(This chapter is addressed to young men and women who haven't yet found the work
they want to do. If you are in that category, reading this chapter may have a profound
effect upon the remainder of your life.)
If you are under eighteen, you will probably soon be called upon to make the two most
important decisions of your life- decisions that will profoundly alter all the days of your
years: decisions that may have far-reaching effects upon your happiness, your income,
your health; decisions that may make or break you.
What are these two tremendous decisions?
First: How are you going to make a living? Are you going to be a farmer, a mail carrier, a
chemist, a forest ranger, a stenographer, a horse dealer, a college professor, or are you
going to run a hamburger stand?
Second: Whom are you going to select to be the father or mother of your children?
Both of those great decisions are frequently gambles. "Every boy," says Harry Emerson
Fosdick in his book, The Power to See It Through, "every boy is a gambler when he
chooses a vocation. He must stake his life on it."
How can you reduce the gamble in selecting a vocation? Read on; we will tell you as
best we can. First, try, if possible, to find work that you enjoy. I once asked David M.
Goodrich, Chairman of the Board, B. F. Goodrich Company-tyre manufacturers-what he
considered the first requisite of success in business, and he replied: "Having a good
time at your work. If you enjoy what you are doing," he said, "you may work long hours,
but it won't seem like work at all. It will seem like play."
Edison was a good example of that. Edison-the unschooled newsboy who grew up to
transform the industrial life of America-Edison, the man who often ate and slept in his
laboratory and toiled there for eighteen hours a day. But it wasn't toil to him. "I never did
a day's work in my life," he exclaimed. "It was all fun."
No wonder he succeeded!
I once heard Charles Schwab say much the same thing. He said: "A man can succeed
at almost anything for which he has unlimited enthusiasm."
But how can you have enthusiasm for a job when you haven't the foggiest idea of what
you want to do? "The greatest tragedy I know of," said Mrs. Edna Kerr, who once hired
thousands of employees for the Dupont Company, and is now assistant director of
industrial relations for the American Home Products Company-"The greatest tragedy I
know of," she told me, "is that so many young people never discover what they really
want to do. I think no one else is so much to be pitied as the person who gets nothing at
all out of his work but his pay." Mrs. Kerr reports that even college graduates come to
her and say: "I have a B.A. degree from Dartmouth [or an M.A. from Cornell]. Have you
some kind of work I can do for your firm?" They don't know themselves what they are
able to do, or even what they would like to do. Is it any wonder that so many men and
women who start out in life with competent minds and rosy dreams end up at forty in
utter frustration and even with a nervous breakdown? In fact, finding the right occupation
is important even for your health. When Dr. Raymond Pearl, of Johns Hopkins, made a
study, together with some insurance companies, to discover the factors that make for a
long life, he placed "the right occupation" high on the list. He might have said, with