How to Succeed

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"That fellow will beat us all some day," said a merchant, speaking of
John Wanamaker and his close attention to his work. What a prediction to
make of a young man who started business with a little clothing in a
hand cart in the streets of Philadelphia. But this youth had _the
indomitable spirit of a conqueror in him_, and you could not keep him
down. General Grant said to George W. Childs, "Mr. Wanamaker could
command an army." His great energy, method, industry, economy, and high
moral principle, attracted President Harrison, who appointed him
Postmaster-General.

Jacques Aristide Boucicault began his business life as an employe in a
dry goods house in a small provincial town in France. After a few years
he went to Paris, where he prospered so rapidly that in 1853 he became a
partner and later the sole proprietor of the Bon Marche, then only a
small shop, which became under his direction the most unique
establishment in the world. His idea was to establish a combined
philanthropic and commercial house on a large scale. Every one who
worked for him was advanced progressively, according to his length of
employment and the value of the services he rendered. He furnished free
tuition, free medical attendance, and a free library for employes; a
provident fund affording a small capital for males and a marriage
portion for females at the expiration of ten or fifteen years of
service; a free reading room for the public; and a free art gallery for
artists to exhibit their paintings or sculptures. After his sudden death
in 1877, his only son carried forward his father's projects until he,
too, died in 1879, when his widow, Marguerite Guerin, continued and
extended his business and beneficent plans until her death in 1887. So
well did this family lay the foundations of a building covering 108,000
square feet, with many accessory buildings of smaller size, and of a
business employing 3600 persons with sales amounting to nearly
$20,000,000 annually, that every department is still conducted with all
its former success in accordance with the instructions of the founders.
They are here no longer in their bodily presence, but their spirit,
their ideas, still pervade the vast establishment. Everything is still
sold at a small profit and at a price plainly marked, and any article
which may have ceased to please the purchaser can, without the slightest
difficulty, be exchanged or its value refunded.

When James Gordon Bennett was forty years old, he collected all his
property, three hundred dollars, and in a cellar with a board upon two
barrels for a desk, himself his own type setter, office boy, publisher,
newsboy, clerk, editor, proof-reader and printer's devil, he started the
New York _Herald_. In all his literary work up to this time he had
tried to imitate Franklin's style; and, as is the fate of all imitators,
he utterly failed.

He lost twenty years of his life trying to be somebody else. He first
showed the material he was made of in the "Salutatory," of the _Herald_,
viz., "Our only guide shall be good, sound and practical common-sense
applicable to the business and bosoms of men engaged in everyday life.
We shall support no party, be the organ of no faction or coterie, and
care nothing for any election or any candidate from President down to
constable. We shall endeavor to record facts upon every public and
proper subject stripped of verbiage and coloring, with comments when
suitable, just, independent, fearless and good-tempered."

Joseph Hunter was a carpenter, Robert Burns a ploughman, Keats a
druggist, Thomas Carlyle a mason, Hugh Miller a stone mason. Rubens, the
artist, was a page, Swedenborg, a mining engineer. Dante and Descartes
were soldiers. Ben Johnson was a brick layer and worked at building
Lincoln Inn in London with trowel in hand and a book in his pocket.
Jeremy Taylor was a barber. Andrew Johnson was a tailor. Cardinal Wolsey
was a butcher's son. So were Defoe and Kirke White. Michael Faraday was
the son of a blacksmith. He even excelled his teacher, Sir Humphry Davy,
who was an apprentice to an apothecary.

Virgil was the son of a porter, Homer of a farmer, Pope of a merchant,
Horace of a shopkeeper, Demosthenes of a cutler, Milton of a money
scrivener, Shakespeare of a wool stapler, and Oliver Cromwell of a
brewer.

John Wanamaker's first salary was $1.25 per week. A. T. Stewart began
his business life as a school teacher. James Keene drove a milk wagon in
a California town. Joseph Pulitzer, proprietor of the New York _World_,
once acted as stoker on a Mississippi steamboat. When a young man, Cyrus
Field was a clerk in a New England store. George W. Childs was an errand
boy for a bookseller at $4 a month. Andrew Carnegie began work in a
Pittsburg telegraph office at $3 a week. C. P. Huntington sold butter
and eggs for what he could get a pound or dozen. Whitelaw Reid was once
a correspondent of a newspaper in Cincinnati at $5 per week. Adam
Forepaugh was once a butcher in Philadelphia.

