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 yourself with beauty or with ugliness.

you surround

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.

This satisfaction with the lesser when the greater is possible often comes from relatives or friends telling you that you are doing well, and that you would better let well enough alone. These advisers say: "Don't take chances with a certainty. It is true you are not getting a very big salary, but it is a sure thing, and if you give it up with the hope of something better you may do worse.'

Very few of us realize how dependent our growth is on some special stimulus. Every act must have a motive. We do nothing outside of our automatic habitual acts without an underlying motive. Perhaps the strongest life motive of the average man is that which comes from his desire to get up in the world.

There was a force behind Lincoln which drove him from a log cabin up to the White House. There was a vision of the North Pole which haunted Peary, filled him with ambition to climb to the earth's uttermost boundary, and finally drove him, after repeated failures, to the Pole. The same indomitable inner force urged the despised young Jew, Benjamin Disraeli, to push his way up through the lower classes in England, up through the middle classes, up through the upper classes, until he stood a master, self-poised upon the topmost round of political and social power, the prime minister of the greatest country in the world.

The story of those men is the same at bottom as that of every man who has attained greatness.

They were continually urged forward and upward by some inward prompting they could not resist.

This instinctive impulse to keep pushing on and up is the most curious and the most interesting thing in the human life. It exists in every normal human being, and is just as pronounced and as real as the instinct of self-preservation. Upon this climbing instinct rests the destiny of the race. Without it men would still be savages. It is this incessant urge to go on and up, to climb, that has educated the brute out of man and lifted him from the Hottentot to the Gladstones and the Lincolns. But for this urge he would still be living in caves and huts. Civilization, as we know it, would not exist. There would be no great cities, no great factories, no railroads, no steamships, no beautiful homes or parks, pictures, sculpture or books, but for this mysterious urge which we call ambition, aspiration. This incessant inward prompting, call it ambition or what we will, this something which pushes men to their goal, is the expression in man of the universal force of evolution which is flowing Godward. It is a part of the great cosmic plan of creation. We do not create this urge, we do not manufacture it; it does not come by training. Every normal person feels this imperious must which is back of the flesh, but not of it, this internal urge which is ever pushing us on, even at the cost of our own discomfort and sacrifice.

It is a part of every atom, for all atoms are