How to Succeed

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Horace Vernet's enthusiasm and devotion to the one idea of his life knew
no bounds. He had himself lashed to the mast in a terrible gale on the
Mediterranean when all others on board were seized with terror, and with
great delight sketched the towering waves which threatened every minute
to swallow the vessel. Several writers tell the story that a great
artist, Giotto, about to paint the crucifixion, induced a poor man to
let him bind him upon a cross in order that he might get a better idea
of the terrible scene that he was about to put upon the canvas. He
promised faithfully that he would release his model in an hour, but to
the latter's horror the painter seized a dagger and plunged it into his
heart; and, while the blood was streaming from the ghastly wound,
painted his death agony.

Beecher was a very dull boy and was the last member of the family of
whom anything was expected. He had a weak memory, and disliked study. He
shunned society and wanted to go to sea. Even when he went to college
many of his classmates stood ahead of him, who have fallen into
oblivion. But when he was converted his whole life changed: he was full
of enthusiasm, hopefulness and zeal. Nothing was too menial for him to
undertake to carry his purpose. He chopped wood, built the fire in his
little church in Lawrenceburg, Ind., of only eighteen members, cleaned
the lamps, swept the floor and washed the windows. He built the fire,
baked, washed, when his wife was ill. The pent-up enthusiasm of his
ambitious life burst the barriers of his inhospitable surroundings until
he blossomed out into America's greatest pulpit orator.

When Handel was a little boy he bought a clavichord, hid it in the
attic, and went there at night to play upon it, muffling the strings
with small pieces of fine woolen cloth so that the sounds should not
wake the family. Michael Angelo neglected school to copy drawings which
he dared not carry home. Murillo filled the margin of his school-book
with drawings. Dryden read Polybius before he was ten years old. Le
Brum, when a boy, drew with a piece of charcoal on the walls of the
house. Pope wrote excellent verses at fourteen. Blaise Pascal, the
French mathematician, composed at sixteen a tract on the conic sections.

Professor Agassiz was so enthusiastic in his work and so loved the
fishes, the fowl and the cattle that it is said these creatures would
die for him to give him their skeletons. His father wanted him to fit
for commercial life, but the fish haunted him day and night.

Confucius said that "he was so eager in the pursuit of knowledge that he
forgot his food;" and that, "in the joy of its attainment, he forgot his
sorrows;" and that "he did not even perceive that old age was coming
on."

"That boy tries to make himself useful," said an employer of the errand
boy, George W. Childs. It is this trying to be useful and helpful that
promotes us in life.

Once, when Mr. Harvey, an accomplished mathematician, was in a
bookseller's shop, he saw a poor lad of mean appearance enter and write
something on a slip of paper and give it to the proprietor. On inquiry
he found this was a poor deaf boy, Kitto, who afterward became one of
the most noted Biblical scholars in the world, and who wrote his first
book in the poor-house. He had come to borrow a book. When a lad he had
fallen backward from a ladder thirty-five feet upon the pavement with a
load of slates that he was carrying to the roof. The poor lad was so
thirsty for books that he would borrow from booksellers who would loan
them to him out of pity, read them and return them.

The _Youth's Companion_ says that Mr. Edison in his new biography--his
"Life and Inventions"--describes the accidental method by which he
discovered the principle of the phonograph. There is a kind of accident
that happens only to a certain kind of man.

"I was singing to the mouthpiece of a telephone," Mr. Edison says, "when
the vibrations of the voice sent the fine steel point into my finger.
That set me to thinking. If I could record the actions of the point,
and send the point over the same surface afterward, I saw no reason why
the thing would not talk.

"I tried the experiment first on a slip of telegraph paper and found
that the point made an alphabet. I shouted the words 'Halloo! Halloo!'
into the mouthpiece, ran the paper back over the steel point, and heard
a faint 'Halloo! Halloo!' in return.

"I determined to make a machine that would work accurately, and gave my
assistants instructions, telling them what I had discovered. They
laughed at me. That's the whole story. The phonograph is the result of
the pricking of a finger."

