The Art of Manliness - Manvotionals: Timeless Wisdom and Advice on Living the 7 Manly Virtues (11 page)

CHAPTER THREE
INDUSTRY

I
s greatness born or made? Despite the myth of mystical innate genius, researchers have found that it’s actually the latter. And how is it made? Through hustle and hard work: by harnessing the supreme power of industry.

We have no control over the circumstances into which we are born. But there are two things over which every man has complete sovereignty: time and toil. Every man, rich or poor, has twenty-four hours in a day and seven days in a week to labor as much as he will. Industry and time: these are the great equalizers among men. And how they are used is what separates the mediocre from the extraordinary.

The world’s greatest men understood this principle; they knew they had a limited amount of time on this planet to make their mark. They understood that glory and honor go to the man who uses his time wisely and effectively, and so they got to work.

Take Theodore Roosevelt for example. In his sixty-year life, he served as state legislator, police commissioner, governor of New York, and president of the United States, penned over thirty-five books and read tens of thousands of them, owned and worked his own cattle ranch, formed a cavalry unit to fight in the Spanish-American War, navigated an uncharted Amazonian river, and became the first American to win the Nobel Prize.

Benjamin Franklin was another great man who accomplished much during his life. From humble beginnings as the son of a candlemaker, he became a successful printer, inventor, writer, scientist, and diplomat. He invented the lightning rod, bifocal glasses, swim fins, and a more efficient wood-burning stove. He conducted scientific experiments and inquiries into electricity, oceanography, meteorology, temperature, and light. He composed music and played the guitar, violin, and harp. He established the first public library, post office, and fire department in the United States. Oh, and in his spare time, he helped found a country.

Achievement at these awe-inspiring levels may seem impossible to the modern man, who is apt to think these men were simply of an entirely different breed. But Franklin and Roosevelt did not have special powers; whatever innate intelligence they may have been born with would have remained latent if not for their own dogged lifelong pursuit of self-education. No, the secret of their success was really quite simple. They sucked the marrow out of every minute of every single day. They had aim, purpose, and drive. They took every opportunity that came their way and created them when they didn’t. They woke up early and attacked the day’s work with vim and vigor. They were industry personified.

Each and every day we are creating our legacy. What will you be able to look back on when you’re eighty-five? A business started? A book written? A library consumed? A language learned? A child raised? Or vast expanses of time on which the mind draws a blank, an unaccounted for wasteland of life that somehow slipped through the fingers? Better get to work.

Carpe Diem.

F
ROM
H
OW TO
L
IVE ON 24
H
OURS A
D
AY
, 1910
By Arnold Bennett

Newspapers are full of articles explaining how to live on such-and-such a sum, and these articles provoke a correspondence whose violence proves the interest they excite. … I have seen an essay, “How to live on eight shillings a week.” But I have never seen an essay, “How to live on twenty-four hours a day.” Yet it has been said that time is money. That proverb understates the case. Time is a great deal more than money. If you have time you can obtain money—usually. But though you have the wealth of a cloak-room attendant at the Carlton Hotel, you cannot buy yourself a minute more time than I have, or the cat by the fire has.

Philosophers have explained space. They have not explained time. It is the inexplicable raw material of everything. With it, all is possible; without it, nothing. The supply of time is truly a daily miracle, an affair genuinely astonishing when one examines it. You wake up in the morning, and lo! your purse is magically filled with twenty-four hours of the unmanufactured tissue of the universe of your life! It is yours. It is the most precious of possessions. A highly singular commodity, showered upon you in a manner as singular as the commodity itself!

For remark! No one can take it from you. It is unstealable. And no one receives either more or less than you receive.

Talk about an ideal democracy! In the realm of time there is no aristocracy of wealth, and no aristocracy of intellect. Genius is never rewarded by even an extra hour a day. And there is no punishment. Waste your infinitely precious commodity as much as you will, and the supply will never be withheld from you. No mysterious power will say: “This man is a fool, if not a knave. He does not deserve time; he shall be cut off at the meter.” It is more certain than consols, and payment of income is not affected by Sundays. Moreover, you cannot draw on the future. Impossible to get into debt! You can only waste the passing moment. You cannot waste tomorrow; it is kept for you. You cannot waste the next hour; it is kept for you.

