zards," he used to say to young
lawyers; "move heaven and earth to carry the jury, and then fight it
out with the judge on the law questions as best you can."

The man who succeeds has a programme. He fixes his course and adheres
to it. He lays his plans and executes them. He goes straight to his
goal. He is not pushed this way and that every time a difficulty is
thrown in his path; if he can't get over it he goes through it.
Constant and steady use of the faculties under a central purpose gives
strength and power, while the use of faculties without an aim or end
only weakens them. The mind must be focused on a definite end, or,
like machinery without a balance-wheel, it will rack itself to pieces.

This age of concentration calls, not for educated men merely, not for
talented men, not for geniuses, not for jacks-of-all-trades, but for
men who are trained to do one thing as well as it can be done.
Napoleon could go through the drill of his soldiers better than any one
of his men.

_Stick to your aim_. The constant changing of one's occupation is
fatal to all success. After a young man has spent five or six years in
a dry goods store, he concludes that he would rather sell groceries,
thereby throwing away five years of valuable experience which will be
of very little use to him in the grocery business; and so he spends a
large part of his life drifting around from one kind of employment to
another, learning part of each, but all of none, forgetting that
experience is worth more to him than money, and that the years devoted
to learning his trade or occupation are the most valuable.
Half-learned 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