It is one thing to hit upon an idea, however, and another thing to carry
it out to perfection. The machine would talk, but, like many young
children, it had difficulty with certain sounds--in the present case
with aspirants and sibilants. Mr. Edison's biographers say, but the
statement is somewhat exaggerated:

"He has frequently spent from fifteen to twenty hours daily, for six or
seven months on a stretch, dinning the word 'Spezia,' for example, into
the stubborn surface of the wax. 'Spezia,' roared the inventor, 'Pezia'
lisped the phonograph in tones of ladylike reserve, and so on through
thousands of graded repetitions till the desired results were obtained.

"The primary education of the phonograph was comical in the extreme. To
hear those grave and reverend signors, rich in scientific honors,
patiently reiterating:

Mary had a little lamb,
A little lamb, _lamb_, LAMB,

and elaborating that point with anxious gravity, was to receive a
practical demonstration of the eternal unfitness of things."

Milton, when blind, old and poor, showed a royal cheerfulness and never
"bated one jot of heart or hope, but steered right onward."

Dickens' characters seemed to possess him, and haunt him day and night
until properly portrayed in his stories.

At a time when it was considered dangerous to society in Europe for the
common people to read books and listen to lectures on any but religious
subjects, Charles Knight determined to enlighten the masses by cheap
literature. He believed that a paper could be instructive and not be
dull, cheap without being wicked. He started the _Penny Magazine_, which
acquired a circulation of 200,000 the first year. Knight projected the
_Penny Cyclopedia_, the _Library of Entertaining Knowledge_, _Half-Hours
With the Best Authors_, and other useful books at a low price. His whole
adult life was spent in the work of elevating the common people by
cheap, yet wholesome, publications. He died in poverty, but grateful
people have erected a noble monument over his ashes.

Demosthenes roused the torpid spirits of his countrymen to a vigorous
effort to preserve their independence against the designs of an
ambitious and artful prince, and Philip had just reason to say he was
more afraid of that man than of all the fleets and armies of the
Athenians.

Horace Greeley was a hampered genius who never had a chance to show
himself until he started the _Tribune_, into which he poured his whole
individuality, life and soul.

Emerson lost the first years of his life trying to be somebody else. He
finally came to himself and said: "If a single man plant himself
indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the whole world will come
round to him in the end." "Though we travel the world over to find the
beautiful we must carry it with us or we find it not." "The man that
stands by himself the universe stands by him also." "Take Michael
Angelo's course, 'to confide in one's self and be something of worth and
value.'" "None of us will ever accomplish anything excellent or
commanding except when he listens to this whisper which is heard by him
alone."

Many unknown writers would make fame and fortune if, like Bunyan and
Milton and Dickens and George Eliot and Scott and Emerson, they would
write their own lives in their MSS., if they would write about things
they have seen, that they have felt, that they have known. It is life
thoughts that stir and convince, that move and persuade, that carry
their very iron particles into the blood. The real heaven has never been
outdone by the ideal.

Neither poverty nor misfortune could keep Linnaeus from his botany.

The English and Austrian armies called Napoleon the
one-hundred-thousand-man. His presence was considered equal to that
force in battle.

The lesson he teaches is that which vigor always teaches--that there is
always room for it. To what heaps of cowardly doubts is not that man's
life an answer.

CHAPTER X.

TO BE GREAT, CONCENTRATE.

Let every one ascertain his special business and calling, and
then stick to it.
--FRANKLIN.

"He who follows two hares is sure to catch neither."

None sends his arrow to the mark in view,
Whose hand is feeble, or his aim untrue.
--COWPER.

He who wishes to fulfill his mission must be a man of one idea,
that is, of one great overmastering purpose, overshadowing all
his aims, and guiding and controlling his entire life.
--BATE.

The shortest way to do anything is to do only one thing at a
time.
--CECIL.

The power of concentration is one of the most valuable of
intellectual attainments.
--HORACE MANN.

The power of a man increases steadily by continuance in one
direction.
--EMERSON.

Careful attention to one thing often proves superior to genius
and art.
--CICERO.

"It puffed like a locomotive," said a boy of the donkey engine; "it
whistled like the steam-cars, but it didn't go anywhere."

The world is full of donkey-engines, of people who can whistle and puff
and pull, but they don't go anywhere, they have no definite aim, no
controlling purpose.

