If your goal is personal advancement, do not let negative feelings stand in your way. Dreams and imaginings avail nothing in raising us to what our souls aim at, without fruitful work; nor can these faculties grow in one brief instant — they need time and effort. How, then, can we advance in practice, and not by mere daydreams?
Half a century ago many believed that personality was hereditary and admitted of no change
whatever: environment was merely the ground where the inherited endowments grew, without any perceptible transformation coming over them. How often this philosophy persuaded people that they had been born with music rather than come by it! Today, however, that philosophy lies at rest where the geographical theory reposes which held that the earth is flat and not round!
We do not believe that knowledge
is the means of that progress which is bound up with intelligence, unless we enter the broad field of culture, and the laboratory. Facts are the fruit of personal experiment, which works to steer life along the roads of success and advancement.
There is another truth that science makes clear: progress is the result of striving and development, not a hereditary process. A positive spirit has helped many to reach their goals after spending but little effort, while the negative spend double the effort on the very same undertaking, and may arrive at no result. From this last group come the protests and the discontent. Listen to this one, who says: "I am ready to accept the facts of science, and I will spend my utmost effort to improve my character — but how? What must I do? Where do I begin? And how do I overcome the obstacles that bar my way?" Obstacles: here is the crux of our subject, for they rise up even before the beginning and paralyze our thoughts from moving. Were it not for them, progress would be easily won simply by studying the circumstances around us and the careers of those who have attained some measure of success.
You know that if you could overcome the difficulties you would reach the summit of success, and your ambitious soul longs for this. Then hear this example: suppose a man has a quantity of stones stacked in his garden and wants to move them. Does he think first that he is not up to it — so let the work wait for tomorrow?... He has, then, the desire to work, and every time he looks at the heap of stones it grows more insistent, and he wishes it would vanish in the