Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/213003
The Art of Manliness Continued is when men work with most exhausting intensity, on the basis of a life-time of training, that they work with most apparent ease.This world is no lottery, where you take a chance ticket and run your risk of winning or losing a prize, but serious business, where nothing worthwhile comes any other way than through dead, hard work carried through the days and years. One never truly possesses anything one has not earned by hard effort.To possess money, you must have earned money, or you do not know its worth, nor how to spend it aright.To possess knowledge, you must have earned knowledge; and the brilliant student who slides through college on his wits, coaching up just before examination and winning fairly good grades, loses in the slower race of life beside even the ungifted plodder, who has taken faithfully every hard step of the road. It is said of Euclid, formulator of the earliest of the sciences, geometry, that on one occasion he was called in to teach a certain king of Egypt his new science. He began as we begin, with definition, axiom and proposition — we have not improved appreciably upon his text-book; and the king grew restless and indignant:"Must a Pharaoh learn like a common slave?" Euclid, with that pride in knowing one thing well, that everyone ought to have who knows one science thoroughly to the end, responded:"There is no royal road to geometry!"We can universalize the statement: there is no royal road to anything on earth — perhaps in heaven either — worth having, except the one broad, open highway, with no toll-gates upon it, of dead, hard, consistent work through the days and years. Spinoza said — it is the last word in his Ethic:"All noble things are as difficult as they are rare; " and we may add, they are rare because they are difficult.> JOBS for TEAMS | 18 JobsForTeams1013_manliness.indd 2 www.jobsforteams.com 10/8/13 11:37 AM