is what the college does for you. But if you have no original thinking powers, of what use are all these tools to you? You may have exceptional brain power, thinking qualities, but not along those lines necessary to make a successful writer, and so you are at a loss to know how to apply the tools given you. If you still struggle along in this false position you soon sink to the hack writer, the mind becomes clouded by failures and then comes the “down and out” state too often seen in those who have made the mistake of trying to be what they could never be.