"You do not observe well. You are a little too careless in regard to your facts. You therefore have a tendency to go ahead with your theories and your plans upon insufficient data or upon data which are not accurate because they have not been properly verified.
"This deficiency in observation also handicaps you, because you do not see things in their right relation, and your judgment is, therefore, liable to be erratic and unsound.
"You should compel yourself to get the facts. You should suspend judgment until you have made sure that all of the premises from which you argue to your conclusions are sound and accurate. Take nothing for granted. Compel yourself to stick to the facts. Not only ask yourself the question, "Will it work?" but make sure that the affirmative answer is absolutely accurate before you go ahead.
"Many of your characteristics are those of immaturity, notwithstanding your years, your education, and your experience. You still retain many youthful tendencies. You are inclined to be impulsive. You are very responsive emotionally, and when your emotions are aroused you are p.r.o.ne to decide important matters without reference to facts, reason, and logic.
Another very youthful characteristic in you is your tendency to be headstrong, wilful, stubborn, and opinionated. When you have arrived at one of your swift conclusions you find it very difficult to take advice.
Even when you do listen to what others say, you do not listen well. Your mind jumps ahead to conclusions that are erroneous and which were never in the mind of the person giving you the advice.
"As you can readily see, it is this inability to get competent counsel from others, coupled with your own lack of observation and lack of deliberation, that leads you into so many situations that turn out to be undesirable. Here, again, you need to go more slowly, to act more according to your knowledge and less according to impulse, to make sure that you understand what other people say, especially when seeking for advice. As a result of your rather emotional character, you are liable to go to extremes and do erratic things, to be over-zealous for a short period; also, at times, to be high tempered, although your temper quickly evaporates. In all of these things you will see the need for cultivation of more self-control, more poise, more calmness, more maturity of thought, speech, and action.
"You are very idealistic. Your standards are high. You naturally expect much. It is your hope always, when making a change, that you will get into something which will more nearly approach perfection than the thing you are leaving.
"But you are also critical. Indeed, you are inclined to be hypercritical, to find too much fault, to see too many flaws and failures. For this reason, nothing ever measures up to your ideals--you are always being disappointed.
"You need to cultivate far more courage. By this I mean the courage which hangs on, which meets obstacles, which overcomes difficulties, which persists through disagreeable situations. Your impulsiveness leads you into plenty of things, but you are so hypercritical, and you become so easily discouraged when eventualities do not measure up to your ideals, that you fail to finish that which you start.
"Naturally, of course, if you were to be more deliberate and more careful in forming your judgments, you would find things more nearly ideal after you got into them. Then, if you would stick to them, you could make a much greater success of them.
"Your intention to be honest, is, no doubt, above reproach. However, your conduct or the results may at times be equivalent to dishonesty, being so regarded by others. This, of course, is the result of your immaturity, your impulsiveness, and your tendency not to see things through.
"You are very keenly sensitive. With your great love of beauty and refinement, anything which is coa.r.s.e, crude, and ugly in your environment is very depressing to you. You also find it difficult to a.s.sociate happily with those who are coa.r.s.e and crude by nature. Unquestionably, such people frequently hurt you cruelly when they have no intention of doing so. It would be well if you would learn to accept other people for what they are worth, rather than being so critical of them and so easily hurt. Praise and blame are usually meant impersonally and should be so received. In other words, people praise or blame the deed and not the doer.
"Your appreciation of financial and commercial values and methods is deficient. This is due to many different things, but princ.i.p.ally to your lack of observation, your inability to see things in their right relations, and your limited sense of values. For these reasons you are not and cannot become vitally interested in financial and commercial affairs.
If your wants were supplied, and you had something interesting to do, money would receive practically no consideration from you. For your own sake, you ought to attach more importance to monetary considerations, cultivate a greater sense of values, develop more practical commercial sense. On the other hand, however, you should not attempt any vocation in which a high development of these qualities is necessary.
"In practical affairs, you show a tendency not to learn by experience.
This is because of deficiency in your observation of facts. You do not really understand the essential facts of the experiences through which you pa.s.s, and, therefore, they do not impress or teach you.
"In your choice of a vocation you should make up your mind once for all that, on account of the qualities I have described, you are not commercial or financial, and, therefore, you do not belong in the industrial or commercial world. Your talents are educational, dramatic, professional, literary. You are decidedly of the mental type. Your world is a mental world, an intellectual world. Ideas, ideals, and theories are the things with which you can deal most successfully.
