VI. Success and the Capital S

VI

SUCCESSANDTHE CAPITAL S

I come now to a question, always thought of consequence, and growing year by year in the prominence assigned to it, until with some men it has become the sole pursuit in life. The present age is obsessed with its importance in a singular degree. The American nation is obsessed with it beyond all nations. Books are printed on it; magazines are devoted to it; men learnedly discuss its “secret.” I refer, as the reader has probably divined, to the question of Success.

You observe that I spell it with the majuscule. The meaning of the word thus spelt is at once broader and narrower than that of the ordinary word. Broader, because it is taken to mean success in life. Narrower, because it has come to imply a peculiar kind of success. It means first of all a material success. It is a synonym for “getting on.” Where you get to is thought of more consequence than what you are. Worshippers of Success hold in contempt the man who is capable of enjoying life in obscurity and on $30 a week. They measure happiness externally, not internally; objectively, not subjectively. Some (a growing clan) gauge success directly in proportion to the number of dollars on which a man pays income tax. Others, less narrow, would accord a place to fame, which is apparently conceived not so much as having the high estimation of one’s fellows, as it is having one’s name known among a large number of them.

Now implicitly or explicitly, this kind of extrinsic success is taken by the majority of persons as the measure of the intrinsic worth of a man. And that is why so many of us pursue it—not for itself, not because we personally would give a blackberry for it, not because it is indispensable to our inmost happiness, but simply that we may excite the envy of others and seem happy in their eyes. We have a strange habit of estimating our own happiness by what other persons think it is; and their opinion is likely to be based on our material success, since they have little else to go by. We continually try to obtain the things that the people around us want or profess to want, rather than what we want ourselves, because we have never really tried to examine whether there is any difference between the two. In trying to find whether we are hot or cold, we attach more importance to a dubious thermometer than we do to our own feelings.

Now this kind of success, which I have gone so far out of my way to become sarcastic about, is not commonly attainable without the possession for one characteristic, a characteristic of far more importance in this respect than thrift, intelligence, industry or common sense. That characteristic is a passionate desire to succeed, a desire so strong and overbearing that it amounts to a demand, and that, in the strictly economic sense to which I have before referred, means a willingness to pay the price.

The price is first of all singleness of purpose and concentration of effort. Nearly all of us, at school, have thought that we should some day like to be President of the Unite States. But not all of us have made it a point to study the lives of past presidents to see how they did it. Not all of us have taken a law course with that special end. Not all of us have refused tempting commercial opportunities for certain poverty and struggle for a time to gain an end in which the mathematical chances were ridiculously and overwhelmingly against us. Not all of us have kept desperately fanning the embers of dissatisfaction, fanning them into a constant white hot flame. With most of us the early fire dies; the embers fade and grow cool. We reach as high a level as we ever seriously hope to reach. We have spasms of dissatisfaction with our position in the world, but not sufficient dissatisfaction to make us work our way out of the rut to a higher position. We have moments of longing for the mountain tops, but not enough longing to make us willing to give up something for them. Strolling in the valleys is so much more pleasant than climbing.

And singleness of purpose demands more sacrifices than mere industry. It involves giving up all pleasures that interfere with it. They may be quite innocent pleasures, their sole offense being that they occupy time. It involves making oneself narrow; one cannot be a success in any one line if one dissipates one’s energies in a number of activities—unless, of course, one be a versatile genius whose energies overflow, like Benjamin Franklin, Leonardo da Vinci, or Goethe—and such instances are so rare that they may be ignored.

Let there be no mistake. I do not mean to discourage efforts to become a Success. I mean merely to indicate that the goal has a price. I want you merely to ask yourself whether you are willing to pay that price; to ask yourself candidly how far you want to go and how much you are willing to pay; for if you do not ask yourself now, before you make your Success resolutions, you are likely to ask yourself later on. As you see obstacles and disappointments pile up, you are apt to begin wondering whether the game is worth the candle, whether the colors of the reality are as gorgeous as those of the painting. And if you decide to give up then, you will have broken your early resolution, with all the undermining of self-confidence and faith in your will which that involves.