Choosing a Vocation

Choosing a Vocation

BY FRANK PINGREE.

The time will come when there will be institutions for deter- mining the natural bent of the boy or girl ; when men of large ex- perience and close observation will study the natural inclination of the youth, help him find where his greatest strength lies and how to use it to the best advantage. Such institutions would help boys and girls to start in their proper careers early in life ; and an early choice shortens the way. Can anything be more im- portant to human beings than a start in life in the right direction, where even small effort will count for more in the race than the greatest effort — and a life of drudgery — in the wrong direction ? A man is seldom unsuccessful, unhappy, or vicious when he is in his place.

"Be what nature intended you for, and you will succeed; be anything else, and you will be ten thousand times worse than nothing." — Sydney Smith.

"He that hath a trade hath an estate." — Franklin.

"Nature fits all her children with something to do." — Lowell.

As occupations and professions have a powerful influence upon the length of human life, the youth should first ascertain whether the vocation he thinks of choosing is a healthful one.

The occupation of the mind has a great influence upon the health of the body.

There is no occupation so dangerous and destructive to life but that plenty of human beings can be found to engage in it. Of all the instances that can be given of recklessness of life, there is none that exceeds that of the workmen employed in what is called drypointing — the grinding of needles and table forks. The fine steel dust which they breathe brings on a painful disease, of which they are almost sure to die before they are forty. Yet not only are men tempted by high wages to engage in this employment, but they resist to the utmost all contrivances devised for the dimin- ishing of danger through fear that such things would cause more workmen to offer themselves and thus lower wages.

We will probably find more old men on farms than elsewhere. There are many reasons why farmers should live longer than per- sons residing in cities, or than those engaged in other occupations.

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Aside from the purer air, the outdoor exercise, both conducive to a good appetite and sound sleep which comparatively few in cities enjoy, they are free from the friction, harassing cares, anxieties and the keen competition incident to city life.

There is no doubt that aspiration and success tend to prolong life. Prosperity tends to longevity, if we do not wear life away or burn it out in the feverish pursuit of wealth.

Among miners in some sections over six hundred out of every thousand die from consumption. In the prisons of Europe, where the fatal effect of bad air and filth are shown, over sixty-one per cent of the deaths are from tuberculosis. According to a long series of investigations by Drs. Benoysten & Lombard into occu- pations or trades where workers must inhale dust, it appears that mineral dust is the most detrimental to health, animal dust rank- ing next, and vegetable dust third.

In choosing an occupation, cleanliness, pure air, sunlight and freedom from corroding dust and poisonous gases, are of the greatest importance. A man who would sell a year of his life for any amount of money would be considered insane, and yet we de- liberately choose occupations and vocations which statistics and physicians tell us will be practically sure to cut off from five to twenty-five, thirty, or even forty years of our lives, and are seemingly perfectly indifferent to our fate.

There is danger in a calling which requires great expenditure of vitality at long, irregular intervals. He who is not regularly, or systematically employed incurs perpetual risk. Dr. Patten, chief surgeon at the National Soldiers' Home, at Dayton, Ohio, says that "of the five thousand soldiers in that institution, fully eighty per cent are suffering from heart disease in one form or other, due to the forced physical exertions of the campaigns."

Vigorous thought must come from a fresh brain. We cannot expect nerve, snap, robustness and vigor, elasticity in the speech, from an exhausted, jaded brain. The brain is one of the last organs of the body to reach maturity (at about the age of twenty- eight) and should never be overworked, especially in youth. The whole future of a man is often ruined by over-straining the brain in school.

As a rule, physical vigor is the condition of a great career.

What wrould Gladstone have accomplished with a weak, puny physique ? He addresses an audience in Corfu, in Greek ; and another at Florence, in Italian. A little later he converses at ease with Bismarck, in German, or talks fluent French, in Paris, or piles argument on argument in English, for hours, in Parliament.

