The Selection of a Life Work
By Orison Swett Marden
FORCING young people into the first situations they can possibly fill, regardless of aptness, is a wrong that is often irreparable. In many cases society as a whole is to blame, for poverty knows no higher law, but when parents able to do differently thus inconsiderately ruin their children’s future, no condemnation can be too strong. I know a number of young people having marked ability in certain lines, who are probably capable of making great reputations, but who are being held back by parents who do not happen to think it wise or prudent for their children to strive to express what the Creator has locked up within them, and so they are cramped and unhappy. It is serious business, even for a parent, to stifle a God-given ambition, to dampen a divine aspiration. If a decided talent has been put into a child, a parent should think many times before taking the responsibility of countermanding the Creator’s order. Every child comes into the world with sealed orders from the infinite hand, and even the fondest parent can not certainly read the secret message written within that bit of clay. The child has certain inalienable rights which even the parent has no right to question or to try to modify. Selecting a life work is serious business. It should be done only after careful study and test of aptitudes, fitness and tastes, by both the person choosing and those having authority with him, unless his bent speaks so loudly in his blood, and his dominant faculties are so imperative in their expression of choice, that he can not mistake the calling for which he is fitted. It is everything to a boy or a girl to get into just the right place, where the highest and noblest faculties will find a healthy and delightful exercise, instead of the lowest and meanest. To do the kind of work for which one is fitted by nature, and to do it to the best of one’s ability, is working along the lines of one’s strength, which increases with every well-directed effort. —Orison Swett Marden, in Success.