Know Your Road and Go Straight Ahead
Let thine eyes look right on, and let thine eyelids look straight before theeƒTurn not to the right hand nor the left. "When I have once taken a resolution, I go straight to my aim," said Cardinal Richelieu. The man who vacillates in his course, turning first this way and then that, may get somewhere, but it will likely be nowhere. "He was everything by turns and nothing long," one comments on a man of extraordinary talent who might have made a mark in history, but who outlived his splendid promise and died a failure. "He was always just going to do something, but never did it," one tells us of the brilliant Coleridge, who, according to Charles Lamb, left behind him above forty thousand treatises on metaphysics and divinity-not one of them completed! "I go at what I am about," said Charles Kingsley, "as if there was nothing else in the world for the time being." And the mark Charles Kingsley made in the world still abides as one of the most golden lines in human history. There is such a thing as being a "Jack-of-all-trades" and good at none. There are too many who are like the London shop keeper, who had painted above his shop door the sign, "Goods Removed, Messages Taken, Carpets Beaten, and Poetry composed on any subject," but whose story history preserves only because he was noted for being very unsuccessful. Success is very shy of scattered energies. It crowns the man who sets his heart on one thing supremely, and brings to bear on that one thing the full force of all his powers. In the majority of cases, the difference between one man and another, is not a difference in ability and opportunity, but a difference in the power to concentrate attention and effort. It is this difference that spells success for the one and failure for the other. The man who gets there, is the man who knows where he is going and goes straight ahead.