The great secret of Napoleon's power lay in his marvelous ability to
concentrate his forces upon a single point. After finding the weak place
in the enemy's ranks he would mass his men and hurl them upon the enemy
like an avalanche until he made a breach. What a lesson of the power of
concentration there is in that man's life! He was such a master of
himself that he could concentrate his powers upon the smallest detail as
well as upon an empire.

When Napoleon had anything to say he always went straight to his mark.
He had a purpose in everything he did; there was no dilly-dallying nor
shilly-shallying; he knew what he wanted to say, and said it. It was the
same with all his plans; what he wanted to do, he did. He always hit the
bull's eye. His great success in war was due largely to his definiteness
of aim. He knew what he wanted to do, and did it. He was like a great
burning glass, concentrating the rays of the sun upon a single spot; he
burned a hole wherever he went.

The sun's rays scattered do no execution, but concentrated in a burning
glass, they melt solid granite; yes, a diamond, even. There are plenty
of men who have ability enough, the rays of their faculties taken
separately are all right; but they are powerless to collect them, to
concentrate them upon a single object. They lack the burning glass of a
purpose, to focalize upon one spot the separate rays of their ability.
Versatile men, universal geniuses, are usually weak, because they have
no power to concentrate the rays of their ability, to focalize them upon
one point, until they burn a hole in whatever they undertake.

This power to bring all of one's scattered forces into one focal point
makes all the difference between success and failure. The sun might
blaze out upon the earth forever without burning a hole in it or setting
anything on fire; whereas a very few of these rays concentrated in a
burning glass would, as stated, transform a diamond into vapor.

Sir James Mackintosh was a man of marvelous ability. He excited in
everybody who knew him great expectations, but there was no purpose in
his life to act as a burning glass to collect the brilliant rays of his
intellect, by which he might have dazzled the world. Most men have
ability enough, if they could only focalize it into one grand, central,
all-absorbing purpose, to accomplish great things.

"To encourage me in my efforts to cultivate the power of attention,"
said a friend of John C. Calhoun, "he stated that to this end he had
early subjected his mind to such a rigid course of discipline, and had
persisted without faltering until he had acquired a perfect control over
it; that he could now confine it to any subject as long as he pleased,
without wandering even for a moment; that it was his uniform habit,
when he set out alone to walk or ride, to select a subject for
reflection, and that he never suffered his attention to wander from it
until he was satisfied with its examination."

"My friend laughs at me because I have but one idea," said a learned
American chemist; "but I have learned that if I wish ever to make a
breach in a wall, I must play my guns continually upon one point."

"It is his will that has made him what he is," said an intimate friend
of Philip D. Armour, the Chicago millionaire. "He fixes his eye on
something ahead, and no matter what rises upon the right or the left he
never sees it. He goes straight in pursuit of the object ahead, and
overtakes it at last. He never gives up what he undertakes."

While Horace Greeley would devote a column of the New York _Tribune_ to
an article, Thurlow Weed would treat the same subject in a few words in
the Albany _Evening Journal_, and put the argument into such shape as to
carry far more conviction.

"If you would be pungent," says Southey, "be brief; for it is with words
as with sunbeams--the more they are condensed the deeper they burn."

"The only valuable kind of study," said Sydney Smith, "is to read so
heartily that dinner-time comes two hours before you expected it; to
sit with your Livy before you and hear the geese cackling that saved the
Capitol, and to see with your own eyes the Carthaginian sutlers
gathering up the rings of the Roman knights after the battle of Cannae,
and heaping them into bushels, and to be so intimately present at the
actions you are reading of, that when anybody knocks at the door it will
take you two or three seconds to determine whether you are in your own
study or on the plains of Lombardy, looking at Hannibal's weather-beaten
face and admiring the splendor of his single eye."

"Never study on speculation," says Waters; "all such study is vain. Form
a plan; have an object; then work for it; learn all you can about it,
and you will be sure to succeed. What I mean by studying on speculation
is that aimless learning of things because they may be useful some day;
which is like the conduct of the woman who bought at auction a brass
door-plate with the name of Thompson on it, thinking it might be useful
some day!"

