To

Focus Your Energies

a question as to how Mr. Eugene Grace, President of the Bethlehem Steel Company, had managed to work himself up from the rank of an ordinary truckman in the steel company to the head of that enormous concern, came the reply, "His devotion to everything he undertakes." That is the secret of Mr. Grace's phenomenal rise in the business world: absolute devotion to whatever he undertakes.

Could this be said of you, my friend? If so, you cannot complain of your hard luck or failure, for you must have succeeded.

The trouble with most people who do not get on, or who are disappointed, whose ambitions have been thwarted, is that they are not all there in what they undertake. Their energies are split up, they do not focus with that tremendous energy which achieves.

Absolute devotion to the thing undertaken-therein lies the secret of success. You do not need to go any further into the cause or the mystery of any man's If he shows absolute devotion to everything he undertakes, if he throws his whole life, all his energy and ambition, all his being into his work, achievement will follow.

success.

Someone has said of Mr. Grace. "He knows how to make a small job big, to make a big thing out of a small opportunity."

When he wants anything and goes out to get it, he brings it back, he gets what he seeks; failure is not in his thoughts.

Absorption in his work is characteristic of this man. You may say he takes his job too seriously; but no man ever does a big thing who does not focus his energies upon it. A man who takes his job lightly gets small returns, just as a farmer who sows lightly harvests a light crop.

Carrying a Message Part Way to Garcia

THE

HE trouble with many of us is that we carry our messages to Garcia only part way. When we strike the forests, when the unknown confronts us, when we are perplexed and don't know what to do, we flinch, or turn back.

Resolve that you are going to carry your message the whole way; that no matter what stands in the way, you are going ahead; that you are going to hold your own; to be a leader, not a trailer or follower.

Resolve that you are not going to jog along the old beaten path, turning aside from every obstacle, but

that you will blaze your way through forests of difficulty, if necessary, straight to your goal.

Resolve that things are going to move around you because you have discovered you are a real force, a dynamic power.

It is the executive that is wanted-the doer, the practical man; it is not the theorizer, it is not what might, could or would do, but what will do that is wanted everywhere. It is the man who can carry a message all the way to Garcia, who can do the "impossible," who reaches the goal and wins the prize.

The man who can get things done, who can stick to a thing and put it through, who can deliver the goods by honorable methods, is the man the world is looking for. Until you can show you are such a man there will not be a very big place for you.

MY

Who's to Blame?

Y friend, if you are dissatisfied with what you have so far done in life, who's to blame? Do you think you have been cheated because you haven't achieved the success you thought you would? Do you not know that you have gotten what you have paid for, and that there would have been a much larger success for you if you had paid the larger price? For every effort you have made the law of cause and effect has paid you accordingly. If you are dissatisfied with your bargain, you can blame no one but yourself.

You cannot have achievement without paying the price. You cannot get anything without paying the price. Perhaps once in a million times, luck may strike you just as lightning sometimes strikes an individual. But what are the chances of your ever being struck by lightning? An insurance company would regard the chance as practically infinitesimal. A similar thing is true of luck.

Luck is such a negligible quantity that successful men do not regard it. Can you imagine Charles M. Schwab or Thomas A. Edison waiting around for luck to give them a push or a pull? No, they never waited one minute for luck to help them.

If you are dissatisfied with what has come to you in life, don't complain. The very energy you are now expending in grumbling and finding fault would help you to make your life a success. Just think how much you might have achieved, how much better off you might have been if you had used energetically and efficiently all the time that you have wasted waiting around for someone to help you, for some outside influence to give you assistance! Think of the time

and energy you have wasted in grumbling and finding fault!

My friend, what you call your unlucky fate has paid you exactly for all that you have done. If your pay seems small, inadequate, your work has been small and inadequate. Do your best and largest and fate will give you her best and largest rewards.

AM

Ask Yourself

MI living the sort of life that will give me the largest returns in brain energy and gripping thought, in masterful living; that will keep me always fit for the biggest things I am capable of doing? Am I doing the sort of things that will encourage my aspiration, feed my ambition, develop my mental and physical strength, or am I forming habits which will tend to sap the largest percentage of my energy, devitalize me, demoralize my efforts, kill my ambition, mar my ideals?

