قراءة كتاب 21
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go to work at something for which my fellow men would be willing to pay. I would not wait for an Ideal Job. The only ideal job I ever heard of was the one some other fellow had.
It is quite important to find the best thing to do. It is much more important to find something to do. If I were a young artist, I would paint soap advertisements, if that were all opportunity offered, until I got ahead enough to indulge in the painting of madonnas and landscapes. If I were a young musician, I would rather play in a street band than not at all. If I were a young writer, I would do hack work, if necessary, until I became able to write the Great American Novel.
I would go to work. Nothing in all this world I have found is so good as work.
I believe in the wage system as the best and most practical means of coördinating human effort. What spoils it is the large indigestible lumps of unearned money that, because of laws that originated in special privilege, are injected into the body politic, by inheritance and other legal artificialities.
If I were twenty-one I would resolve to take no dollar for which I had not contributed something in the world’s work. If a philanthropist gave me a million dollars I would decline it. If a rich father or uncle left me a fortune, I would hand it over to the city treasury. All great wealth units come, directly or indirectly, from the people and should go to them. All inheritance should be limited to, say, $100,000. If Government would do that there would be no trouble with the wage system.
If I were twenty-one I would keep clean of endowed money. The happiest people I have known have been those whose bread and butter depended upon their daily exertion.
II
IF I WERE TWENTY-ONE I WOULD
ADJUST MYSELF
More people I have known have suffered because they did not know how to adjust themselves than for any other reason. And the happiest-hearted people I have met have been those that have the knack of adapting themselves to whatever happens.
I would begin with my relatives. While I might easily conceive a better set of uncles, aunts, cousins, brothers, and so on, yet Destiny gave me precisely the relatives I need. I may not want them, but I need them. So of my friends and acquaintances and fellow workmen. Every man’s life is a plan of God. Fate brings to me the very souls out of the unknown that I ought to know. If I cannot get along with them, be happy and appreciated, I could not get along with another set of my own picking. A man who is looking for ideal human beings to make up his circle of acquaintances would as well go at once and jump into the river.
The God of Things as They Ought to Be is a humbug. There is but one God, and He is the God of Things as They Are.
Half of my problem is Me; the other half is Circumstances. My task is to bring results out of the combination of the two.
Life is not a science, to be learned; it is an art, to be practised. Ability comes by doing. Wisdom comes not from others; it is a secretion of experience.
Life is not like a problem in arithmetic, to be solved by learning the rule; it is more like a puzzle of blocks, or wire rings—you just keep trying one way after another, until finally you succeed, maybe.
I think it was Josh Billings who said that in the Game of Life, as in a game of cards, we have to play the cards dealt to us; and the good player is not the one who always wins, but the one who plays a poor hand well.