Insist on Your Best by Orison Swett Marden

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Mountain View, California · May 6, 1908

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 34, No. 19.

Insist on Your Best.

By Orison Swett Marden

It is only when we do our best, when we put joy, energy, enthusiasm, and zeal into our work, that we really grow; and this is the only way we can keep our highest self-respect.

We can not think much of ourselves when we are not honest in our work—when we are not doing our level best. There is nothing which will compensate you for a loss of faith in yourself, for the knowledge of your capacity for doing bungling, dishonest work.

You have something infinitely higher in you to satisfy than to make a mere living, to get thru your day's work as easily as possible. That is, your sense of the right, the demand in you to do your level best to call out the best thing in you, to be a man, to do the square thing; this should speak so loudly in you that the mere bread-and-butter question, the money-making question, should be absolutely insignificant in comparison.

Start out with the tacit understanding with yourself that you will be a man at all hazards; that your work shall express the highest and the best things in you; and that you can not afford to debase or demoralize yourself, by appealing to the lowest, the most despicable, mean side of yourself by deteriorating, by botching your work.

How often we see people working along without a purpose, half committed to their aim, only intending to pursue their vocation until they strike snags! They intend to keep at it as long as it is tolerable, or until they find something they like better. This is a cowardly way to face a life-work which determines our destiny.

A man ought to approach his life task, however humble, with the high ideals that characterize a greater master as he approaches the canvas upon which he is going to put his masterpiece—with a resolution to make no false moves that will mar the model that lives in his ideal.—Orison Swett Marden.