Sarah Bernhardt was a dressmaker's apprentice. Adelaide Neilson began
life as a child's nurse. Miss Braddon, the novelist, was a utility
actress in the provinces. Charlotte Cushman was the daughter of poor
people.

Mr. W. O. Stoddard, in his "Men of Business," tells a characteristic
story of the late Leland Stanford. When eighteen years of age his father
purchased a tract of woodland, but had not the means to clear it as he
wished. He told Leland that he could have all he could make from the
timber if he would leave the land clear of trees. A new market had just
then been created for cord wood, and Leland took some money that he had
saved, hired other choppers to help him, and sold over two thousand
cords of wood to the Mohawk and Hudson River Railroad at a net profit of
$2600. He used this sum to start him in his law studies, and thus, as
Mr. Stoddard says, chopped his way to the bar.

It is said that the career of Benjamin Franklin is full of inspiration
for any young man. When he left school for good he was only twelve years
of age. At first he did little but read. He soon found, however, that
reading, alone, would not make him an educated man, and he proceeded to
act upon this discovery at once. At school he had been unable to
understand arithmetic. Twice he had given it up as a hopeless puzzle,
and finally left school almost hopelessly ignorant upon the subject. But
the printer's boy soon found his ignorance of figures extremely
inconvenient. When he was about fourteen he took up for the _third time_
the "_Cocker's Arithmetic_," _which had baffled him at school_, and
_ciphered all through it with ease and pleasure_. He then mastered a
work upon navigation, which included the rudiments of geometry, and thus
tasted "the inexhaustible charm of mathematics." He pursued a similar
course, we are told, in acquiring the art of composition, in which, at
length, he excelled most of the men of his time. When he was but a boy
of sixteen, he wrote so well that the pieces which he slyly sent to his
brother's paper were thought to have been written by some of the most
learned men in the colony.

Henry Clay, the "mill-boy of the slashes," was one of seven children of
a widow too poor to send him to any but a common country school, where
he was drilled only in the "three R's." But he used every spare moment
to study without a teacher, and in after years he was a king among
self-made men.

The most successful man is he who has triumphed over obstacles,
disadvantages and discouragements.

It is Goodyear in his rude laboratory enduring poverty and failure until
the pasty rubber is at length hardened; it is Edison biding his time in
baggage car and in printing office until that mysterious light and power
glows and throbs at his command; it is Carey on his cobbler's bench
nourishing the great purpose that at length carried the message of love
to benighted India;--these are the cases and examples of true success.

CHAPTER IV.

OUT OF PLACE.

The high prize of life, the crowning fortune of a man, is to be
born with a bias to some pursuit, which finds him in employment
and happiness.
--EMERSON.

The art of putting the right man in the right place is perhaps
the first in the science of government, but the art of finding
a satisfactory position for the discontented is the most
difficult.
--TALLEYRAND.

It is a celebrated thought of Socrates, that if all the
misfortunes of mankind were cast into a public stock, in order
to be equally distributed among the whole species, those who
now think themselves the most unhappy would prefer the share
they are already possessed of, before that which would fall to
them by such a division.
--ADDISON.

I was born to other things.
--TENNYSON.

How many a rustic Milton has passed by,
Stifling the speechless longings of his heart,
In unremitting drudgery and care!
How many a vulgar Cato has compelled
His energies, no longer tameless then,
To mould a pin, or fabricate a nail.
--SHELLEY.

"But I'm good for something," pleaded a young man whom a merchant was
about to discharge for his bluntness. "You are good for nothing as a
salesman," said his employer. "I am sure I can be useful," said the
youth. "How? Tell me how." "I don't know, sir, I don't know." "Nor do
I," said the merchant, laughing at the earnestness of his clerk. "Only
don't put me away, sir, don't put me away. Try me at something besides
selling. I cannot sell; I know I cannot sell." "I know that, too," said
the principal; "that is what is wrong." "But I can make myself useful
somehow," persisted the young man; "I know I can." He was placed in the
counting-house, where his aptitude for figures soon showed itself, and
in a few years he became not only chief cashier in the large store, but
an eminent accountant.