"Owing to your distaste for detail, and the difficulty you have in applying yourself to a task until it is finished, and also on account of your very keen and sensitive critical faculties, you are probably better fitted for success as a critic than as a producer.
"A position in a house publishing books and magazines, where your duty would be to read, a.n.a.lyze, and criticise ma.n.u.scripts, would offer you far better opportunities than anything you have yet attempted.
"You could probably do well in a mail-order house as correspondent.
"You also have some dramatic ability which, if developed and trained, might make you a success, either on the stage or in the pulpit. In this connection, I merely call your attention, in pa.s.sing, to the opportunities in the motion picture drama. Here is where dramatic ability is everything and the heavier demands upon the actor in the ordinary drama, especially in the way of physical development, voice, etc., do not enter.
"Another line which might possibly interest you would be that of a salesman in an art or music store, where customers come to you, or in a book store. You probably would do better selling to women than to men.
"Whatever you do, you should work under direction, under the direction of some one whose judgment, wisdom, honesty, and high principles you respect.
Under wise leadership you have your very best opportunities for success.
In attempting to be your own manager and to go your own way, you suffer from the serious handicaps to which I have already referred.
"In selecting from among the vocations I have enumerated the one that is best for you, you will, of course, be guided very largely by opportunities. At this distance I do not know just which is your best opportunity, and, therefore, cannot counsel you definitely to undertake any one of these vocations in preference to the others. If the opportunity is at hand, perhaps the position of literary or dramatic critic with a publishing house would be most congenial for you and offer you the best future. If not, then one of the others. You might even undertake a position as salesman in a book store or an art store while preparing or waiting for an opening in one of the other lines suggested.
"Whatever you undertake, however, compel yourself, in spite of obstacles, in spite of your very natural criticisms of the situation, to stick to it until you make a success of it.
"As you grow older, if you will patiently and conscientiously cultivate more deliberation, more practical sense, more self-control, and more poise, you will become more mature in judgment and gradually overcome to a greater and greater degree the handicaps which have so far interfered with your progress and the best and highest expression of your personality."
HANDICAPS OF THIS TYPE
To make a long story short, Sydney Williams and men of his type have unusual intellectual powers of a.n.a.lysis, criticism, memory, abstraction, and philosophy. They can master hypotheses, higher mathematics, and Hebrew irregular verbs, but they are babes in all practical affairs. They have some such conception of the plain facts of human nature, ordinary financial values, and efficient methods of commerce as a man with color blindness has of the art of Corot. Like the children they are, these people seldom suspect their deficiencies. Oftentimes they are ambitious to make a success in a commercial way. They try salesmanship, or, if they have a little capital, they may embark in some ambitious business project on their own account. They even go into farming or agriculture or poultry raising, or some kind of fancy fruit producing, with all of the optimism and cheerfulness and confidence in their ability that Sydney Williams felt for his orange growing. When they fail, it is more often through their own incompetence than because some one comes along who is mean enough to take candy from a baby. They usually dissipate their a.s.sets by impracticable schemes before the unscrupulous can take them. The only hope for such men is to learn their limitations; to learn that, even though they may be ambitious for commercial success, they are utterly unqualified for it; that, although they may wish to do something in the way of production or selling, they have neither talent, courage, secretiveness, persistence, nor other qualities necessary for a success in these lines. They are too credulous. They are too impractical. They are too lacking in fighting qualities, and, therefore, too easily imposed upon. They are usually lazy physically and find disagreeable situations hard, so that they are out of place in the rough-and-tumble, strenuous, hurly-burly of business, manufacturing, or ordinary professional life.
Perhaps a few stories would indicate what these men can do, do well, and what they can be happy and satisfied in doing. There is a real need for them in the world.
A CAREER IN MUSIC
George R. came to us late one evening in a little town in Illinois. He was nervous, weak, and diffident.
"I am now," he said, "a salesman in a dry goods store. But I have only held the job three months and do not expect that I will be permitted to remain more than a week or so longer. I have been warned several times by the floor-walker that my errors will cost me my position. G.o.d knows, I do my best to succeed in the work, but it is like all the other positions I"ve held. Somehow or other I don"t seem to be able to give satisfaction.
