To Be Square

If you had a fine horse upon whose swiftness your fortunes depended, how would you treat it? Would you house it carelessly and make a pack-horse of it between races? Would you stuff it on all sorts of foods, keep it standing for weeks in the stable and then expect it to win the race for you? Would you keep it chasing over the country all night and then expect it to win next day? Of course you would not.

But you treat YOURSELF that way—and then go around clad in rags and a grieved expression because you have “failed” in the races for success.

In the races of life there are “classes” enough for all. Every man, woman and child may win his races and carry off his prizes—IF he takes proper care of himself and observes carefully the rules of the race.

With proper preparation and a good understanding any man can win his races.

By proper preparation I do not mean a college education. Nor do I mean even that a man’s youth must be spent in any sort of school. There is Owen Kildare, for instance, whose story appears in February Success. He is now winning his races and wearing his laurels although his early life was spent as newsboy, prizefighter and all-around tough, and he never learned to read until he was thirty years old. Now, at thirty-eight, he is a successful story writer and a real helper in the world’s work.

It is never too late to catch on to the principle of success. That is literally what one has to do in order to win the races.

Owen Kildare was a success even in the slums, and all his life was a schooling. He was “square.” He lived up to his best understanding and his understanding grew.

Every man is born into just the school he needs to prepare him for success in life. If he is not “square” with himself and the class he is born into he stays perhaps a life-time in that class. Perhaps he drops down, down, down to the foot of the class. All because he is not “square” in his treatment of the lessons life presents to him. He shirks.

What does it mean to be “square”? It means a different thing to every man on earth, and yet it means always one thing—to do what your own spirit says is right, and to keep your word, actual or implied.

To be square requires a steady purpose; in other words, self-control.

To be square one must control it feelings instead of letting them run away with him. The boy who plays hookey when he feels like it is not square with himself nor the world. There is an “ought” in his heart which he is not square with.

Life is full of mournful fizzles who habitually play hookey when they feel like it. They feel like alighting this thing and that, and—they play hookey. They feel like lying abed late in the morning, though that little “ought” inside, and mayhap an employer outside, admonishes them to get up even if they don’t happen to feel like it. Something is expected of them and they shirk. Tacitly their word is given to be on time, and they are not on time. They are not square.

The little “ought” inside is the well laid track upon which the individual’s life may safely run. When he jumps that track and runs on feeling alone he is not square with the world and there is danger ahead. And he ploughs along in the wrong direction, injuring himself and others.

He follows feeling and lies abed. He is late at his work and dumpy when he gets there. His employer feels that he is not fairly treated. If he acts upon his feeling the sleepy-head will get his salary reduced.

Then he will tell folks what a stingy old curmudgeon his employer is. For he will never see that his own lack of square dealing has anything to do with his lack of funds or success. If there is anything the feeling-follower is really proficient in—anything where he shows himself a glorious genius—it is in finding excuses for himself and to himself. He never flies the smooth track of “ought” unless there was a great big bogie-man to throw him off. But his bogie-man somehow will never stand the camera test—they are big and valid excuses only in his own mind. The feeling-follower has an artistic imagination. He is ingenious.

If only he would exercise his ingenuity in keeping on the track he’d get his salary raised.

Of course the sense of oughtness is conscience, and conscience is a matter of education. The Hindoo mother thinks she ought to drown her baby girls in the Ganges. Owen Kildare used to think he ought to be a slugger. He religiously knocked down every fellow who failed to toe the scratch in slumdom. Roosevelt et al thinks he ought to knock down Spain for being mean to Cuba and the Filipinos. Tolstoi thinks he ought to resist nothing. All these people are winners in their own particular races because they square their acts with their “oughts.”

And no two of them has just the same kind of an ought. Each has the conscience he is educated up to.

Conscience is a matter of education, but it has to be minded just the same. The Hindoo must mind her conscience and she will win her races. Tolstoi must mind his conscience if he would win his. You must mind your conscience if you would win.

And you must mind your conscience at it IS—not as you’d like to have it be. If your conscience tells you to hop out of bed now it will not do to lie still and philosophize about it, and explain away the “ought,” and conjure up an excuse for flying its track.

You can silence the “ought” but you can’t convince it. You can no more explain it away than you can explain away the shining steel rails between here and New York. You can ignore either—and get hurt. But they are there.

Until you can educate your conscience up to the point of letting you do what you want to do you would better do what it bids you even if you don’t happen to feel like it.

The true preparation for success in life is to be had anywhere, in school or slum, in war or peace. All life’s experiences are simply opportunities for you to set the habit of being square with the God in you and the gods without. This is character.

