ness or your family is an extra tax on your strength.

Eliminate every habit that holds you back, every practice that unfits
you for progress, every person who depresses you, every move that is
not necessary, every footless idea that crowds your brain.

The Specialist

When this nation of ours was born nearly every one was a generalist.

The merchant sold a general line of merchandise. The doctor was also a
farmer and a horse trader. In those days there were very few
specialists.

As time passed some of the wiser individuals turned specialist and
succeeded.

The doctor who is a generalist cannot excel in any one branch of
medicine, or compete with the specialist who devotes all his time and
study and practice towards one point and towards the treatment of a
specific ailment. The merchant who sells everything cannot compete with
the man who makes it his business to sell one class of goods. This is
an age of specialists, and what we considered a specialist twenty-five
years ago is only a generalist from the present standpoint. The
specialist of twenty-five years ago has been divided again and again.
The best doctor today is one who doctors the eye alone, the stomach
alone, or the nerves alone. He can do more for you and knows more of
your case in five minutes' observation than the generalist would in
three months.

With the keen competition of these days it is necessary for the
individual to be a specialist in business.

Pleasure and recreation are the only things in which an individual
should be a generalist.

Were it not for specialists we should know little about the sun, little
of electricity, little of steam, little of railroads, little of
advertising, little of anything else. It is because individuals have
made a speciality of one thing, because they have concentrated their
energies and their brain power on one thing that the world has
progressed.

Recreation is for relaxation, and the business man should see to it
that he gets the full benefit of recreation. If he carries specialism
into recreation, recreation is spoiled, for the moment a man is a
specialist in recreation he strives to excel, and this striving to
excel is hard work, and that is the same thing he is doing in business.

The business man who plays billiards and no other game doubtless will
play a better game than the generalist who indulges in all sorts of
games and recreations, but the man who makes a specialty of billiards
fin