• Author: Nautilus
• Editor: B-7413
• Newspaper: The Umpire volume 6
• Page Number:
• Date: 10 24 1917
• Tags:
• advice

YOU MUST HELP YOURSELF

I once knew a boy whose hobby was mathematics. He had practically finished higher arithmetic when he was eleven and the advanced algebra when he was thirteen. One of his peculiarities was that he would permit no one to help him work a problem. He would not listen to a suggestion. He would fight or leave the room before he would suffer a word to be said that would throw any light on the solution of his ‘‘sums.” Perhaps he had not reasoned it out, but in his own heart he regarded the opportunity to work a problem as a privilege of which he was very jealous and with which no one might interfere.

That boy is now a successful man. I have followed his career with some interest and have seen him make his mark. He has kept the same traits, although expressed in different ways, that he manifested in his boyhood. He still insists on working out his own problems and thinking his own thoughts.

The boy who asks another to help him with his lessons is cheating himself. He is robbing himself of training and mental discipline. He is weakening his own faculties. He is handicapping himself for the problems that life itself will present when he has to make his own way and can not obtain outside help in their solution.

It is as though a man were training for a race and would ask another to do his road work or as though one preparing fora boxing bout depended on another to use the punching-bag.

We can not win by proxy nor send a substitute into the battle of life.

Stand on vour own feet. Live your own life. Think out your own course.

There are few if any questions that ever confront a human being that can not be solved by that being if he thinks hard enough and deep enough and straight enough. All this is a matter of will power and of mental training. He must learn to concentrate until he can shut out everything in the world except the one questicn before him. He must be able to analyze and to put it into its simplest statement. If he thinks long enough he will discover that to every problem there is a key and after that everything is simple.

In whatever situation you find yourself, think your way out.

— Nautilus.