Medina High School - Medinian Yearbook (Medina, OH)

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12 Annual are his ten fingers.” Remember the lesson of the hare and the tortoise — the hare, the genius; the tortoise, the plodder: “ The heights by great men won and kept, Were not attained by sudden flight, But they, while their companions slept, Were toiling upward in the night.” II. The second essential of success consists in fitting one’s self into the work for which one is fitted — “Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it.” While it is absolutely true that work is the fundamental essential of success, work is not all there is to it. There are thousands of people who work, and work hard, and yet are not successful. Brawn is not all that is required to make success, it also takes some brains. It is not enough that a man find work, he must find his work. While all that we have said about the futility of depending on genius is true, this is also true, that every person has his own peculiar talents and capabilities. One is fit for some kinds of work, and unfit for other kinds. The reason that some hard-working people are nevertheless unsuccessful is not because they do not work hard enough, but because they are not engaged in the right kind of work. There are men trying to preach Christ, and wearing out the saints of the Most High, who would be magnificently successful plant- ing corn. There are attorneys practicing at law, and eking out a precarious and nefarious existence, who would be noble and honorable successes digging ditches. There are doctors peddling pills, and acting as the advance agents for the tombstone business, who would be glorious successes building bridges. There are starving poets writing sonnets and impecuni- ous artists painting sunsets, who would be splendid successes writing life insurance and painting barns. There are young ladies pounding out their sweet young lives on the key- board of ' a grand piano, driving everybody to the distance, who would be simply irresistible in a kitchen apron. Now the reason that these are failures in their chosen vocations is not because they do not work, but because they are not at the right kind of work. They have not found their place. God has put into this world an almost infinite variety of work. He has equipped human nature with an equally infinite variety of talents. Furthermore, He has given to each individual human being the faculties of judgment, reason, and choice. It is left largely to the individual person to choose his own work. It is absolutely essential to success that one find the work for which by nature, experience, or training, one is best fitted. This process of finding one’s own peculiar task in the world’s work is a serious matter. Mazah , of my text, the Hebrew verb for findeth , is not a passive, but an active, alert word. There is no “ happenstance ” about it. It is not find in the sense of “ stumbling upon,” as one might happen to find a horseshoe during a stroll, or a sweetheart at a summer resort. Mazah has in it the element of conscious search, the process of walking the streets from morning until night looking for a job, and not resting until that job is found. A subsidiary meaning of mazah is acquire. Christ said, “ I go to prepare a place for you.” In heaven, therefore, every person steps into a place prepared for him, but we are not yet in heaven, so here we must often make our place for ourselves — if we cannot find our place, we must acquire a place for ourselves. The men who today stand on the top rung of the ladder of success are usually not the men who at some point in their career stumbled upon a vacant pair of shoes and had sense enough to see that they fit their feet and put them on, but they are usually the men who have made the shoes for themselves, soles and uppers both. An interesting example of this is the recent remarkable development of the jitney bus. Last December some one in the city of Los Angeles conceived the idea of running an automobile in competition with the streetcar and charging the same fare as the streetcar. Although the automobile has been with us successfully for quite a number of years, no

