If we would only study the needs of our bodies as we study the needs of the plants in our gardens, and give them the proper amount and variety of food, with plenty of water, fresh air, and sunshine, we would not be troubled with disordered stomachs, indigestion, biliousness, headache, or any other kind of pain or ache.
If we used common sense in our diet, lived a plain, sane, simple life, we would never need to take medicine. But the way many of us live is a crime against nature, against manhood, against our possibilities.
It is amazing that otherwise shrewd, sensible men can deceive themselves into practicing petty economies which are in reality ruinous extravagances.
No good mechanic would for a moment think of using tools that are out of order. Think of a barber trying to run a first-class shop with dull razors! Think of a carpenter or cabinet-maker attempting to turn out finished work with dull chisels, saws, planes, or other tools!
The man who wants to do a fine piece of work, whether it be the painting of a picture or the building of a house, must have everything with which he works in the best possible condition, otherwise the quality of his work will suffer.
The great thing in life is efficiency. If you amount to anything in the world, your time is valuable, your energy precious. They are your success capital and you can not afford to heedlessly throw them away or trifle with them.
Whatever else you do, husband your strength, save your vitality, hang on to it with the determination with which a drowning man seizes and clings to a log or spar at sea. Store up every bit of your physical force, for it is your achievement material, your manhood timber. Having this, the man who has no money is rich compared with the man of wealth who has squandered his vitality, thrown away his precious life energy. Gold is but dross compared with this, diamonds but rubbish; houses and lands are contemptible beside it.
Dissipators of precious vitality are the wickedest kind of spendthrifts; they are worse than money spendthrifts; they are suicides, for they are killing their every chance in life.
Of what use is ability if you can not use it, of forces that are demoralized, weakened by petty, false economies; what use is great brain power, even genius, if you are physically weak, if your vitality is so reduced either by vicious living or lack of proper care, that your energy becomes exhausted with the very least effort?
To be confronted by a great opportunity of which you are powerless to take advantage, because you have let your energy leak away in useless, vicious ways, or to feel that you can only take hold of your great chance tremblingly, weakly, with doubt instead of assurance and a consciousness of vigor, is one of the most disheartening experiences that can ever come to a human being.
If you would make the most of yourself, cut away all of your vitality sappers, get rid of everything which hampers you and holds you back, everything which wastes your energy, cuts down your working capital. Get freedom at any cost. Do not drag about with you a body that is half dead through vicious habits, which sap your vitality and drain off your life forces. Do not do anything or touch anything which will lower your vitality or lessen your chances of advancement. Always ask yourself, “What is there in this thing I am going to do which will add to my life-work, increase my power, keep me in superb condition to do the best thing possible to me?”
Much precious energy is wasted in fretting, worrying, grumbling, fault-finding, in the little frictions and annoyances that accomplish nothing, but merely make you irritable, cripple and exhaust you. Just look back over yesterday and see where your energy went to. See how much of it leaked away in trifles and in vicious practices. You may have lost more brain and nerve force in a burst of passion, a fit of hot temper, than in doing your normal work in an entire day.
Some people are very careful to keep the pianos in their homes in tune, but they never trouble themselves about the human instruments which are out of tune most of the time. They try to play the great life symphonies on a living instrument that is jangled and out of tune, and then wonder why they produce discord instead of harmony.
The great aim of your life should be to keep your powers up to the highest possible standard, to so conserve your energies, guard your health, that you can make every occasion a great occasion.
The trouble with most of us is that we do not half appreciate the marvelousness of the human mechanism, nor the divinity of the man that dwells in it.
“Man is an infinite little copy of God,” says Victor Hugo. “That is glory enough for man. . . . Little as I am, I feel the God in me.”
Unfortunately most of us do not feel the God in us, we do not realize our powers and possibilities. We lose sight of our divinity. We live in our animal senses instead of rising into the Godlike faculties. We crawl when we might fly.
Chapter II.
Economy That Costs Too Much
A Paris bank clerk, who was carrying a bag of gold through the streets, dropped a ten-franc piece, which rolled from the sidewalk. He set his bag down to look for the lost piece, and, While he was trying to extricate it from the gutter, some one stole his bag and ran away with it.
I know a rich man who has become such a slave to the habit of economizing, formed when he was trying to get a start in the world, that he has not been able to break away from it, and he will very often lose a dollar’s worth of valuable time trying to save a dime.
He goes through his home and turns the gas down so low that it is almost impossible to get around without stumbling over chairs. Several members of his family have received injuries from running against half-open doors, or stumbling over furniture in the dark; and once, while I was present, a member of the family spilt a bottle of ink upon a costly carpet in passing from one room to another in the darkness.
This man, although now wealthy, tears off the unused half-sheets of letters, cuts out the backs of envelopes for scribbling paper, and is constantly spending time trying to save little things which are utterly out of proportion to the value to him of the time thus consumed. He carries the same spirit of niggardly economy into his business. He makes his employees save strings from bundles as a matter of principle, even if it takes twice as much time as the string is worth, and practices all sorts of trifling economies equally foolish.
True economy is not stinginess or meanness. It often means very large outlay, for it always has the larger end in view. True economy means the wisest expenditure of what we have, everything considered, looking at it from the broadest standpoint. It is not a good thing to save a nickel at the expenditure of twenty-five cents’ worth of time.
Comparatively few people have a healthy view of what real saving, or economy, means. Many have been run over by street cars or other vehicles in New York while trying to recover a dropped package, a hat, an umbrella, or a cane.
I know a young man who has lost many opportunities for advancement, and a large amount of business, by false economy in dress, and smallness regarding expenditures. He believes that a suit of clothes and a necktie should be worn until they are threadbare. He would never think of inviting a customer or a prospective customer to luncheon, or of offering to pay his car fare (if he happened to be traveling with him). He has such a reputation for being stingy, even to meanness, that people do not like to do business with him. False economy has cost this man very dear.
Many people injure their health seriously by trying to save money. If you are ambitious to do your best work, beware of economies that cost too much.
No ambitious person can afford to feed his brain with poor diet or wrong fuel. To do so would be as foolhardy as for a great factory to burn shavings and refuse material because good coal was too expensive. Whatever you do, however poor