trades, no matter if a man has twenty, will never give him
a good living, much less a competency, while wealth is absolutely out
of the question.

How many young men fail to reach the point of efficiency in one line of
work before they get discouraged and venture into something else! How
easy to see the thorns in one's own profession or vocation, and only
the roses in that of another! A young man in business, for instance,
seeing a physician riding about town in his carriage, visiting his
patients, imagines that a doctor must have an easy, ideal life, and
wonders that he himself should have embarked in an occupation so full
of disagreeable drudgery and hardships. He does not know of the years
of dry, tedious study which the physician has consumed, the months and
perhaps years of waiting for patients, the dry detail of anatomy, the
endless names of drugs and technical terms.

There is a sense of great power in a vocation after a man has reached
the point of efficiency in it, the point of productiveness, the point
where his skill begins to tell and brings in returns. Up to this point
of efficiency, while he is learning his trade, the time seems to have
been almost thrown away. But he has been storing up a vast reserve of
knowledge of detail, laying foundations, forming his acquaintances,
gaining his reputation for truthfulness, trustworthiness, and
integrity, and in establishing his credit. When he reaches this point
of efficiency, all the knowledge and skill, character, influence, and
credit thus gained come to his aid, and he soon finds that in what
seemed almost thrown away lies the secret of his prosperity. The
credit he established as a clerk, the confidence, the integrity, the
friendships formed, he finds equal to a large capital when he starts
out for himself and takes the highway to fortune; while the young man
who half learned several trades, got discouraged and stopped just short
of the point of efficiency, just this side of success, is a failure
because he didn't go far enough; he did not press on to the point at
which his acquisition would have been profitable.

In spite of the fact that nearly all very successful men have made a
life-work of one thing, we see on every hand hundreds of young men and
women flitting about from occupation to occupation, trade to trade, in
one thing to-day and another to-morrow,--just as though they could go
from one thing to another by turning a switch, as though they c