Doing One’s Best

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jun 24, 1873

Doing One’s Best.

The habit of doing to the best of one’s ability the duty of the hour is invaluable. The world is full of work half done, of enterprises imperfectly accomplished, of deeds that lack one or two elements only to make them great. And this is so because there are so many people who simply try to meet the present contingency. They have no high ideal of doing things well for the sole sake of doing them well, no wings to their souls which raise them into that upper air where motive gives nobility to action. Those who do rise to the conception of an ideal life too often procrastinate the hour when they shall begin to live as well as they know how, and still the days pass on, and their conceptions take no form. Thus life goes by, and mediocrity slumbers in an unknown grave.

The interior life of every man and every woman who rises above the common level is distinguished by this love of excellence for its own sake, this quenchless aspiration to do better and better until their performance reaches the unattainable ideal.

There is not a boy nor a girl in the remote cabins of the far West, or on the lonely prairies, that may not follow in the footsteps of these mighty ones who have laid

“—their just hands on that golden key That opens the palace of Eternity.”

Let the boy begin by doing well his morning chores, neglecting nothing, slighting nothing, omitting nothing. Not many months since we went through the stables of the best stock-raiser in this country. How clean were the calf-pens, and the pigs looked like household pets! Not a corn-stalk was in the wrong place; not a dust of ashes on the furnace where the food was cooked; every rake and brush and shovel hung on its nail. “How do you manage to keep things so clean?” we asked. “Oh,” was the reply, “I’ve discharged many a man because he wouldn’t do things well!” This stock-raiser will have everything, little and big, done in the very best manner, and just here is the secret of his success. When the boy has done his chores well, if he goes to school, let him get his arithmetic lesson thoroughly, not doing the sums this way or that because it “brings the answer,” but because the right way of doing the sum is right, and every other method is wrong. If he has a composition to write, let him take the utmost pains to make it the best expression possible of his ability, in language, grammar, and penmanship. He might as well be playing ball, or twirling his thumbs, so far as any intellectual improvement is concerned, as merely “scratching off a composition,” to save a bad mark or escape reproof.

And the girl, she can walk in the footsteps of Alice Cary, of Margaret Fuller, of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, by washing the dishes well and wiping them till they shine, by making the loaf snowy, and light, and sweet, by giving her kitchen an air of neatness and cleanliness, of order and system, without which the costliest parlor is cheerless and dreary. If she has in her own mind a clear conception of perfection in housekeeping, it will appear in everything she touches, and adorn the rooms over which she presides more than costly tapestries or rosewood furniture. And for the lessons at school, what we said to the boy applies with equal emphasis to her.

If we knew that this day, this month, this year, would close our work here, how solicitous would we be to make each separate portion perfect in quality and in performance! If we knew what single act of our lives would mark a turning point in our destinies, how careful would we be to make that act complete in every excellent quality! As we cannot know these things, how fitting it is that at every step of our progress we covet earnestly the best gifts, and let each separate day as it passes witness a perfect record.