Places three important suggestions before young men and women who are embarking on a new career and aspiring to make it big in life.
FIRST, never look upon your occupation as drudgery. If you approach your work grudgingly and put half-hearted service into what you do, you have not learnt the real art of living. The quality of your work will have a great deal to with the quality of your life. The habit of insisting upon the best of which you are capable, and of always demanding of yourself the highest, never accepting the lowest, will make all the difference between mediocrity or failure, and a successful career. Do you own thinking and carry out your own ideas, as far as possible, even though working for another. Let your work speak for your personality.
We must bring to our work the spirit of an artist, instead of an artisan. No matter how humble your work may appear in your new job, you must accomplish it with a positive spirit and burning zeal, understanding it to be the work of God.
SECONDLY, never shrink from responsibility. People who have never been entrusted with tasks involving huge responsibility. People who have never been entrusted with tasks involving huge responsibility, are never able to realize their full potential and possibilities. Many young men avoid responsibility because they prefer an easy life and are not prepared to tax their minds further.
If our aim is growth, with the largest expansion of our powers, then we must be prepared to assume large responsibilities. There are many youngsters who could not achieve anything worthwhile in life, simply because they just carried out the programs evolved by others and never made efforts to stand alone, to act independently, and to carve out a niche for themselves in their chosen vocation.
THIRDLY, make your character your biggest asset. Youngsters who start their careers with a firm resolve to make character their biggest capital, and to pledge their total commitment to every obligation they enter into, will never be a failure, though fortune in terms of money might elude them at times. No man who loses his character ever really rises to great heights.
Those who take recourse to dishonest ways to further their career prospects, will be constantly haunted by their conscience that keeps telling them, “You know you are a fraud, you are not the man you pretend to be.” The consciousness of not being genuine, not being what others think you to be, shatters one’s self-respect and self-confidence.
Strong advice to young people — not to stay in a questionable occupation, no matter what inducement it offers. It is indeed demoralizing to the mental faculties to do something that does not have the approval of one’s conscience.
There is a higher meaning, something deeper and nobler in a vocation than make a living. The part of our life-work which gives us a living, which provides the bread and butter, is merely incidental to the great disciplinary educative phase of it — the self-unfoldment. “It is a question of how large and how grand a man or woman you can bring out of your vocation, not how much money there is in it.”
