XXV.
THE ROAD TO SUCCESS.
The world is constantly looking for the man who knows the most, and it pays little regard to those who are proficient in the usual degree in the same things. One must excel, or, in other words, know more than his associates in order to succeed notably. The world will bid high for you if you know more than other men.
The Road to Success.
So that boys and girls who are preparing themselves for the duties of life should not aim simply at being as good as somebody else, but they should aim at being the best that it is possible to be in any chosen line of life or business. I have noticed in my short lifetime that there is a great tendency on the part of young people to cut short their education. Being able to shine in the intellectual and social worlds with the small attainments made in some college or normal school or industrial school, the average young negro man is content to stop with a diploma or certificate from one or another of these institutions. They will never realize what injury they have done themselves by so doing until it is too late. On the other hand, there is another large class of young people that stop short even before they have finished the course in even any one of the normal or industrial schools. They must go out to work; they know enough to make a living; what’s the use of so much education, anyhow? This is the way some of them talk. This is what some of them believe. Boys and girls, no man or woman with such low ideals will ever reach the topmost round of the ladder of fame. Such boys and girls will always play a second-rate part in the great drama of life. The boys and girls who are going to the front—the boys and girls who are going to have the leading parts—are the boys and girls who are willing to take time to prepare themselves. And preparation means hard work; and not only hard work, but hard and long-continued work. A person can learn a good deal in one year; a person can learn a good deal in two years; but nobody can learn enough in one or two years, or in three or four years, to make it at all likely that he will ever be sought by the great world.
Aside from the rudimentary training, it ought to take at least ten years to make a good doctor, or a good lawyer, or a good electrician, or a good preacher. Four of these years ought to be spent in college; and four in the professional school; and the other two ought to be spent in picking up a practical or working knowledge of the calling—whatever it may be. The young doctor obtains this practical knowledge in hospitals and in practice among the poor. The electrician obtains it by entering some large electrical industry or manufactory, in which a thoroughly practical knowledge of mechanical engineering and electricity can be secured. It is true that some men have become distinguished in these callings without this long preparation of which I have spoken; yet it is, also, true that they would have been better off—they would have been more likely to have become eminent—if they had taken the longer course. College is a little world which every one, other things being equal, ought to enter and pass through before launching in the great world.