"Out of an art," says Bulwer, "a man may be so trivial you would mistake
him for an imbecile--at best, a grown infant. Put him into his art, and
how high he soars above you! How quietly he enters into a heaven of
which he has become a denizen, and unlocking the gates with his golden
key, admits you to follow, an humble reverent visitor."

A man out of place is like a fish out of water. Its fins mean nothing,
they are only a hindrance. The fish can do nothing but flounder out of
its element. But as soon as the fins feel the water, they mean
something. Fifty-two per cent of our college graduates studied law, not
because, in many cases, they have the slightest natural aptitude for it,
but because it is put down as the proper road to promotion.

A man never grows in personal power and moral stamina when out of his
place. If he grows at all, it is a narrow, one-sided, stunted growth,
not a manly growth. Nature abhors the slightest perversion of natural
aptitude or deviation from the sealed orders which accompany every soul
into this world.

A man out of place is not half a man. He feels unmanned, unsexed. He
cannot respect himself, hence he cannot be respected.

You can enter all kinds of horses for a race, but only those which have
natural adaptation for speed will make records; the others will only
make themselves ridiculous by their lumbering, unnatural exertions to
win. How many truck and family-horse lawyers make themselves ridiculous
by trying to speed on the law track, where courts and juries only laugh
at them. The effort to redeem themselves from scorn may enable them by
unnatural exertions to become fairly passable, but the same efforts
along the line of their strength or adaptation would make them kings in
their line.

"Jonathan," said Mr. Chace, when his son told of having nearly fitted
himself for college, "thou shalt go down to the machine-shop on Monday
morning." It was many years before Jonathan escaped from the shop to
work his way up to the position of a man of great influence as a United
States Senator from Rhode Island.

Galileo was sent to the university at Pisa at seventeen, with the
strict injunction not to neglect medical subjects for the alluring study
of philosophy or literature. But when he was eighteen he discovered the
great principle of the pendulum by a lamp left swinging in the
cathedral.

John Adams' father was a shoemaker; and, trying to teach his son the
art, gave him some "uppers" to cut out by a pattern which had a
three-cornered hole in it to hang it up by. The future statesman
followed the pattern, hole and all.

There is a tradition that Tennyson's first poems were published at the
instigation of his father's coachman. His grandfather gave the lad ten
shillings for writing an elegy on his grandmother. As he handed it to
him, he said; "There, that's the first money you ever earned by your
poetry, and take my word for it, it will be the last."

Murillo's mother had marked her boy for a priest, but nature had already
laid her hand upon him and marked him for her own. His mother was
shocked on returning from church one day to find that the child had
taken down the sacred family picture, "Jesus and the Lamb," and had
painted his own hat on the Saviour's head, and had changed the lamb into
a dog.

The poor boy's home was broken up, and he started out on foot and alone
to seek his fortune. All he had was courage and determination to make
something of himself. He not only became a famous artist, but a man of
great character.

"Let us people who are so uncommonly clever and learned," says
Thackeray, "have a great tenderness and pity for the folks who are not
endowed with the prodigious talents which we have. I have always had a
regard for dunces,--those of my own school days were among the
pleasantest of the fellows, and have turned out by no means the dullest
in life; whereas, many a youth who could turn off Latin hexameters by
the yard, and construe Greek quite glibly, is no better than a feeble
prig now, with not a pennyworth more brains than were in his head before
his beard grew."

"In the winter of 1824, there set in a great flood upon the town of
Sidmouth, the tide rose to a terrible height. In the midst of this
sublime and terrible storm, Dame Partington, who lived upon the beach,
was seen at the door of her house, with mop and pattens, trundling her
mop, squeezing out the sea-water, and vigorously pushing away the
Atlantic Ocean. The Atlantic was roused. Mrs. Partington's spirit was
up: but I need not tell you the contest was unequal; the Atlantic Ocean
beat Mrs. Partington. She was excellent at a slop or a puddle, but she
should not have meddled with a tempest."

How many Dame Partingtons there are of both sexes, and in every walk of
life!