Select a clean, useful, honorable occupation. If there is any doubt on this point, abandon it at once, for familiarity with a bad business will make it seem good. Choose an occupation which will develop you ; which will elevate you ; which will give you a chance

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for self-improvement and promotion. You may not make quite so much money, but you will be more of a man, and manhood is above all riches, oversteps all titles ; and character is greater than any career. If possible avoid occupations that compel you to work in a cramped position, or where you must work at night and on Sunday. Don't try to justify yourself that someone must do this work. Let "Somebody," not yourself, take the responsi- bility. Aside from the right and wrong of the thing, it is injuri- ous to the health to work seven days in the week, to work at night when nature intended you to sleep, or to sleep in the daytime when she intended you to work. Many a man has dwarfed his man- hood, cramped his intellect, crushed his aspiration, blunted his finer sensibilities, in some mean, narrow occupation just because there was money in it.

"Study yourself," says Longfellow, "and most of all note well wherein kind nature meant you to excel."

Dr. Matthews says that "to no other cause, perhaps, is failure in life so frequently to be traced as to a mistaken calling."

How many men have been made ridiculous for life by choos- ing law, or medicine, or theology, simply because they are hon- orable professions? These men might have been respectable farmers or merchants, but are "Nobodies" in such vocations. Thousands of youths receive an education that fits them for a pro- fession which they have not the means or inclination to follow, and that unfits them for the conditions of life to which they were born. A large portion of Paris cabmen are unsuccessful students in theology and other professions, and also unfrocked priests. They are very bad cabmen.

Don't choose a profession or occupation because your father, or uncle, or brother, is in it. Don't choose a business because you inherit it, or because parents or friends want you to follow it. Don't choose it because others have made fortunes in it. Don't choose it because it is considered the proper thing and a "genteel" business. The mania for a genteel occupation, for a soft job, which eliminates drudgery, thorns, hardships, and all disagreeable things, and one which can be learned with very little effort, ruins many a youth.

Those who fail, as a rule are those who are out of their places. A man out of his placets but half a man ; his very nature is per- verted. He is working against his nature, rowing against the stream. When his strength is exhausted, he will float down with the current. A man can not succeed when his whole nature is entering its perpetual protest against his occupation. To succeed, his vocation must have the consent of all his faculties ; they must be in harmony with his purpose.

"Do not, I beseech you," said Garfield, "be content to enter on any business that does not require and compel constant intel-

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lectual growth." Choose upward, study the men in the vocation you think of adopting. Does it elevate those who follow it ? Are they broad, liberal, intelligent, men ? Or have they become mere appendages of their professions, living in a rut with no standing in the community, and of no use to it? Don't think you will be the great exception, and can enter a questionable vocation without being a creature of it. In spite of all your determination and will- power to the contrary, your occupation from the very law of asso- ciation and habit, will seize you as in a vise, will mold you, shape you, fashion you, and stamp its inevitable impress upon you.

Beware of that frequently fatal gift, versatility.

Many a person misses being a great man by splitting into two middling ones. In attempting to gain a knowledge of half a hundred subjects he has mastered none. "The jack-of-all-trades," says one of the foremost manufacturers of this country, "had a chance in my generation. In this he has none."

"The measure of man's learning will be the amount of his voluntary ignorance," said Thoreau. If we go into a factory where the mariner's compass is made, we can see the needles before they are magnetized, they will point in any direction. But when they have been applied to the magnet, and received its peculiar power, from that moment they point to the north, and are true to the pole ever after. So man never points steadily in any direction until he has been polarized by a great master pur- pose.

Canon Farrar said, "There is only one real failure in life pos- sible, and that is, not to be true to the best one knows."

"Whoever can make two ears of corn, two blades of grass to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before," .^ays Swift, "would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service to his country, than the whole race of politicians put to- gether."

COALVILLE, UTAH

(From time to time, helpful articles on the nobility of work, and that will aid young men in the selection of their lives' vocations, will appear in Vol. 17, Improvement Era.)

ATTER-DAY SAINTS' CHAPEL, LOS ANGELES BRANCH, CALIFORNIA

MISSION.

Dedicated by President Joseph F. Smith, on Sunday, May 4, 1913.

LATTER-DAY SAINTS' MISSION HOME, Residence of the President of California Mission, Los Angeles, Cal.