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©I ye Animal 11 tonight is testimony to your past success. It means that you have been successful in your studies and examinations, and have brought your high school course to a worthy comple- tion. You are to be highly congratulated on your past achievements. But you are not here tonight merely for the delicious sensation of listening to congrat- ulations on your past success, you are here for a more serious purpose. These are your commencement, not your completion, days. Although these graduating days inevitably cause you to look wistfully back over your happy high school career, yet today your faces front the future as never before, and more opportune and appropriate than our congrat- ulations on your past success are our wishes for the success of your future. But you already know from sad experience that it takes more than wishes to mate- rialize access. If good wishes would pass examinations, every scholar would always be marked .100, or A plus. “ If wishes were horses, beggars might ride,” is the old saying, but you have learned that it takes more than a “ pony ” to get successful grades. Your future success, young people, depends upon something more substantial than our wishes, sincere as they may be. Your future success is conditional on your own application of certain practical principles, on your own adoption of and adaption to certain eternal essentials. Surely we can not better occupy the time we are to be together tonight than by a discussion of these principles and essentials of success. I will present them as they are contained in the chosen text: ‘‘Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might, for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in Sheol, whither thou goest.” Four essentials of success does this ancient prescription present. I. The first essential is effort — “ Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it.” I suppose it is true of success, as Shakespeare says of greatness, that some are born successful, some achieve success, and some have success thrust upon them. But by far the greatest proportion of successes are those of achievement. The others are the rare and seldom exceptions., Success is not the child of luck, but of pluck; not the result of acci- dent, but of effort. There is no royal road to success. Men are not carried to the sky- heights of success on flowery beds of ease. The price of success is work, labor, energy, effort ! It is one of the most deadly and dangerous fallacies which supposes that genius is essentia] to success. Genius, according to the popular notion, is that peculiar inborn quality which makes success easy and certain. It is that which people have in mind when they explain a person who is a failure in everything he undertakes, by saying, “ It simply is not in him to succeed,” meaning that success requires that a person have in him some peculiar quality of genius. To be sure, the person who succeeds must have genius in him — but it is the genius for work! Says Ruskin truly: “Whenever I hear of any young man starting out in the battle of life, and praised as being a man of promise, a man of genius, I always ask just one question, ‘ Does he work?’ ” That is the decisive question, “ Does he work? ” In my day I have seen several “ infant wonders ” and “ knee-pant prodigies ” for whom, on high school class day, the class prophet made wonderful predictions, but the prophecies never came true simply because the wonderful prodigy went out into the world believing himself to be a great genius to whom success would come as a matter of course. He had to learn by bitter experience that the stern Goddess of Success bestows her laurels, not upon those who have “ swelled heads,” but upon those whose muscles and joints are swollen with labor! Young people, never forget that the first essential of success is effort. Work wins! Effort is effective! Labor conquers all things! Perspiration is a mighty good substitute for inspiration! Remember Robert Collyer’s homely suggestion, “A man’s best friends

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Annual 13 one seems ever to have thot of the jitney bus idea before. A profitable business was made where it had never existed before. From Los Angeles the jitney bus idea has spread to all of the great cities of the country, and quite uniformly successful. The point of this illustration is that the most successful are not the ones who take over, or have thrust upon them, some vacant job, but are the ones who make or acquire a place for themselves in the complex economy of modern life. Milton is only partially right when he says : “ To know That which before us lies in daily life Is the prime wisdom.” The prime wisdom, it seems to me, is to be able to place something before ns in daily life when there isn ' t anything there ! That is, not only to find one’s place, but to make one’s place in the world. But we cannot afford to ignore the caution in the word “Whatsoever ” — “Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do.” The ranks of the unsuccessful are full of people who believed themselves, either rightly or wrongly, to be peculiarly fitted for a certain kind of work. No opportunity for that particular vocation opened up, therefore they did nothing. “Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it!” It may not be the job that you would like, but take the best job that offers; it may not be the kind of work for which you believe yourself to be fitted, but take the nearest thing to it that opens up. The men who today stand as the exponents of success are the men who were not ashamed or afraid to tackle the next best thing. The principle of the evangelistic hymn is universal in its application : “ If you are too weak to journey Up the mountain steep and high, You can stand within the valley, While the multitude go by; If you can not speak like angels, if you can not preach like Paul, You can tell the love of Jesus, You can say he died for all.” III. Having agreed that work is the foundation of success, and having found one’s own work, the next essential of success requires that one put into his work the very best that is in him, “Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might.” We get out of life in proportion as we put in. The law of compensation is unerring. “ Be not deceived, God is not mocked, for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap. He that soweth sparingly shall reap also sparingly; and he that soweth bountifully shall reap also bountifully.” This refers both to the quantity and the quality of effort. So severe is the struggle for existence, so keen is the competition in our modern complex social and economical system, that only he has the ghost of a chance of success who works with all his might. The busy bee-hive of the world has no use for drones. The man who succeeds is the man who puts the whole quantity of his strength, body and soul, into his task. Quality, too, is essential. The successful person does his work well. He believes that whatsoever is worth doing at all is worth doing well. You remember the story of the sculptor who, when he was reprimanded for putting so much care on the back of a statue where it would be hidden by the wall and could never be seen by the eye of man, replied in justification of his painstaking care, “ The gods see everywhere.” “ In the elder days of art, Builders wrought with greatest care Each minute and unseen part; For the gods see everywhere. Let us do our work as well, Both the unseen and the seen, Make the house where God shall dwell, Beautiful, entire, and clean. Else our lives are incomplete, Standing in these walls of time,