otten hours, and slighted, botched work into
the foundation, your superstructure will topple. The foundation must
be clean, solid, and firm.

The quality which you put into your work will determine the quality of
your life. The habit of insisting upon the best of which you are
capable, of always demanding of yourself the highest, never accepting
the lowest or second best, no matter how small your remuneration, will
make all the difference to you between mediocrity or failure, and
success. If you bring to your work the spirit of an artist instead of
an artisan, a burning zeal, an absorbing enthusiasm, these will take
the drudgery out of it and make it a delight.

Take no chances of marring your reputation by the picayune and unworthy
endeavor "to get square" with a stingy or mean employer. Never mind
what kind of a man he is, resolve that you will approach your task in
the spirit of a master, that whether he is a man of high ideals or not,
you will be one. Remember that you are a sculptor and that every act
is a chisel blow upon life's marble block. You can not afford to
strike false blows which may mar the angel that sleeps in the stone.
Whether it is beautiful or hideous, divine or brutal, the image you
evolve from the block must stand as an expression of yourself, of your
ideals. Those who do not care how they do their work, if they can only
get through with it and get their salary for it, pay very dearly for
their trifling; they cut very sorry figures in life. Regard your work
as a great life school for the broadening, deepening, rounding into
symmetry, harmony, beauty, of your God-given faculties, which are uncut
diamonds sacredly intrusted to you for the polishing and bringing out
of their hidden wealth and beauty. Look upon it as a man-builder, a
character-builder, and not as a mere living-getter. Regard the
living-getting, money-making part of your career as a mere incidental
as compared with the man-making part of it.

The smallest people in the world are those who work for salary alone.
The little money you get in your pay envelope is a pretty small, low
motive for which to work. It may be necessary to secure your bread and
butter, but you have something infinitely higher to satisfy than that;
that is, your sense of the right; the demand in you to do your level
best, to be a man, to do the square thing, the fair thing. These
should speak so loud in you that the mere bread-and-butter question
will