by Elsie Lincoln Benedict
Available in 98 free installments
Owner:
he masses of mankind form a vast pyramid. At the very tip-top peak are gathered the few who are famous. In the bottom layer are the many failures. Between these extremes lie all the rest?from those who live near the ragged edge of Down-and-Out-Land to those who storm the doors of the House of Greatness.
Again, between these, and making up the large majority, are the myriads of laborers, clerks, small business men, housekeepers?that myriad-headed mass known as "the back bone of the world."
Yet the great distance from the lower layer to the tip-top peak is not insurmountable. Many have covered it almost overnight.
¶ For fame is not due, as we have been led to believe, solely to years of plodding toil. A thousand years of labor could never have produced an Edison, a Marconi, a Curie, a Rockefeller, a Roosevelt, a Wilson, a Bryan, a Ford, a Babe Ruth, a Carpentier, a Mary Pickford, a Caruso, a Spencer or an Emerson.
¶ The reserved seat in the tip-top peak of the pyramid is procured only by him who has found his real vocation.
To such a one his work is not hard. No hours are long enough to tire his body; no thought is difficult enough to weary his mind; to him there is no day and no night, no quitting time, no Saturday afternoons and no Sundays. He is at the business for which he was created?and all is play.
¶ Thomas A. Edison so loves his work that he sleeps an average of less than four hours of each twenty-four. When working out one of his experiments he forgets to eat, cares not whether it is day or night and keeps his mind on his invention until it is finished.
Yet he has reached the age of seventy-four with every mental and physical faculty doing one hundred per cent service?and the prize place in the tip-top peak of the Wizards of the World is his! He started at the very bottom layer, an orphan newsboy. He made the journey to the pinnacle because early in life he found his vocation.
¶ Each one of the world's great successes was a failure first.
It is interesting to note the things at which some of them failed. Darwin was a failure at the ministry, for which he was educated. Herbert Spencer was a failure as an engineer, though he struggled years in that profession. Abraham Lincoln was such a failure at thirty-three as a lawyer that he refused an invitation to visit an old friend "because," he wrote, "I am such a failure I do not dare to take the time."
Babe Ruth was a failure as a tailor. Hawthorne was a failure as a Custom House clerk when he wrote the "Scarlet Letter." Theodore Roosevelt was a failure as a cowboy in North Dakota and gave up his frontiering because of it.
These men were failures because they tried to do things for which they were not intended. But each at last found his work, and when he did, it was so easy for him it made him famous.
¶ Fame comes only to the man, or woman, who loves his work so well that it is not work but play. It comes only to him who does something with marvellous efficiency. Work alone can not produce that kind of efficiency.