While I am on my guard and as alert as I know how to be against one of the things I"ve been told not to do, I am just as sure as sunshine to go and do some other thing which is against the rules. If I don"t do something against the rules, then I forget to do something I was told to do. If I don"t forget to do something I"ve been told to do, then I am quite likely to make some outlandish mistake that no one ever thought of framing a rule to fit. The result of it all is that in about another week or, at the most, two, I"ll be out of employment again. I have tried driving a delivery wagon. I"ve tried grocery stores. I"ve tried doing collections. I began once as clerk in a bank. Immediately after leaving college, I started in as newspaper reporter. I"ve been a newsboy on railroad trains.
I sold candies and peanuts in a fair ground. I have been night clerk in a hotel. I"ve been steward on a steamboat. I"ve been a shipping clerk in a publishing house, and I have been fired from every job I have ever had.
True enough, I"ve hated them all, but, nevertheless; I have tried to do my best in them. Why I cannot succeed with any of them, I don"t know, and yet I have a feeling that somehow, somewhere, sometime, I will find something to do that I will love, and that I can do well."
"Music," we said, "unquestionably music."
"Do you think I could?" he said wistfully. "Music has been my pa.s.sion all my life long. It has been my one joy, my one solace in all my wanderings and all my failures. But I have always been afraid I would fail also in that, and, if I should, it would break my heart sure. But if you think I have the talent, then I shall give my whole time, my whole thought, my whole energy to music hereafter."
It was rather late in life for this young man to begin a musical career.
While he had always been fond of music, he had been sent to college for a cla.s.sical course by parents to whom a cla.s.sical course meant everything that was desirable in an education. He had learned to play the piano, the violin, the guitar, the mandolin, and some other instruments, without education, because of his natural musical talent. He played them all as he had opportunity, for his own amus.e.m.e.nt, but, because of his ambition for commercial success, had never thought of music as a career. We wish we might tell you that this young man was now one of the foremost composers or conductors of his time. It would make an excellent story. Such, however, is not the case.
He devoted himself to securing a thorough musical education, supporting himself and paying his expenses in the mean-while by playing in churches, musicales, motion picture shows, and other places. He also received a few dollars nearly every week for playing the violin for dances and other functions in a semi-professional orchestra. Truly this was not "art for art"s sake." Any critical musician could probably tell you that such use of his musical talent forever shut off any hopes of his becoming a true artist. On the other hand, it did fill his stomach and clothe him while he was securing a sufficient musical education to enable him to make a very fair living as teacher on various musical instruments and as a performer at popular concerts, recitals, etc. Best of all, he was happy in his work, felt himself growing in success and, while there were probably heights which he never could scale and to which he may have turned his longing eyes, he doubtless got a considerable amount of satisfaction out of the fact that he was no longer being kicked around from pillar to post in the commercial world.
VOCATIONS FOR THE IMPRACTICAL
Herbert Spencer felt that he was a complete and utter failure as a civil engineer, but he made a magnificent success as a scientist, essayist, and philosopher.
The number of great authors, scientists, philosophers, poets, actors, preachers, teachers, lecturers, and musicians who were ludicrously impractical is legion. Literature abounds in stories of their idiosyncrasies. These people deal with abstractions, ideas, with theories, and with emotions. They may be very successful in the spinning of theories, in the working out of clever ideas, and in their appeal to the emotions of their fellow-men. They may write poetry which is the product of genius; they may devise profound philosophy. This is their realm. Here is where they are supreme, and it is in this kind of work they find an expression for all of their talent.
Right here there is need for careful distinction. There is a great difference between the impractical man who has energy, courage, and persistence, and the impractical man who is lazy and cowardly. No matter what a man"s natural talent may be, it takes hard work to be successful in such callings as art, music, the pulpit, the stage, the platform, and the pen. Inspiration may seem to have a great deal to do with success. But even in the writing of a poem inspiration is probably only about five per cent.; hard work const.i.tutes the other ninety-five per cent. It is one thing to have vague, beautiful dreams, to be an admirer of beauty, to enjoy thrills in contemplation of beautiful thoughts or beautiful pictures. It is quite another thing to have the energy, the courage, and the dogged persistence necessary to create that which is beautiful.
NO EASY ROAD TO SUCCESS