Did you ever watch a horse race? Perhaps there are half a dozen entries, every one of which has been fed, exercised and groomed to the highest state of perfection—each according to the best judgment of its own particular groom. Now they appear, ready, for the running. When the signal is given to start the horses are all wheeled around with the aim to keep them abreast as they pass under the wire ready for the signal, “Go!” But there are always some jockeys who are not square. They are so eager to get ahead of all the others that they swing too far ahead, and the whole lot have to be started over again. Time and again this false start is repeated, all because some of the jockeys are not trying to get a fair start—they are trying to get the start of the others; they want to take all the advantage they can get. They are not square. And did you ever see one of these unfair jockeys win the race? I never did.

The jockey who cannot control his feelings and start square gets rattled and urges his horse so excitedly that the horse “breaks” and “goes to pieces.” Then when the jockey knows he has lost the race he takes it out on the poor horse, which finally comes in all panting and foam-covered at the tail of the race.

The same horse with a self-contained jockey would have won the race. The self-contained jockey rules his feelings and keeps to the track of “ought”—which is the track of wisdom and success.

It is easy for a man to do as he “ought” in little things. And if he takes pains to do it in little things he will find he has grown power to do as he “ought” when big things turn up. It is this doing as he ought—as his own soul says he ought, which enables a man to learn the lessons set for him in his particular class in life.

And it is the learning of the lessons in one class which fits him for those of a higher class.

This is why the shirk, who isn’t square, has a hard row to hoe, and never gets promoted.

The “ought” in a man is the voice of the principle of his being.

Success is the result of obedience to this voice.

Your feelings are the race horse upon whose swiftness and right handling depend the races of your life.

You are not your feelings. You are the intelligence and will which govern and inform your feelings. You are the groom who cares for, and the jockey who directs the race horse of feeling.

Will you direct feeling, or will you let feeling run away with you?

Remember, feeling is your race horse. How will you treat it? Will you train it for the great events of life? Will you let it run loose without a purpose? Will you make a pack-mule of it, to carry petty and unnecessary burdens for Tom, Dick and Harry?

A good horse-trainer takes great care of the feelings of his horse. He never jerks the reins and yells at him. He never lets him stand uncurried and unfed in a dirty stable, with little yapping, snapping curs to torment him. He never loads him with unnecessary burdens and flogs him up hill and down.

But that is what men do with themselves. A man neglects his own brain and body and soul; he curses himself and his “luck”; he permits himself to be loaded with unnecessary annoyances; and then he jaws around about never being able to do as he wants to, and wonders what life is good for anyway.

A good horse trainer never pampers his horse either. He does not give him free access to the oat bin. Neither does he curry him daily to the last pitch of shininess, blanket him and keep him always under a roof.

A man stuffs himself at all hours, upon any sort of food which tempts his palate; he overdresses and underexercises himself; and cusses the world in general because his feelings are unruly.

A good horse trainer does not stuff his horse for supper and chase him around over the country until two o’clock in the morning as a preparation for next day’s race. No. It takes a man or woman to do such things as that with himself, and then expect success.

If you want to be a real success in life you must have ONE purpose to which all other purposes an tributary. You must have ONE aim, and all the actions of your life must be so governed as to assist in the one direction.

This does not mean that a whole life-time must be devoted to a single pursuit; nor that you must have no other pursuits whilst you are following the one. But it does mean that no other pursuits shall come before the one—that you shall have no other gods before that.

If you neglect business for art, or art for business, both will fail. If you pursue art as a recreation, to better prepare you for business; if you pursue art when business does not call you; if at the slightest call of business you fly instantly with your whole soul, to that; you will make a success of business and the art will help you to do it. But if business is the present aim everything else must be dropped instantly and willingly, at its lightest call. Only so will business be a success. This is “concentration.”

A race horse is not always racing; neither is the most successful man in any line, always thinking and working on that line. But he is always thinking and working on tributaries of his special line.

Clara Morris and Bernhardt find recreation in art, history, literature, outdoor life—things not necessarily connected at all with their stage life, but all of which tend to breadth and depth of character, and to splendid health, and thus add to the power of their work on the stage.

But Paderewski or Gabrilowitsch or Hoffmann would not turn to heavy manual labor for recreation, lest it stiffen their supple fingers.

Neither would any of these successful artists indulge in midnight carousals and unseasonable but highly seasoned feasts. With them, all things which will not assist them in their main purpose, are ruthlessly cut out entirely.

It is this self-command and one-purpose-ness which enables them to win their races. The lack of these is the ONE cause of all failures.

 

I find, upon looking however this article that, as a whole, it is quite a mixed metaphor. But never mind—it is like life itself, which is decidedly a mixed metaphor, and none the less interesting for the mixture.