How to Analyze People on Sight by Elsie Lincoln Benedict (epub read online books txt) 📕

he masses of mankind form a vast pyramid. At the very tip-top peak are gathered the few who are famous. In the bottom layer are the many failures. Between these extremes lie all the rest—from those who live near the ragged edge of Down-and-Out-Land to those who storm the doors of the House of Greatness.

Again, between these, and making up the large majority, are the myriads of laborers, clerks, small business men, housekeepers—that myriad-headed mass known as "the back bone of the world."

Yet the great distance from the lower layer to the tip-top peak is not insurmountable. Many have covered it almost overnight.

¶ For fame is not due, as we have been led to believe, solely to years of plodding toil. A thousand years of labor could never have produced an Edison, a Marconi, a Curie, a Rockefeller, a Roosevelt, a Wilson, a Bryan, a Ford, a Babe Ruth, a Carpentier, a Mary Pickford, a Caruso, a Spencer or an Emerson.

¶ The reserved seat in the tip-top peak of the pyramid is procured only by him who has found his real vocation.

To such a one his work is not hard. No hours are long enough to tire his body; no thought is difficult enough to weary his mind; to him there is no day and no night, no quitting time, no Saturday afternoons and no Sundays. He is at the business for which he was created—and all is play.

¶ Thomas A. Edison so loves his work that he sleeps an average of less than four hours of each twenty-four. When working out one of his experiments he forgets to eat, cares not whether it is day or night and keeps his mind on his invention until it is finished.

Yet he has reached the age of seventy-four with every mental and physical faculty doing one hundred per cent service—and the prize place in the tip-top peak of the Wizards of the World is his! He started at the very bottom layer, an orphan newsboy. He made the journey to the pinnacle because early in life he found his vocation.

¶ Each one of the world's great successes was a failure first.

It is interesting to note the things at which some of them failed. Darwin was a failure at the ministry, for which he was educated. Herbert Spencer was a failure as an engineer, though he struggled years in that profession. Abraham Lincoln was such a failure at thirty-three as a lawyer that he refused an invitation to visit an old friend "because," he wrote, "I am such a failure I do not dare to take the time."

Babe Ruth was a failure as a tailor. Hawthorne was a failure as a Custom House clerk when he wrote the "Scarlet Letter." Theodore Roosevelt was a failure as a cowboy in North Dakota and gave up his frontiering because of it.

These men were failures because they tried to do things for which they were not intended. But each at last found his work, and when he did, it was so easy for him it made him famous.

¶ Fame comes only to the man, or woman, who loves his work so well that it is not work but play. It comes only to him who does something with marvellous efficiency. Work alone can not produce that kind of efficiency.

¶ Fame comes from doing one thing so much better than your competitors that your results stand out above and beyond the results of all others. Any man who will do efficiently any one of the many things the world is crying for can place his own price upon his work and get it. He can get it because the world gladly pays for what it really wants, and because the efficient man has almost no competition.

¶ But here's the rub. You will never do anything with that brilliant efficiency save what you LIKE TO DO. Efficiency does not come from duty, or necessity, or goading, or lashing, or anything under heaven save ENJOYMENT OF THE THING ITSELF.

Nothing less will ever release those hidden powers, those miraculous forces which, for the lack of a better name, we call "genius."

¶ Elimination of what are distinctly NOT your vocations will help you toward finding those that ARE. To that end here are some tests which will clear up many things for you. They will help you to know especially whether or not the vocations you have been contemplating are fitted to you.

¶ Whenever you are considering your fitness for any vocation, ask yourself these questions:

Self-Question 1—Am I considering this vocation chiefly because I would enjoy the things it would bring—such as salary, fame, social position or change of scene?

If, in your heart, your answer is "Yes," this is not a vocation for you.

¶ The above test can best be illustrated by the story of a young woman who wanted to be told that she had ability to act. "I am determined to go into the movies," she told us. "Do you think I would be a success?"

"When you picture yourself in this profession what do you see yourself doing?" we asked.

"Oh, everything wonderful," she replied. "I see myself driving my own car—one of those cute little custom-made ones, you know—and wearing the most stunning clothes and meeting all those big movie stars—and living all the year round in California!"

"Is that all you ever see yourself doing?" we inquired.

"Yes—but isn't that enough?"

"All but one—the acting."

She then admitted that in the eight years she had been planning to enter the movies she had never once really visualized herself acting, or studying any part, or doing any work—nothing but rewards and emoluments.

Self-Question 2—Knowing the requirements of this vocation—its tasks, drudgeries, hours of work, concentration and kind of activity—would I choose to follow them in preference to any other kind of activity even if the income were the same?

Would I do these things for the pleasure of doing them and not for the pay?

If, in your heart, you can answer "Yes" to these questions, your problem is settled; you will succeed in that vocation. For you will so enjoy your work that it will be play. Being play, you will do it so happily that you will get from it new strength each day.

Because you are doing what you were built to do, you will think of countless improvements, inventions, ways of marketing them. This will promote you over the others who are there only for the pay envelope; it will raise your salary; it will eventually and inevitably take you to the top.

A man we know aptly illustrates this point. He was a bookkeeper. He had held the same position for twenty-three years and was getting $125 a month. He had little leisure but used all he did have—evenings, Saturday afternoons, Sundays and his ten-day vacations—making things.

In that time he had built furniture for his six-room house—every kind of article for the kitchen, bathroom and porch. And into everything he had put little improving touches such as are not