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and who work hard, but who, tification, fail to make good.

greatly to their morThere is some lack

in their make-up, some screw loose in their mentality, some little defect, some invisible thread, not noticed very much in childhood, perhaps, which now holds them back.

I have talked with many of these people, and they do not seem to know why they do not get on. They are honest, sincere, eager to make the most of themselves, yet because of some little thing, some mental defect which could long ago have been corrected had they known about it, they do not get on.

If you could have seen yourself as you really were, faults and all; if you could have measured yourself up at the very outset of your career as others saw and measured you, you could have saved yourself many humiliating experiences and bitter defeats in the past. You would not have stumbled and fumbled and blundered as you have, because your mistakes have been caused by weaknesses which you did not even know you had, or if you did know, you never dreamed of their becoming so serious later on as to prove handicaps to your dearest ambition.

In order to make the most of our assets we need the aid of every faculty and function of our being. No matter how handicapped you may be, you are the controller of your own forces, and you may make them friends to push you along or enemies

to drag you back. You are the captain of your mental team and your individual faculties, and the way you train them, the way you command your team, the way you play the great life game, will determine whether you shall be a success or a failure.

Your progress, of course, will depend almost wholly on your faithfulness to your task. For instance, if you conscientiously exercise your weak points and try to keep them up to standard to-day, and neglect them to-morrow, to-day's efforts will be lost, and they will drop down to the level of yesterday.

Few of us are willing to pay the price of excellence, but if we expect to continue growing we must keep right after ourselves. We are too easy with ourselves. We coddle and pity ourselves too much, and find all sorts of excuses for our failure to get on. We blame everything but the right thing. The trouble is in ourselves. "It is not in our stars, but in ourselves that we are underlings." It is too much trouble to brace up our weak points. Some of us do not like to admit them even to ourselves. It is so much pleasanter and so much easier to work on the strong links in our chain. Our pride is in these, and we like to dwell on them, to make the most of them, and to ignore the others. But if we are not honest with ourselves, if we haven't enough enterprise, energy, and determination to rise above the things which down the weak

and trip up the unworthy, of course we must take the consequences. There is only one price for real success—honest work in building ourselves along right physical and mental lines.

If you are not doing more than fifty per cent. of what, everything considered, you know you ought to do, have a good heart-to-heart talk with that other self, the real but invisible you inside the visible man, something after this fashion:

"Now, John, we have come to a crisis in our career. Here I find the years flying by with no adequate return for my efforts. I am not accomplishing one-half of what I can and ought to accomplish. I can't afford to go on in this mediocre, half and half way until I strike the inevitable years of diminishing returns. If I am ever to make a success of life I haven't a day to spare, for I have already lost precious years which should have borne better fruit. Something tells me that I can do infinitely better than I have done so far. Every time I see someone else with no greater ability, no more favorable opportunity, doing better than I have yet done; every time I read of any one doing the thing that I have so long dreamed of doing, the interrogation leaps into my mind 'Why can't I do it?' Now I not only know that I can, but I know I shall do it. I am master of myself—mind and body must do my bidding. All my faculties must obey me in making my life the success my Creator meant it to be."

Now, after some such earnest talk with yourself get paper and pencil, and go over your personal chart once more. Analyze yourself again and again, studying closely each one of the faculties which are called into play in every big manly success, and see whether you are conscientiously and persistently doing your best to strengthen those which you have found to be weak, and to restrain those which are naturally too strong.

The things which brought the first gleam of hope to Columbus's discouraged, mutinous crew was the discovery of bits of dry wood, branches of trees, and plants floating on the water. This was a sign that land was not very far away, and the men took new heart and pressed on to the great unknown continent still hidden from their sight.

Now, there are certain signs in our lives that indicate possible undiscovered continents of ability and of power in the great within of ourselves. These signs, if rightly understood and followed, will keep us always on a voyage of self-discovery.

If you are dead-in-earnest; if you feel a great ambition welling up in you which has not yet been satisfied; if you have a passion for growth, for selfimprovement; if you yearn for a larger life, you may be sure that that larger life is possible to you, that there is something bigger in you than you have yet discovered.

On the other hand, if you are listless, ambitionless, if work to you is drudgery, if life does not

seem to you the grandest boon ever bestowed on mortal, if you do not feel an unspeakable delight and satisfaction in being alive, if you are not grateful for the chance to make good in such a magnificent world, then you are not likely to do anything larger than you have already done.

We all have a prophetic faculty which points the way to what is in store for us, gives us an inkling of the nature of the undiscovered territory within us. Unless we wilfully close our minds to the truth, we cannot mistake the signs. A divine hunger for growth is a sure sign that there is something larger in you. It is the vision of the future which you have not yet been able to make real.

The mere conviction that you have a vast amount of unused ability, the consciousness of possessing possibilities which have not yet become realities, will mean everything to you. It will prove an irresistible stimulus to your advancement because, as Phillips Brooks said, no man can be content to go on living a half life when he has discovered that a larger, fuller, completer life is possible.

If there is anything that should make a tremendous call upon our efforts it is the backing up of our only chance in this world, in fact the only chance we know anything about. We may know nothing about what is coming to us in the next life, but we do know that a great opportunity confronts us here and now, at the very outset of our career

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