st certainly
you cannot be.

If the men who have battalions of friends to start with become
negligent of their associations, welcoming all fish that come to their
net, and frogs, too, you dare not take the risk of a dissolute
companionship, or any other companionship that will weaken the daily
discipline of yourself, or lower you in the esteem of the people.

Thus you become a careful student of human nature. And never forget
that he who has mastered this, the most abstruse of sciences, has a
better equipment for practical success than all the abstract learning
from the days of Socrates till now could give him.

Conscious from day to day of your limited resources, and understanding
by the severe tuition of your daily life that the world now demands
effectiveness, you will nurture your physical and nervous powers where
the rich young man with a college training is apt to waste his. He may
smoke, but you dare not. You cannot afford it, for one thing.

For another thing, it is a long race that you are running before you
reach the point from which your fellow runner starts; so you have got
to save your wind. You need all your nerve. You have got to keep
"clean to the bone," as Jack London expresses it.

You have got to take thought of the morrow. You have got to do all
those things which your employer, and all observers of you, will,
consciously or unconsciously, approve; and refrain from doing anything
that your employer, or his wife, or the world, or anybody who is
watching you, will disapprove of, even subconsciously.

Thus your profound understanding that effectiveness is what counts
will cut out every questionable habit, every association of idleness
and sloth. No social club for you; that institution is for the man of
dollars and of Greek. No evenings with gay parties for you; you must
use those precious hours for reading, planning, sleep.

You cannot dally with brilliant indirectness; you must make every man
and woman understand that you are goldenly sincere, forcefully
earnest, earnestly honest, high of intention, sound of purpose, direct
of method. Out of all these you will finally wring everything which
the college is designed to give: skilled intellect, mind equipped with
systematized knowledge, simple, earnest, upright character.

And to crown it all, you will discover in this hard discipline of your
faculties and of your soul a happiness whose steady felicity is
unknown to the lounger of the club or th