by Elsie Lincoln Benedict
Available in 98 free installments
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Self-Question 3?Do I tend to follow, of my own accord, for the sheer joy of it, the kinds of activity demanded by this vocation which I am contemplating?
If you do not you will never succeed in this line of work.
¶ One incident will serve to illustrate the foregoing test. A young man asked us if he could succeed as a public speaker. He had decided to become a lecturer and had spent two years studying for that work.
"Do you enjoy talking? Do you like to explain and expatiate? When out with others do you furnish your share of the conversation or a little more?" were the questions we put to him.
To all of the questions he answered "No."
"But I thought this was just the line of work I ought to go into," he explained, "I have always been diffident and I thought the training would do me good."
¶ Expecting the world to pay you handsomely while remaking you is short-sighted, to say the least. The public schools are free, like life's education, but you don't get a salary for attending them.
To be a success you must PRODUCE something out of the ordinary for the world. And you will produce nothing unusual save what your particular organism was built to produce. To know what this is, classify the kind of activities you "take to" naturally. You can be a star in some line that calls for those activities. You will never succeed in any calling which demands the opposite kinds of activities or reactions.
¶ A few years ago, in San Francisco, a young woman came to us for vocational advice. She had decided to find an opening in a silk-importing establishment, for none of whose duties she was qualified. When asked how she happened to hit upon the thing for which she unquestionably had no ability, she said:
"I thought it would give me a world outlook (which I need); compel me to learn fabrics (something I think every woman ought to know); force me to attend to details (which I have always hated but which I must learn to master); and because it would bring me into contact with people (I dislike them but think I should learn to deal with them)."
¶ When a position is being considered the questions an applicant should be asking himself are, "What must I do in this position? Am I qualified? Can I make good? Do I like the activities demanded by this position?"
But ninety-nine out of every hundred applicants for a vacancy ask no question of themselves whatever, and only one of anybody else. That question is to the employer and it is only four words: "What does it pay?"
He overlooks the fact that if the salary involved is large enough to be attractive he will soon be severed from it unless he makes good. He also forgets that if the salary is small he can force it to grow if he is big enough himself.
If the particular task he is considering does not warrant a large salary, his employers will find one for him that does if he shows he has ability.
Every business in the world is looking for people who can do a few things a trifle better than the mass of people are doing them today, and whenever they find them they pay them well?because it pays THEM in the long run.
¶ Don't be afraid that you may develop ability and then find no market for it. The only jobs that have to go begging are the big-salaried ones, because the combination of intelligence and efficiency is not easy to find. The men who are drawing from $10,000 to $50,000 a year are not supermen. They are not very different from anybody else. But they found a line that fitted their particular talents, and they went ahead cultivating those talents without asking for everything in advance.
¶ While touring through the Rockies last summer we came one day to a log shack perched on the mountain-side near the road. In the back-yard was the owner, just ready to feed his chickens. As he flung out the grain they came from every direction, crowding and jostling each other and frantically pecking for the tiny morsels he threw on the ground. Several dozen flocked around him. But three or four stayed on the outer edge, ready to scamper for the big grains he threw now and then amongst the boulders up on the hillside.
