Your ShelfYour Projects

Are You Ready?

33%

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, Cal. · May 21, 1885

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 11, No. 20.

Read the full edition

Are You Ready?

By Christian Union

You are looking for a place and a work in the world; are you ready for them? If you are, you may be sure they are waiting for you. Thousands of men are looking for situations, but it is astonishing how difficult it is to find the right man when there is a place to be filled. A host of men want it, but not one in a hundred is ready for it. Readiness implies something more than willingness to roll up one's sleeves; it means ability to do the thing required with skill, zeal, and absolute fidelity. A merchant wants a clerk; he can fill the place twenty times over with good, steady-going, well-meaning, humdrum men; he will be lucky if he finds in half a year the boy who will take all thought of the place off of his mind by the energy, capacity, and general intelligence he brings into it. There is an opening in a newspaper office, and the need is advertised; there is at once a host of applicants; out of them, twenty-five young men can be selected who will do the work set before them fairly well; but the young man who will really fill the place and expand it, who will overflow it with vitality, freshness, and life, must be searched for far and wide, as with a lighted candle.
These select workmen, who add to general good intentions the concentration and the mastery which go with high power, are the men for whom the world is looking, and for whom there is always a place. They survive financial crises and outlive hard times because they are indispensable; if their employers go to the wall they rarely wait long for another opportunity. The only safe road to success runs past the door of the boy who has made up his mind to do one thing and to do it with all his might; to focus himself on it and pour himself into it. Whatever you decide to do, qualify yourself for it by mastering every detail of it; fling yourself, heart and soul, into it. Are you ready?