"I resolved, when I began to read law," said Edward Sugden, afterward
Lord St. Leonard, "to make everything I acquired perfectly my own, and
never go on to a second reading till I had entirely accomplished the
first. Many of the competitors read as much in a day as I did in a week;
but at the end of twelve months my knowledge was as fresh as on the day
it was acquired, while theirs had glided away from their recollection."

"Very often," says Sidney Smith, "the modern precept of education is,
'Be ignorant of nothing.' But my advice is, have the courage to be
ignorant of a great number of things, that you may avoid the calamity of
being ignorant of all things."

"Lord, help me to take fewer things into my hands, and to do them well,"
is a prayer recommended by Paxton Hood to an overworked man.

"Many persons seeing me so much engaged in active life," said Edward
Bulwer Lytton, "and as much about the world as if I had never been a
student, have said to me, 'When do you get time to write all your books?
How on earth do you contrive to do so much work?' I shall surprise you
by the answer I made. The answer is this--I contrive to do so much work
by never doing too much at a time. A man to get through work well must
not overwork himself; or, if he do too much to-day, the reaction of
fatigue will come, and he will be obliged to do too little to-morrow.
Now, since I began really and earnestly to study, which was not till I
had left college, and was actually in the world, I may perhaps say that
I have gone through as large a course of general reading as most men of
my time. I have traveled much and I have seen much; I have mixed much
in politics, and in the various business of life; and in addition to all
this, I have published somewhere about sixty volumes, some upon subjects
requiring much special research. And what time do you think, as a
general rule, I have devoted to study, to reading, and writing? Not more
than three hours a day; and, when Parliament is sitting, not always
that. But then, during these three hours, I have given my whole
attention to what I was about."

"The things that are crowded out of a life are the test of that life.
Not what we would like, but what we long for and strive for with all our
might we attain."

"One great cause of failure of young men in business," says Carnegie,
"is lack of concentration. They are prone to seek outside investments.
The cause of many a surprising failure lies in so doing. Every dollar of
capital and credit, every business-thought, should be concentrated upon
the one business upon which a man has embarked. He should never scatter
his shot. It is a poor business which will not yield better returns for
increased capital than any outside investment. No man or set of men or
corporation can manage a business-man's capital as well as he can manage
it himself. The rule, 'Do not put all your eggs in one basket,' does not
apply to a man's life-work. Put all your eggs in one basket and then
watch that basket, is the true doctrine--the most valuable rule of all."

"A man must not only desire to be right," said Beecher, "he must _be_
right. You may say, 'I wish to send this ball so as to kill the lion
crouching yonder, ready to spring upon me. My wishes are all right, and
I hope Providence will direct the ball.' Providence won't. You must do
it; and if you do not, you are a dead man."

The ruling idea of Milton's life and the key to his mental history is
his resolve to produce a great poem. Not that the aspiration in itself
is singular, for it is probably shared in by every poet in his turn. As
every clever schoolboy is destined by himself or his friends to become
Lord-Chancellor, and every private in the French army carries in his
haversack the baton of a marshal, so it is a necessary ingredient of the
dream of Parnassus that it should embody itself in a form of surpassing
brilliance. What distinguishes Milton from the crowd of youthful
literary aspirants, _audax juventa_, is his constancy of resolve. He not
only nourished through manhood the dream of youth, keeping under the
importunate instincts which carry off most ambitions in middle life into
the pursuit of place, profit, honor--the thorns which spring up and
smother the wheat--but carried out his dream in its integrity in old
age. He formed himself for this achievement and no other. Study at home,
travel abroad, the arena of political controversy, the public service,
the practice of the domestic virtues, were so many parts of the
schooling which was to make a poet.

Bismarck adopted it as the aim of his public life "to snatch Germany
from Austrian oppression," and to gather round Prussia, in a North
German Confederation, all the states whose tone of thought, religion,
manners and interest "were in harmony with those of Prussia." "To attain
this end," he once said in conversation, "I would brave all
dangers--exile, the scaffold itself. What matter if they hang me,
provided the rope with which I am hung binds this new Germany firmly to
the Prussian throne?"

