The University of Hard Knocks Part 12

You must solve your own problems and carry your own loads to have a strong mind and back. Anybody who does for you regularly what you can do for yourself--anybody who gives you regularly what you can earn for yourself, is robbing you of your birthright.

Father and mother can put money in your pocket, ideas in your head and food in your stomach, but you cannot own it save as you digest it--put it into your life.

I have read somewhere about a man who found a coc.o.o.n and put it in his house where he could watch it develop. One day he saw a little insect struggling inside the coc.o.o.n. It was trying to get out of the envelope.

It seemed in trouble and needed help. He opened the envelope with a knife and set the struggling insect free. But out came a monstrosity that soon died. It had an over-developed body and under-developed wings. He learned that helping the insect was killing it. He took away from it the very thing it had to have--the struggle. For it was this struggle of breaking its own way out of that envelope that was needed to reduce its body and develop its wings.

Not Packhorse Work

But remember there is little virtue in work unless it is getting us somewhere. Just work that gets us three meals a day and a place to lie down to sleep, then another day of the same grind, then a year of it and years following until our machine is worn out and on the junkpile, means little. "One day nearer home" for such a worker means one day nearer the sc.r.a.pheap.

Such a worker is like the packhorse who goes forward to keep ahead of the whip. Such a worker is the horse we used to have hitched to the sorghum mill. Round and round that horse went, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, his head down, without ambition enough to p.r.i.c.k up his ears.

Such work deadens and stupefies. The ma.s.ses work about that way. They regard work as a necessary evil. They are right--such work is a necessary evil, and they make it such. They follow their nose. "Dumb, driven cattle."

But getting a vision of life, and working to grow upward to it, that is the work that brings the joy and the greatness.

When we are growing and letting our faculties develop, we will love even the packhorse job, because it is our "meal ticket" that enables us to travel upward.

"Helping" the Turkeys

One time I put some turkey eggs under the mother hen and waited day by day for them to hatch. And sure enough, one day the eggs began to crack and the little turkeys began to stick their heads out of the sh.e.l.ls.

Some of the little turkeys came out from the sh.e.l.ls all right, but some of them stuck in the sh.e.l.ls.

"Sh.e.l.l out, little turkeys, sh.e.l.l out," I urged, "for Thanksgiving is coming. Sh.e.l.l out!"

But they stuck to the sh.e.l.ls.

"Little turkeys, I'll have to help you. I'll have to sh.e.l.l you by hand." So I picked the sh.e.l.ls off. "Little turkeys, you will never know how fortunate you are. Ordinary turkeys do not have these advantages.

Ordinary turkeys do not get sh.e.l.led by hand."

Did I help them? I killed them, or stunted them. Not one of the turkeys was "right" that I helped. They were runts. One of them was a regular Harry Thaw turkey. They had too many silk socks. Too many "advantages."

Children, you must crack your own sh.e.l.ls. You must overcome your own obstacles to develop your own powers.

A rich boy can succeed, but he has a poorer chance than a poor boy. The cards are against him. He must succeed in spite of his "advantages."

I am pleading for you to get a great arm, a great mind, a great character, for the joy of having a larger life. I am pleading with you to know the joy of overcoming and having the angels come and minister to you.

Happiness in Our Work

Children, I am pleading with you to find happiness. All the world is seeking happiness, but so many are seeking it by rattling down instead of by shaking up.

The happiness is in going up--in developing a greater arm, a greater mind, a greater character.

Happiness is the joy of overcoming. It is the delight of an expanding consciousness. It is the cry of the eagle mounting upward. It is the proof that we are progressing.

We find happiness in our work, not outside of our work. If we cannot find happiness in our work, we have the wrong job. Find the work that fits your talents, and stop watching the clock and planning vacations.

Loving friends used to warn me against "breaking down." They scared me into "taking care" of myself. And I got to taking such good care of myself and watching for symptoms that I became a physical wreck.

I saved myself by getting busier. I plunged into work I love. I found my job in my work, not away from it, and the work refreshed me and rejuvenated me. Now I do two men's work, and have grown from a skinny, fretful, nervous wreck into a hearty, happy man. This has been a great surprise to my friends and a great disappointment to the undertaker. I am an editor in the daytime and a lecturer at night.

I edit all day and take a vacation lecturing at night. I lecture almost every day of the year--maybe two or three times some days--and then take a vacation by editing and writing. Thus every day is jam full of play and vacation and good times. The year is one round of joy, and I ought to pay people for the privilege of speaking and writing to them instead of them paying me!

If I did not like my work, of course, I would be carrying a terrible burden and would speedily collapse.

You see, I have no time nowadays to break down. I have no time to think and grunt and worry about my body. And like Paul I am happy to be "absent from the body and present with the Lord." Thus this old body behaves just beautifully and wags along like the tail follows the dog when I forget all about it. The grunter lets the tail wag the dog.

I have never known a case of genuine "overwork." I have never known of anyone killing himself by working. But I have known of mult.i.tudes killing themselves by taking vacations.

The people who think they are overworking are merely overworrying. This is one species of selfishness.

To worry is to doubt G.o.d.

To work at the things you love, or for those you love, is to turn work into play and duty into privilege.

When we love our work, it is not work, it is life.

Many Kinds of Drunkards

The world is trying to find happiness in being amused. The world is amus.e.m.e.nt-mad. Vacations, Coca Cola and moviemania!

What a sad, empty lot of rattlers! Look over the bills of the movies, look over the newsstands and see a picture of the popular mind, for these places keep just what the people want to buy. What a lot of mental frog-pond and moral slum our boys and girls wade thru!

There are ten literary drunkards to one alcoholic drunkard. There are a hundred amus.e.m.e.nt drunkards to one victim of strong drink. And all just as hard to cure.

We have to have amus.e.m.e.nt, but if we fill our lives with nothing but amus.e.m.e.nt, we never grow. We go thru our lives babies with new rattleboxes and "sugar-t.i.ts."

Almost every day as I go along the street to some hall to lecture, I hear somebody asking, "What are they going to have in the hall tonight?"