I said the affair was a miracle. Is it not?

You have to live on this twenty-four hours of daily time. Out of it you have to spin health, pleasure, money, content, respect, and the evolution of your immortal soul. Its right use, its most effective use, is a matter of the highest urgency and of the most thrilling actuality. All depends on that. Your happiness—the elusive prize that you are all clutching for, my friends!—depends on that. Strange that the newspapers, so enterprising and up-to-date as they are, are not full of “How to live on a given income of time,” instead of “How to live on a given income of money!” Money is far commoner than time. When one reflects, one perceives that money is just about the commonest thing there is. It encumbers the earth in gross heaps.

If one can’t contrive to live on a certain income of money, one earns a little more—or steals it, or advertises for it. One doesn’t necessarily muddle one’s life because one can’t quite manage on a thousand pounds a year; one braces the muscles and makes it guineas, and balances the budget. But if one cannot arrange that an income of twenty-four hours a day shall exactly cover all proper items of expenditure, one does muddle one’s life definitely. The supply of time, though gloriously regular, is cruelly restricted.

Which of us lives on twenty-four hours a day? And when I say “lives,” I do not mean exists, nor “muddles through.” Which of us is free from that uneasy feeling that the “great spending departments” of his daily life are not managed as they ought to be? … Which of us is not saying to himself—which of us has not been saying to himself all his life: “I shall alter that when I have a little more time?”

Innumerable band of souls who are haunted, more or less painfully, by the feeling that the years slip by, and slip by, and slip by, and that they have not yet been able to get their lives into proper working order.

If we analyse that feeling, we shall perceive it to be, primarily, one of uneasiness, of expectation, of looking forward, of aspiration. It is a source of constant discomfort, for it behaves like a skeleton at the feast of all our enjoyments. We go to the theatre and laugh; but between the acts it raises a skinny finger at us. We rush violently for the last train, and while we are cooling a long age on the platform waiting for the last train, it promenades its bones up and down by our side and inquires: “O man, what hast thou done with thy youth? What art thou doing with thine age?” You may urge that this feeling of continuous looking forward, of aspiration, is part of life itself, and inseparable from life itself. True!

But there are degrees. A man may desire to go to Mecca. His conscience tells him that he ought to go to Mecca. He fares forth, either by the aid of Cook’s, or unassisted; he may probably never reach Mecca; he may drown before he gets to Port Said; he may perish ingloriously on the coast of the Red Sea; his desire may remain eternally frustrate. Unfulfilled aspiration may always trouble him. But he will not be tormented in the same way as the man who, desiring to reach Mecca, and harried by the desire to reach Mecca, never leaves Brixton.

It is something to have left Brixton. Most of us have not left Brixton. We have not even taken a cab to Ludgate Circus and inquired from Cook’s the price of a conducted tour. And our excuse to ourselves is that there are only twenty-four hours in the day.

If we further analyse our vague, uneasy aspiration, we shall, I think, see that it springs from a fixed idea that we ought to do something in addition to those things which we are loyally and morally obliged to do. We are obliged, by various codes written and unwritten, to maintain ourselves and our families (if any) in health and comfort, to pay our debts, to save, to increase our prosperity by increasing our efficiency. A task sufficiently difficult! A task which very few of us achieve! A task often beyond our skill! Yet, if we succeed in it, as we sometimes do, we are not satisfied; the skeleton is still with us.

And even when we realise that the task is beyond our skill, that our powers cannot cope with it, we feel that we should be less discontented if we gave to our powers, already overtaxed, something still further to do.

And such is, indeed, the fact. The wish to accomplish something outside their formal programme is common to all men who in the course of evolution have risen past a certain level.

Until an effort is made to satisfy that wish, the sense of uneasy waiting for something to start which has not started will remain to disturb the peace of the soul.

F
ROM
A S
HROPSHIRE
L
AD
, 1896
By A.E. Houseman