Advice to a Young Man by Hawk-eye

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Aug 23, 1883

Advice to a Young Man.

By Hawk-eye

AND, then, remember, my son, you have to work. Whether you handle a pick or a pen, a wheelbarrow or a set of books, digging ditches or editing a paper, ringing an auction bell, or writing funny things, you must work. If you look around you, son, you will see that the men who are the most able to live the rest of their days without work are the men who worked the hardest. Don't be afraid of killing yourself with work, son. It is beyond your power to do that. Men cannot work so hard as that on the sunny side of thirty. They die sometimes, but it's because they quit work at 6 P. M. and don't get home until 2 A. M. Its the interval that kills, my son. The work gives you an appetite for your meals, it lends solidity to your slumbers, it gives you a perfect appreciation of a holiday. There are young men who do not work, my son, but the world is not proud of them. It does not know their names, even; it simply speaks of them as old So-and-So's boys. Nobody likes them, nobody hates them; the great busy world doesn't even know that they are there. So find out what you want to be and do, son, and take off your coat and make a dust in the world. The busier you are the less deviltry you will be apt to get into, the sweeter will be your sleep, the brighter and happier your holidays, and the better satisfied will the world be with you.—Hawk-eye.