of the editorial/opinion page staff
published by the StarTribune
June 4, 1967
THERE'S ALWAYS some zealot dedicated to the proposition that any man who isn't a killer or a sex maniac is capable of reaching the top in whatever field he fancies. And said zealot is eager to take you on his knee and give you the formula for attaining your heart's desire.
All you have to do is follow his directions faithfully, crank up your determination, not get distracted by liquor and sins of the flesh, and do your morning pushups. Finally will come the day when you have finished your best seller, become chairman of the board, made a million dollars or won the election.
INVOLVED ARE CHARACTER and courage, courtesy, personality development, the will to succeed, the knack of making stepping stones out of stumbling blocks, conquering fear and worry and developing imagination.
Far be it from me to pooh-pooh personal improvement. I am behind it four-square and, had I stuck with my piano lessons or continued to raise pigeons, life would have been different. There is a crying need for self-improvement, and though the need seems most apparent among the young, the adult could use a big dose of it, too.
But what irks me about those who peddle the self-improvement nostrums is their failure to make allowances for individual differences. Such differences are the heart of the matter.
We differ physically. We differ in taste, interests and inclinations. Some are smarter than others and some have more drive and ambition. Some are satisfied to be hewers of wood and haulers of water, some are content to dig holes or herd sheep. They don 't want to own a company or be a foreman. They want to put in their day's work, go home, and let somebody else worry about production and payroll.
I recall a fellow who made an adequate living raising chickens. When a friend of his went broke in the shoe business, he advised this friend to consider a career in chickens. Raising them, he said, was a cinch.
So the friend bought chickens and went broke again. He was no more cut out for chicken farming than he was for selling shoes. He may not have been cut out for anything but loafing, and all the success books ever written would have given him nothing but eyestrain.
WE LIVED A MILE north of town on a 10-acre tract when I was a boy, and Jay Cowell, a freewheeling Montana sheepman with a bay window, a bald head and considerable money, advised my father to invest in a few rambouilets. He thought it a shame that our place had nothing on it but a cow and a flock of chickens. "Just buy a little band of sheep," Jay told Pop. "You'll never know you have them."
So Pop bought the sheep but they never let him forget that he had them. Every time he carried a cold and near-dead lamb in for resuscitation at the kitchen stove he would repeat Jay's remark, grit his teeth and smile grimly.
He gave up on the sheep after a couple of years, abundant grief and no profits and found it hard to forgive Jay for his bad advice. But it would have been good advice--to the likes of Jay.
Pop simply marched to a different drummer. Reading books about sheep didn't make him a sheepman any more than reading the labels on seed packets makes anyone a truck gardener.
Determination has its rewards. Hard study and sacrifice are not to be ridiculed. They produce great men. But every aspiring law student can't become a Clarence Darrow or an F. Lee Bailey. And every kid baseball nut, try as he might, can't develop into a Willie Mays.
We need the nourishment of hope but must look, too, at the hard face of reality.
Copyright 2013 StarTribune. Republished here with the permission of the StarTribune. No further republication or redistribution is permitted without the express approval of the StarTribune.
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