attempt to do what he has the ability to accomlish. Although he has been a great many years preparing for the launching of his life ship it is still in dry dock, and it may never see the ocean.

Emerson says: "The law of nature is, Do the thing and you shall have the power; but they who do not the thing have not the power." Initiative grows with use.

Fear is one of the worst enemies of initiative; it would paralyze even the initiative of a Columbus. Multitudes of people, if they could get rid of the chronic fear and worry which paralyzes their initiative, could do wonderful things. Anxiety, jealousy, morbid moods, over-sensitiveness, discouragement, despondency, blues, all these things tend to darken the initiative, so that we do not attempt many things we might carry out successfully. Mrs. Grundy has paralyzed the initiative of a vast multitude of people. We are so afraid that something might happen to our undertaking, it might not be successful, and then people would laugh at us or ridicule us.

We are not quite sure we have the ability to do what we long to do, and if we should not happen to be successful then people would say: "Well, I did not believe he could do it. He has not the ability."

I have known several men who have suffered from lack of confidence and fear of failure whenever they have attempted to act on their own ini

tiative, to get great benefit from self-encouragement through suggestion.

Self-assertion, the spirit of independence, the courage, the manhood which respects its own powers and is determined to rely upon them, and belief in one's self, the qualities which characterize a leader, can be cultivated by every human being.

Every man who has made his mark on the world has found his projectile power inside of him. There sleeps the giant powder which will project you to your goal. Do not look to others to push you, to give you a pull or use their influence. Your resources, your assets, are right inside of you; they are nowhere else.

The only help that young Woolworth, the founder of the five and ten cent stores throughout the country, got was three hundred dollars he borrowed to start in business with. When as a boy he asked his employer, a country storekeeper, to let him collect on a table all of the things that were sold for five and ten cents to see if he could not increase their sale by calling people's attention to them, he was finding expression for the giant powder pent up inside of him.

If you feel paralyzed by the very responsibility of deciding things, beginning things of your own accord, make up your mind that, if you ever are to amount to anything, you must strangle this fault. The way to do this is to start out every morning with the grim resolution not to allow yourself,

during the day, to waver, to wait for somebody to start things and show you the way. Resolve that during the day you are going to be a pusher, a leader; that you are not going to be a trailer, not going to wait for somebody else to tell you what to do and how to do it. You are going to take the initiative, start things yourself, and put them through without advice.

Every morning say to yourself: "Now, to-day I am going to be a Theodore Roosevelt," (or a Carnegie, or a Rockfeller, or some one else who has had the reputation for beginning things with vigor and pushing them to a finish with persistency and grit). You will be surprised to see how the bug-bear of beginning things will vanish.

What a sorry sight is a man with great possibilities of leadership following somebody else all his life, seeking the advice of others when he is amply able to give it, and never daring to venture on his own judgment, because he has always leaned upon others, or depended upon some one else to lead the way! His common sense and power of independent decision, his strongest inherent qualities, lie dormant within him. He is doing the work of a pigmy when he has the undeveloped capabilities of a giant.

If you want to be an achiever, to have the power to do things, just imagine yourself a Robinson Crusoe, cast on a desert island, with no tools, no machines, nothing to work with except your hands

and brain. What you eat and what you wear, every necessity of life, must be the result of your own thinking, the offspring of your own brain, the work of your own hands. There is plenty of material on your island, from which may be made everything of which you can think, but there is no one to help you fashion it to human use. That is the problem you yourself must work out. It will all depend upon yourself whether you live in a hovel or in a palace on your island, whether you surround yourself with beauty or with ugliness.

Every human being at the outset of his career is in reality placed on such an island as this, and his little world must be of his own building.

He who strikes out boldly, who does not wait for time or tide, who does not sit on the stone of Fate, waiting for an opportunity to come along, who goes through obstacles and not over or around them, who is not waiting for others to speak, think, or act, is the man who is going to win in these strenuous days. There is a great demand for the self-poised man—the man who is not afraid of himself, who, if he cannot say "I will," at least can say "I will try."

The man who cuts his way through the world to-day may not be a scholar; he may not be clever; but he must have that persistent determination that knows no retreat; that plus-energy which cannot be repelled; that courage which never falters or cringes. He must be a man with initiative.

THE CLIMBING HABIT

"The youth who doesn't look up will look down, and the spirit that does not soar is destined to grovel."

W

'HEN a man who is said to be the highest salaried official in the United States was asked to give the secret of his success, he replied, "I haven't succeeded. No real man ever succeeds. There is always a larger goal ahead."

It is the small man who succeeds in his own estimation. Really great men never reach their goal, because they are constantly pushing their horizon out further and further, getting a broader vision, a larger outlook, and their ambition grows with their achievement.

Don't kill the climbing instinct implanted in you by the Creator by limiting your ambition to a low aim. You can only grow by reaching up to the thing above you.

If you are getting a fair salary in a mediocre position there is danger of hypnotizing yourself into the belief that there is no need to exert yourself very much to get up higher. There is danger of limiting your ambition so that you will be half content to remain a perpetual clerk when you have the ability to do much better.