The young swan is restless and uneasy until she finds the element she
has never before seen. Then,

"With arched neck
Between her white wings mantling proudly, rows
Her state with oary feet."

What a wretched failure was that of Haydon the painter. He thought he
failed through the world's ingratitude or injustice, but his failure was
due wholly to his being out of place. His bitter disappointments at his
half successes were really pitiable because to him they were more than
failures. He had not the slightest sense of color, yet went through life
under the delusion that he was an artist.

"If it is God's will to take any of my children by death, I hope it may
be Isaac," said the father of Dr. Isaac Barrow. "Why do you tell that
blockhead the same thing twenty times over?" asked John Wesley's father.
"Because," replied his mother, "if I had told him but nineteen times,
all my labor would have been lost, while now he will understand and
remember."

A man out of place may manage to get a living, but he has lost the
buoyancy, energy and enthusiasm which are as natural to a man in his
place as his breath. He is industrious, but he works mechanically and
without heart. It is to support himself and family, _not because he
cannot help it_. Dinner time does not come two hours before he realizes
it; a man out of place is constantly looking at his watch and thinking
of his salary.

If a man is in his place he is happy, joyous, cheerful, energetic,
fertile in resources. The days are all too short for him. All his
faculties give their consent to his work; say "yes" to his occupation.
He is a man; he respects himself and is happy because all his powers are
at play in their natural sphere. There is no compromising of his
faculties, no cramping of legal acumen upon the farm; no suppressing of
forensic oratorical powers at the shoemaker's bench; no stifling of
exuberance of physical strength, of visions of golden crops and blooded
cattle amid the loved country life in the dry clergyman's study,
composing sermons to put the congregation to sleep.

To be out of place is demoralizing to all the powers of manhood. We
can't cheat nature out of her aim; if she has set all the currents of
your life toward medicine or law, you will only be a botch at anything
else. Will-power and application cannot make a farmer of a born painter
any more than a lumbering draught horse can be changed into a race
horse. When the powers are not used along the line of their strength
they become demoralized, weakened, deteriorated. Self-respect,
enthusiasm and courage ooze out; we become half-hearted and success is
impossible.

Scott was called the great blockhead while in Edinburgh College. Grant's
mother called the future General and President, "Useless Grant," because
he was so unhandy and dull.

Erskine had at length found his place as a lawyer; he carried everything
before him at the bar. Had he remained in the navy he would probably
never have been heard from. When elected to Parliament, his lofty spirit
was chilled by the cold sarcasm and contemptuous indifference of Pitt,
whom he was expected by his friends to annihilate. But he was again out
of his place; he was shorn of his magic power and his eloquent tongue
faltered from a consciousness of being out of his place.

Gould failed as a storekeeper, tanner and surveyor and civil engineer,
before he got into a railroad office where he "struck his gait."

When extracts from James Russell Lowell's poem at Harvard were shown his
father at Rome, instead of being pleased the latter said, "James
promised me when I left home, that he would give up poetry and stick to
books. I had hoped that he had become less flighty." The world is full
of people at war with their positions.

Man only grows when he is developing along the lines of his own
individuality, and not when he is trying to be somebody else. All
attempts to imitate another man, when there is no one like you in all
creation, as the pattern was broken when you were born, is not only to
ruin your own pattern, but to make only an echo of the one imitated.
There is no strength off the lines of our own individuality.

Anywhere else we are dwarfs, weaklings, echoes, and the echo even of a
great man is a sorry contrast to even the smallest human being who is
himself.

CHAPTER V.

WHAT SHALL I DO?

No man ever made an ill-figure who understood his own talents,
nor a good one who mistook them.
--SWIFT.

Blessed is he who has found his work,--let him ask no other
blessing.
--CARLYLE.

Whatever you are by nature, keep to it; never desert your line
of talent. Be what nature intended you for, and you will
succeed; be anything else, and you will be ten thousand times
worse than nothing.
--SYDNEY SMITH.

He who is false to present duty breaks a thread in the loom,
and will find the flaw when he may have forgotten its cause.
--BEECHER.

I am glad to think
I am not bound to make the world go round;
But only to discover and to do,
With cheerful heart, the work that God appoints.
--JEAN INGELOW.

