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In reading that remarkable book, The Americanization of Edward Bok, I was impressed by what he said of competition in business. Beginning as a very young man in a certain occupation, he had expected to encounter the severest competition. As a matter of fact, he met no competition at all, and found that success was the easiest thing in the world, if one provided the conditions necessary for it.
He worked along with a number of other young men in the business. He was the only one who ever got to the place ahead of time. At the noon hour at lunch the other youngsters never on a single occasion mentioned the business in which they were engaged. They talked of their girls, or of athletic sports, or of various dissipations. He was the only man who ever remained after business hours, and he was convinced that he was the only one who ever occupied his mind with the business during his evenings.
He rose above the others with consummate ease, and for two obvious reasons: First, he made himself indispensable; second, he found his chief pleasure in his work, not in the dissipations outside of it.
It is simple enough for any one to be attracted by the novelty of a new job. The real difficulty is to keep up that initial enthusiasm every day of one’s life, to go to work every morning with zest and excitement. I believe that a man should live every day as if that day were his first and his last day on earth.
Every person needs some relaxation, some recreation; but a man’s chief happiness should not lie outside his daily work, but in it. The chief difference between the happiness of childhood and the happiness of maturity is that the child’s happiness is dependent on something different from the daily routine—a picnic, an excursion, a break of some kind. But to the right sort of men and women happiness is found in the routine itself, not in departures from it. Instead of hoping for a change, one hopes there will be no change, that one will have sufficient health to continue in one’s chosen occupation. The child has pleasures; the man has happiness. But unfortunately some men remain children all their lives.
VI
AN INSPIRING CEMETERY
Americans should not leave Florence without spending some reflective hours in the so-called Protestant cemetery. The grave of Elizabeth Barrett Browning is adorned with a beautiful marble tomb designed by the famous artist Leighton, and the only inscription thereupon is “E. B. B. Ob. 1861.”
Not far away lies the famous poet, Walter Savage Landor, who died in 1864 at the age of eighty-nine. His grave is covered with a flat stone. Here is a poem he wrote about it:
Twenty years hence, though it may hap