These are fundamental questions which strike at the very tap-root of our possibilities. What we should be ambitious to do is to bring out the largest possible man, the man we are capable of being, the man we long to be. And we should live and work with this end in view, and not like a man who should say: "I want to bring out the divine possibilities in me, for I realize that I have two natures, two selves, so to speak. The largest possible man in me is ever prodding me on, ever suggesting to me that I bring him out and give him a chance; but I am not willing to pay the price, I am not willing to do the hard work, which would make the larger man possible, and so there is nothing I feel I can do but to go on, year in and year out, letting the little man in me get my living while the larger man is thundering at the very gates, asking to be let out, to be given a chance to make good."

Would You Resign a Job Because It

Was Too Easy?

A NEW YORK man recently resigned a position

which paid a good salary because, he declared, it was so easy it didn't give sufficient motive for calling out the best in himself. Mr. Virgil Pettiman of the Horace Mann School said, "When a man's job is conquered, he begins to grow old; every year devoted to something mastered is a backward step of six months."

We all know that it is by action, by effort that we develop muscle. A man who is put in a high position by a rich father and who has never developed the muscles of his manhood, his initiative, or executive ability, by climbing to the position, does not usually stay there very long. If he does, he is a clog in the business, killing the enthusiasm of those in the ranks by blighting their prospects of a chance to advance. Firms which go outside for men to fill good places instead of filling them from the ranks, little realize how they take away from their employees the strongest motive for climbing. It is encouragement to effort to know that there is promotion ahead for the deserving. My experience has been that men do their biggest work by far while they are climbing, not after they

have reached the top; that while their position is not assured, while they are uncertain as to the final outcome of their efforts, they do their best work. Beware of stagnation or dry rot; beware of deterioration when you think you have reached your goal. It is a dangerous position when a man imagines that he has “arrived,” for then it is human nature to begin to let up in one's efforts, to begin to take things a little easier, get up a little later in the morning, go a little later to work, take a little longer for luncheon, leave a little earlier at night. This is natural; it is human nature that one should try a little harder when one is in doubt about his position, when one is not quite sure that he has “arrived" in the estimation of the world.

It is the climb that develops the muscles; it is the climb that unfolds the powers, calls out the latent reserves. Very few men ever do their best after they have once made a great hit, achieved a pronounced success in whatever line they may be. There are exceptions, but this is the rule.

Many an author has been cursed by one successful book early in his career. I say cursed, because it gave him the impression that the public would read anything he wrote, and he never again took quite the pains or care he did with that first book, for he didn't have quite the motive he had when he was uncertain of his success, uncertain of his place as a writer, while he was straining every nerve to do his best to win a favored place in the public estimate.

When the author is perfectly satisfied with his book, the clergyman with his sermon, the business man with his accomplishment, dry rot has set in, and they are in a rut. It is what we lack and what we long for and are determined to get that keeps us moving upward. This is what urges us on. It has ever lured men and women through all sorts of privations and hardships.

There is nothing in life that gives us perfect satisfaction. There is slways something beyond ever urging. ever bidding us forward. There is "a still, small voice" that is ever calling us up and on, and it is that thing we lack that pulls us, lures us, over quagmire and bog, over mountain and valley and stream.

Dream again, my friend, plan again, visualize again, go up and on again; mount again, climb again, resolve again! This is what makes the successful life.

The Passion for Gain

UR education, our training and our experiences all through life are constantly enlarging our consciousness in different directions. But it rests with ourselves to determine what kind of consciousness we shall cultivate. If, for instance, we concentrate on money getting; if we hold the picture of money constantly in mind, we develop a money consciousness; and if we sacrifice to this the opportunities for developing consciousness along other lines-social, esthetic, musical, or philanthropic, and confine ourselves to the selfish pursuit of money, we will probably get the money but there is the danger that we shall become greedy and avaricious. All that is finer and nobler in our nature may be overcome, crushed out of existence by the overdevelopment of the passion for gain. The money consciousness will be the dominant one in our lives.