[Pushing to the Front by Orison Swett Marden]@TWC D-Link book
Pushing to the Front

CHAPTER XI
13/23

Let "somebody," not yourself, take the responsibility.

Aside from the right and wrong of the thing, it is injurious to the health to work seven days in the week, to work at night when Nature intended you to sleep, or to sleep in the daytime when she intended you to work.
Many a man has dwarfed his manhood, cramped his intellect, crushed his aspiration, blunted his finer sensibilities, in some mean, narrow occupation just because there was money in it.
"Study yourself," says Longfellow, "and most of all, note well wherein kind nature meant you to excel." Dr.Matthews says that "to no other cause, perhaps, is failure in life so frequently to be traced as to a mistaken calling." We can often find out by hard knocks and repeated failures what we can not do before what we can do.

This negative process of eliminating the doubtful chances is often the only way of attaining to the positive conclusion.
How many men have been made ridiculous for life by choosing law or medicine or theology, simply because they are "honorable professions"! These men might have been respectable farmers or merchants, but are "nobodies" in such vocations.

The very glory of the profession which they thought would make them shining lights simply renders more conspicuous their incapacity.
Thousands of youths receive an education that fits them for a profession which they have not the means or inclination to follow, and that unfits them for the conditions of life to which they were born.
Unsuccessful students with a smattering of everything are raised as much above their original condition as if they were successful.

A large portion of Paris cabmen are unsuccessful students in theology and other professions and also unfrocked priests.


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