"Do that which is assigned you," says Emerson, "and you cannot hope too
much or dare too much. There is at this moment for you an utterance
brave and grand as that of the colossal chisel of Phidias, or trowel of
the Egyptians, or the pen of Moses or Dante, but different from all
these."

"I felt that I was in the world to do something, and thought I must,"
said Whittier, thus giving the secret of his great power. It is the man
who must enter law, literature, medicine, the ministry, or any other of
the overstocked professions, who will succeed. His certain call--that
is, his love for it, and his fidelity to it--are the imperious factors
of his career. If a man enters a profession simply because his
grandfather made a great name in it, or his mother wants him to, with no
love or adaptability for it, it were far better for him to be a day
laborer. In the humbler work, his intelligence may make him a leader; in
the other career he might do as much harm as a boulder rolled from its
place upon a railroad track, a menace to the next express.

Lowell said: "It is the vain endeavor to make ourselves what we are not,
that has strewn history with so many broken purposes, and lives left in
the rough."

"The age has no aversion to preaching as such," said Phillips Brooks,
"it may not listen to your preaching." But though it may not listen to
your preaching, it will wear your boots, or buy your flour, or see stars
through your telescope. It has a use for every person, and it is his
business to find out what that use is.

The following advertisement appeared several times in a paper without
bringing a letter:

"WANTED.--Situation by a Practical Printer, who is competent to
take charge of any department in a printing and publishing
house. Would accept a professorship in any of the academies.
Has no objection to teach ornamental painting and penmanship,
geometry, trigonometry, and many other sciences. Has had some
experience as a lay preacher. Would have no objection to form a
small class of young ladies and gentlemen to instruct them in
the higher branches. To a dentist or chiropodist he would be
invaluable; or he would cheerfully accept a position as bass or
tenor singer in a choir."

At length there appeared this addition to the notice:

"P.S. Will accept an offer to saw and split wood at less than
the usual rates."

This secured a situation at once, and the advertisement was seen no
more.

Don't wait for a higher position or a larger salary. Enlarge the
position you already occupy; put originality of method into it. Fill it
as it never was filled before. Be more prompt, more energetic, more
thorough, more polite than your predecessor or fellow-workmen. Study
your business, devise new modes of operation, be able to give your
employer points. The art lies not in giving satisfaction merely, not in
simply filling your place, but in doing better than was expected, in
surprising your employer; and the reward will be a better place and a
larger salary.

"He that hath a trade," says Franklin, "hath an estate; and he that hath
a calling hath a place of profit and honor. A ploughman on his legs is
higher than a gentleman on his knees."

_Follow your bent._ You cannot long fight successfully against your
aspirations. Parents, friends, or misfortune may stifle and suppress the
longings of the heart, by compelling you to perform unwelcome tasks;
but, like a volcano, the inner fire will burst the crusts which confine
it and pour forth its pent-up genius in eloquence, in song, in art, or
in some favorite industry. Beware of "a talent which you cannot hope to
practice in perfection." Nature hates all botched and half-finished
work, and will pronounce her curse upon it.

Your talent is your _call_. Your legitimate destiny speaks in your
character.

If you have found your place, your occupation has the consent of every
faculty of your being.

If possible, choose that occupation which focuses the largest amount of
your experience and tastes. You will then not only have a congenial
vocation, but will utilize largely your skill and business knowledge,
which is your true capital.

There is no doubt that every person has a special adaptation for his own
peculiar part in life. A very few--the geniuses, we call them--have this
marked in an unusual degree, and very early in life.

A man's business does more to make him than anything else. It hardens
his muscles, strengthens his body, quickens his blood, sharpens his
mind, corrects his judgment, wakes up his inventive genius, puts his
wits to work, starts him on the race of life, arouses his ambition,
makes him feel that he is a man and must fill a man's shoes, do a man's
work, bear a man's part in life, and show himself a man in that part. No
man feels himself a man who is not doing a man's business. A man without
employment is not a man. He does not prove by his works that he is a
man. A hundred and fifty pounds of bone and muscle do not make a man. A
good cranium full of brains is not a man. The bone and muscle and brain
must know how to do a man's work, think a man's thoughts, mark out a
man's path, and bear a man's weight of character and duty before they
constitute a man.

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