The Art of Manliness - Manvotionals - Brett McKay [63]
Remember that you are an individual, not a grain of dust or a blade of grass. Don’t be a sheep; be a man. It has taken nature a hundred million years to produce you. Don’t make her sorry she took the time.
Get out in the park and walk and think. Get up in your hall bedroom, read, study, write what you think. Talk more to yourself and less to others. Avoid magazines, avoid excessive newspaper reading.
There is not a man of average ability but could make a striking career if he could but will to do the best that is in him.
Proofs of growth due to solitude are endless. Milton’s greatest work was done when blindness, old age and the death of the Puritan government forced him into completest seclusion. Beethoven did his best work in the solitude of deafness.
Bacon would never have been the great leader of scientific thought had not his trial and disgrace forced him from the company of a grand retinue and stupid court to the solitude of his own brain.
“Multum insola fuit anima mea.” (My spirit hath been much alone.) This he said often, and lucky it was for him. Loneliness of spirit made him.
Get a little of it for yourself.
Drop your club, your street corner, your gossipy boarding-house table. Drop your sheep life and try being a man.
It may improve you.
Always Try It Yourself
FROM ETHICS FOR YOUNG PEOPLE, 1891
By Charles Carroll Everett
It is important to learn early to rely upon yourself; for little has been done in the world by those who are always looking out for some one to help them.
We must be on our guard not to confound self-reliance with self-conceit, yet the difference between the two cannot easily be defined in words.
The difference is something like that between bravery and foolhardiness.
The self-conceited person takes it for granted that he is superior to others.
Self-reliance is very different from this. The self-reliant person is often very modest. He does not say about anything that is to be done, “I am so strong and wise that I can do it.” He says, “I will try, and if patience and hard work will do it, it shall be done.”
One way in which a person may become self-reliant, is never to seek or accept help till he has fairly tried what can be done without it.
Some scholars, if they come to a problem that seems hard, run at once to the teacher, or an older friend, or perhaps even to another scholar, who is brighter or more self-reliant than themselves, in order to be told how to do it. Always try it yourself. Even if it is nothing more important than a conundrum, do not wish somebody to tell you the answer till you have fairly tried to conquer it.
It is a pleasant feeling that comes from having done a difficult thing one’s self, a feeling that those never have who are helped out of every hard place.
Did you ever think why it is that so many of the great men of our country are found among those who began life in hardship and poverty? Many of them grew up in what was, when they were young, the western frontier, where they had to work hard; where they had no schools, and few comforts and conveniences. They have come from these circumstances that seemed so discouraging, and have become presidents, judges, generals, or millionaires.
One reason why so many that had such an unpromising beginning have won such success is that because they had so few helps, they were forced to help themselves. They thus became self-reliant. When they went out into the world they went straight ahead. Without waiting for any one to make a place for them, they made a place for themselves. Without waiting for any one to do for them, they did for themselves. Without waiting for people to advise them they trusted themselves. They were prompt, energetic and sensible. Thus people trusted them and honored them.
Though you have the helps that such men were forced to do without, yet you can