It is related of Greeley that, when he was writing his "American
Conflict," he found it necessary to conceal himself somewhere, to
prevent constant interruptions. He accordingly took a room in the Bible
house, where he worked from ten in the morning till five in the
afternoon, and then appeared in the sanctum, seemingly as fresh as ever.

Cooper Institute is the evening school which Peter Cooper, as long ago
as 1810, resolved to found some day, when he was looking about as an
apprentice for a place where he could go to school evenings. Through all
his career in various branches of business he never lost sight of this
object; and, as his wealth increased, he was pleased that it brought
nearer the realization of his dream.

"See a great lawyer like Rufus Choate," says Dr. Storrs, "in a case
where his convictions are strong and his feelings are enlisted. He saw
long ago, as he glanced over the box, that five of those in it were
sympathetic with him; as he went on he became equally certain of seven;
the number now has risen to ten; but two are still left whom he feels
that he has not persuaded or mastered. Upon them he now concentrates his
power, summing up the facts, setting forth anew and more forcibly the
principles, urging upon them his view of the case with a more and more
intense action of his mind upon theirs, until one only is left. Like the
blow of a hammer, continually repeated until the iron bar crumbles
beneath it, his whole force comes with ceaseless percussion on that one
mind till it has yielded, and accepts the conviction on which the
pleader's purpose is fixed. Men say afterward, 'He surpassed himself.'
It was only because the singleness of his aim gave unity, intensity, and
overpowering energy to the mind."

"The foreman of the jury, however," said Whipple, "was a hard-hearted,
practical man, a model of business intellect and integrity, but with an
incapacity of understanding any intellect or conscience radically
differing from his own. Mr. Choate's argument, as far as the facts and
the law were concerned, was through in an hour. Still he went on
speaking. Hour after hour passed, and yet he continued to speak with
constantly increasing eloquence, repeating and recapitulating, without
any seeming reason, facts which he had already stated and arguments
which he had already urged. The truth was, as I gradually learned, that
he was engaged in a hand-to-hand--or rather in a brain-to-brain and a
heart-to-heart--contest with the foreman, whose resistance he was
determined to break down, but who confronted him for three hours with
defiance observable in every rigid line of his honest countenance. 'You
fool!' was the burden of the advocate's ingenious argument. 'You
rascal!' was the phrase legibly printed on the foreman's incredulous
face. But at last the features of the foreman began to relax, and at the
end the stern lines melted into acquiescence with the opinion of the
advocate, who had been storming at the defences of his mind, his heart,
and his conscience for five hours, and had now entered as victor. The
verdict was 'Not guilty.'"

"He who would do some great thing in this short life must apply himself
to the work with such a concentration of his forces as, to idle
spectators, who live only to amuse themselves, looks like insanity."

It is generally thought that when a man is said to be dissipated in his
habits he must be a drinking man, or a gambler, or licentious, or all
three; but dissipation is of two kinds, coarse and refined. A man can
dissipate or scatter all of his mental energies and physical power by
indulging in too many respectable diversions, as easily as in habits of
a viler nature. Property and its cares make some men dissipated; too
many friends make others. The exactions of "society," the balls,
parties, receptions, and various entertainments constantly being given
and attended by the _beau monde_, constitute a most wasting species of
dissipation. Others, again, fritter away all their time and strength in
political agitations, or in controversies and gossip; others in idling
with music or some other one of the fine arts; others in feasting or
fasting, as their dispositions and feelings incline. But the man of
concentration of purpose is never a dissipated man in any sense, good or
bad. He has no time to devote to useless trifling of any kind, but puts
in as many strokes of faithful work as possible toward the attainment of
some definite good.

CHAPTER XI.

AT ONCE.

Note the sublime precision that leads the earth over a circuit
of 500,000,000 miles back to the solstice at the appointed
moment without the loss of one second--no, not the millionth
part of a second--for ages and ages of which it traveled that
imperial road.
--EDWARD EVERETT.

Despatch is the soul of business.
--CHESTERFIELD.

Unfaithfulness in the keeping of an appointment is an act of
clear dishonesty. You may as well borrow a person's money as
his time.
--HORACE MANN.

By the street of by-and-by one arrives at the house of never.
--CERVANTES.

The greatest thief this world has ever produced is
procrastination, and he is still at large.
--H. W. SHAW.

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