the education for which the world is ripe, is unfoldment, calling out the germs of possibilities, developing original force, fostering self-reliance, encouraging and stimulating initiative power and executive ability, cultivating all the faculties, and exercising, strengthening, and buttressing them.
We want leaders and originators more than we want followers or imitators. We have enough, and to spare, of those who are willing to lean on others. We want our young people to depend on themselves. We want them to be so educated that their qualities of leadership, their originality, and their individuality will be emphasized and strengthened instead of obliterated.
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 oneself, the qualities which characterize a leader, can be cultivated by every human being. But if these qualities are not drawn out in youth they may forever lie dormant in the soul.
Scores of college graduates, who have won their diplomas legitimately and honorably, fail hopelessly when they attempt to grapple with the practical side of life. They have no qualities of leadership, no independence of thought, and no self-reliance. They are stuffed with facts and theories, but their executive faculties, their powers of combination and assimilation, the qualities which grasp and hold and manipulate, all lie dormant within them. They were not trained in boyhood to depend upon their own judgment, hence it is weak, hesitating, and uncertain. Their common sense has never been put to the test. They do not know how to be aggressive, or how to marshal their facts and theories and reduce them to working proportions.
Whatever you learn in school or college, remember that it is the executive talent, the ability to do things, the power of achievement that counts. It is not the great scholar, who is brimful of facts and theories, but the practical man, who knows what he ought to do and who will do it, who deals with conditions, not theories, and who can bring about results, that is in demand everywhere.
Education is not a stuffing of the memory with facts and theories until it becomes like an unwieldy encyclopedia or dictionary that can not be handled with ease. A really educated man is not loaded down with text-book information that he can not put into practice. He knows how to utilize every bit of his knowledge. His education gives him executive power, and makes him master of himself, with ability to manipulate perfectly all the powers that God has planted in his soul. The man who is rightly educated will never be a leaner, imitator, or follower. He may not, necessarily, be a great leader, but he will not seek his opinions from others; he will trust his own judgment, will pilot his own bark, no matter how rough or troubled the waters, will be himself, and will live his own life, wherever his lot may be cast.
Chapter XVI.
The Passion For Achievement
What are the motives which keep men slaving after they have acquired a competence?” “Is ambition a selfish attribute?” These and similar questions are very frequently asked.
The passion for conquest, for power, the love of achievement, is one of the most dominant and persistent characteristics of human nature. With most men the bread-and-butter and housing problem, the question of getting a living, a competence, is only one, and often one of the least, of the motives for an active career.
We have an instinctive feeling that we have been set in motion by a Higher Power; that there is an invisible spring within us—the “imperious must”—which impels us to weave the pattern given us in the Mount of Transfiguration of our highest moment, to make our life-vision real. A divine impulse constantly urges us to reach our highest ideal. There is something back of our supreme ambitior deeper than a mere personal gratification. There is a vital connection between it and the great plan of creation, the progress, the final goal, of the race.
Even if dimly, we are conscious that we owe something to the world, and that it is our duty to pay the debt. There is something within which protests against our living idle, purposeless lives; which tells us that our debt to the race is a personal one. It tells us that our message to humanity is not transferable; that we must deliver it ourselves. No matter how much money we may have, we don’t feel quite right unless we are doing our part of the world’s work. We feel that it is mean, contemptible, to be drones in the great human hive; to eat, drink, wear, and use what others earn by hard labor. We have a sneaking feeling that we are criminals; that it is unworthy of us to shirk a manly or womanly part in life; it violates our sense of justice, of fairness.
These promptings of humanity and the yearning of every normal man and woman for a fuller, completer life; the craving for expansion, for growth; the desire to objectify our life-visions, to give birth to the children of our brain, to exercise our inventiveness, our ingenuity, to express our artistic temperament, our talents, whatever they may be; the inherent, instinctive longing to become that which we were intended to be; to weave the life-pattern given us at birth—these are the impelling motives for a creative career.
One man expresses himself, or delivers his message to humanity, through his inventive ability to give his fellow men that which will emancipate them from drudgery; another delivers his message through his artistic ability; another through science; another through oratory, through business, or his pen, and so on through all the modes of human expression, each delivers himself according to his talent. In every case the highest motive is beyond the question of mere living-getting.
The great artist does not paint simply for a living, but because he must express that divine thing in him that is struggling for expression. He has an unconquerable desire to put upon canvas the picture that haunts his brain. We all long to bring out the ideal, whatever it may be, that lives within us. We want to see it; we want the world to see it.
It is not so much what men get out of their struggles, as the inherent passion in every normal man for self-expression—to do the biggest thing possible to him—that urges them on. This is what keeps men going, always struggling to achieve.
Some savage tribes believe that the spirit of every conquered enemy enters into the conqueror and makes him so much stronger. It is certain that every business or professional conquest, or financial victory, every triumph over obstacles, makes the achiever so much larger, so much stronger a man.
The exercise of the creative faculties, the stretching of the mind over greater and greater problems, and the solving of them, constitute a powerful mental tonic and give a satisfaction which nothing else gives. Think of the tameness, the insipidity, the weakness, the mental flabbiness of the life of the inactive and purposeless man who has nothing special to do, no great life-motive, pushing him on, in comparison with that of the man who feels all the forces within him heaving and tugging away to accomplish a mighty purpose!
The idle, aimless man does not know the meaning of personal power or the satisfaction which comes to the doer, the achiever.
Those who wonder why men who already have a competence continue to struggle, to play the game with as much zeal and ardor as ever, when they might retire from the field, little realize the tremendous fascination of the great life-game, especially for those who have artistic talent and those who have the ability to do things; men who have great executive powers, qualities of leadership.
With as much reason might we wonder why great singers, artists, actors, authors, do not retire from active life, give up their work when they are at the zenith of their power, when they are just in a position to do the greatest thing possible to them, as to wonder why great business and professional men do not retire in the most fruitful period of their lives merely because they have attained a competence.
The unborn creatures
