HE CAN WHO THINKS HE CAN, AN IRON WILL & PUSHING TO THE FRONT. Orison Swett Marden
of earnest, honest effort.
No man is so rich, no matter how honestly he got his money, as to be able to confer immunity from work upon his offspring. The very nature of things, the eternal law of the universe has made it forever impossible for you to transfer the stamina, the vigorous manhood, the stability, the character, everything that is of real value which you have gained in your struggle to get on in the world, to your son or daughter. Your offspring owes a debt to civilization which goes back of the parent. It is a debt which can only be wiped out by the individual. It cannot be discharged by proxy. Personal effort is the condition of the child’s development. It is the inevitable price of manhood.
No, there are some things you rich fathers cannot do for your boy. There is a law of nature which prohibits it, an omnipotent principle which protests against it.
If a phrenologist should examine the heads of the idle, grown-up sons of rich men, he would find very marked deficiencies, an underdevelopment of nearly all of the qualities which make strong men. He would usually find selfishness very largely developed; self-reliance, originality, inventiveness, resourcefulness, and all the other qualities which are drawn out and strengthened only by self-help and the struggle to make one’s way in the world, little developed.
If he should compare them with the heads of their self-made fathers, he would find very marked inferiority, so marked that there would apparently be no relationship between the owners of the heads. The contrast would be as great as that between the hard, tough, firm fiber of the mountain oak and the fiber of the soft, spongy sapling which never struggled with the storm and tempest because sheltered by surrounding trees.
How little a father realizes that it is one of the crudest things he could do to his boy to practically rob him of the opportunity of making a real man of himself, of developing qualities which make strength, power, which build vigorous, stalwart manhood!
There is something about the actual making of one’s way in the world, of burning behind one all bridges which others have built, throwing away all crutches and refusing to lean, to be boosted, refusing all assistance and standing erect upon one's own feet, thinking his own thoughts, fighting his own battles, bringing out his own latent possibilities by actual exercise, bringing into action every bit of one’s inventiveness, resourcefulness, ingenuity and originality, tact, that makes a man strong, vigorous, and stalwart, which indicates that this is the normal life of a man, the only life which can develop the true man.
The army of inefficients the namby-pambies, the dressed-up nobodies, with soft hands and softer heads, who are expert only in saying “silly nothings to silly women,” or in the practice of some useless fad, the “amount-to-nothings” everywhere, ought to convince you that there is no way of getting something for nothing.
If you will not do a man’s work, if you will not pay a man’s price for manhood, you will be only an apology for a man. Of course, you can live the life of the idle if you will. If you are the son of a foolish rich father, no one may be able to hinder you; but you must take the idler’s reward. You must go through life branded with the shame, labeled with the weakness, marked with the deformities of idleness. You must pay the penalty of your choice and be a nobody.
Chapter XVI.
What Has Luck Done For You?
“FORTUNE brings in some boats that are not steer’d.” People may say what they will about there not being any such thing as “luck,” or “chance,” but we must all admit there is such a thing. We must all concede that things over which a man has no control, unforeseen happenings, or events with which he has had nothing to do and on which he had not calculated, often change the whole course of his career. Good positions do not always come by merit, or as the result of one’s own direct efforts. It is now a poor laboring man or washerwoman who falls heir to a fortune by the death of some relative; or, again it is a poor girl who is suddenly raised to wealth and what the world calls high position by marrying a man of rank or fortune.
Every schoolboy knows that there is a great advantage in being in the right place in just the nick of time, and that being there is often a matter of chance. Men are constantly being moved up into positions which they did not get wholly by merit Their elevation is due, perhaps, to a railroad accident, a stroke of paralysis, or the death of men in high places. We had a striking instance of this, recently, in the death of two presidents of the Long Island Railroad within a few months, which led to unexpected promotions. Everyone knows that men are constantly being put at the head of large concerns because of kinship with the owners of the business, when perhaps a score of those who are working in the establishments, at the time, are much better fitted to fill the positions.
But, after all, who will be foolish enough to say that man is the toy of chance, or that true success is the result of accident or fate?
No; luck is not God’s price for success, nor does He dicker with men. When we consider the few who owe fortune or position to accident or luck, in comparison with the masses who have to fight every inch of the way to their own loaves, what are they, in reality, but the exceptions to the rule that character, merit —not fate, or luck, or any other bogy of the imagination—controls the destinies of men? The only luck that plays any great part in a man’s life is that which inheres in a stout heart, a willing hand, and an alert brain.
What has chance ever done in the world? Has it invented a telegraph or telephone? Has it laid an ocean cable? Has it built steamships, or established universities, asylums, or hospitals? Has it tunneled mountains, built bridges, or brought miracles out of the soil?
What did luck have to do with making the career of Washington, of Lincoln, of Daniel Webster, of Henry Clay, of Grant, of Garfield, or of Elihu Root? Did it help Edison or Marconi with his inventions? Did it have anything to do with the making of the fortunes of our great merchant princes? Do such men as John Wanamaker, Robert Ogden, or Marshall Field owe their success to luck?
Many a man has tried to justify his failure on the ground that he was doomed by the cards which fate dealt him, that he must pick them up and play the game, and that no effort, however great, on his part, could materially change the result. But, my young friend, the fate that deals your cards is in the main your own resolution. The result of the game does not rest with fate or destiny, but with you. You will take the trick if you have the superior energy, ability, and determination requisite to take it. You have the power within yourself to change the value of the cards which, you say, fate has dealt you. The game depends upon your training, upon the way you are disciplined to seize and use your opportunities, and upon your ability to put grit in the place of superior advantages.
Just because circumstances sometimes give clients to lawyers and patients to physicians, put commonplace clergymen in uncommon pulpits, and place the sons of the rich at the head of great corporations even when they have only average ability and scarcely any experience, while poor youths with greater ability, and more experience, often have to fight their way for years to obtain ordinary situations, are you justified in starting out without a chart or in leaving a place for luck in your programme? What would you think of a captain of a great liner who would start out to sea without any port in view, and trust to luck to land his precious cargo safely?
Did you ever know of a strong young man making out his life-programme and depending upon chance to carry out any part of it? Men who depend upon luck do not think it worth while to make a thorough preparation for success. They are not willing to pay the regular price for it. They are looking for bargains. They are hunting for short cuts to success.
We hear a great deal about “Roosevelt’s luck”; but what would it have availed him if he was not ready for the opportunity when it came—if he had not trained himself through years of persistent drill to grasp it—if he had not been prepared to make the best use of it?
I have never known a man to amount to much until he cut out of his vocabulary such words as “good luck” and “bad luck,” and from his life-maxims all the “I can’t” words and the “I can’t” philosophy. There is no word