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Edward W. Bok

Successward: A Young Man's Book for Young Men

A FEW PREFATORY WORDS

THE average young man is apt to think that success is not for him. To his mind it is a gift to the few, not to the many. "The rich, the fortunate – they are the only people who can be successful," is the way one young fellow recently expressed it to me, and he thought as many do. It is this wrong conception of success which this book aims to remove. It has no other purpose save to show that success – and the truest and best success – is possible to any young man of honorable motives. The subject is not new, I know. All that is hoped for from this book is that it may have for young men a certain sense of nearness to their own lives and thoughts, from the fact that it is not written by a patriarch whose young manhood is far behind him. It is written to young men by a young man to whom the noise of the battle is not a recollection, but an every-day living reality. He thinks he knows what a fight for success means to a young fellow, and he writes with the smoke of the battle around him and from the very thick of the fight.

E. W. B.

PHILADELPHIA, 1895.

I

A CORRECT KNOWLEDGE OF HIMSELF

THE first, the most essential, and the greatest element of success with a young man starting out to make a career is a correct knowledge of himself. He should, before he attempts anything, understand himself. He should study himself.

He should be sure that, no matter whom else he may misunderstand, he has a correct knowledge of his own nature, his own character, and his own capabilities. And it is because so few young men have this knowledge of self that so many make disastrous failures, or fail in achieving what they set out for themselves at the beginning.

Every man in this world is created differently; no two are alike. Therefore, the nature, the thoughts, the character, the capacity of one man is utterly unlike that of another. What one man can understand another cannot. The success of one man indicates nothing to a second man. What one is capable of doing is beyond the power of another. Hence it is important that, first of all, a young man should look into himself, find out what has been given him, and come to a clear understanding of what he can do and what he cannot do.

It is one of the most pitiable sights imaginable to see, as one does so constantly, young men floundering and fluttering from one phase of life to another, unable to fasten upon any one, simply because a knowledge of themselves is absent. The result is that we see so many round men trying to fit themselves into square holes.

"But," some one will say, as asked a young fellow recently, "how in the world do you get at an understanding of yourself? How do you go about it?" No definite answer can be given to the question, any more than can a certain rule be laid down. An understanding of one's self is reached by different methods by different people, generally each method being personal to one's self. But this much can be said: every thought, every taste, every action, reveals ourselves to ourselves, and it is in the expression of these that we best learn our natures and our characters. We see ourselves with unmistakable accuracy, for example, in what we most enjoy in reading, in the people whose company pleases us most, in the things that interest us; and where our tastes and interest lead us we are generally truest to ourselves.