If they do not, they doom themselves to unhappiness and failure.
Self-consciousness is a foe to greatness in every line of endeavor.

No one ever does a really great thing until he feels that he is a part of something greater than himself, until he surrenders to that greater principle.
Some of our best writers never found themselves, never touched their power, until they forgot their rules for construction, their grammar, their rhetorical arrangement, by losing themselves in their subject.
Then they found their style.
It is when a writer is so completely carried away with his subject that he cannot help writing, that he writes naturally.

He shows what his real style is.
No orator has ever electrified an audience while he was thinking of his style or was conscious of his rhetoric, or trying to apply the conventional rules of oratory.

It is when the orator's soul is on fire with his theme, and he forgets his audience, forgets everything but his subject, that he really does a great thing.
No painter ever did a great masterpiece when trying to keep all the rules of his profession, the laws of drawing, of perspective, the science of color, in his mind.

Everything must be swallowed up in his zeal, fused in the fire of his genius,--then, and then only, can he really create.
No singer ever captivated her audience until she forgot herself, until she was lost in her song.
Could anything be more foolish and short-sighted than to allow a morbid sensitiveness to interfere with one's advancement in life?
I know a young lady with a superb mind and a fine personality, capable of filling a superior position, who has been kept in a very ordinary situation for years simply because of her morbid sensitiveness.
She takes it for granted that if any criticism is made in the department where she works, it is intended for her, and she "flies off the handle" over every little remark that she can possibly twist into a reflection upon herself.
The result is that she makes it so unpleasant for her employers that they do not promote her.