The fact that he believes in himself, sets him apart from ordinary mankind.  Many great men have been at loss to understand why they attained success.  It is well nigh impossible for them to outline the causes that led them to the top rungs of the ladder.  The reason is that their lack of fear of experiences was an unconscious one, rather than a conscious one.  However, they are willing to admit that acting on the principle of profiting by experience loaned them initiative with which to proceed.  They soon came to know opportunity at sight and had only to look around to find it.

The young man standing on the threshold of life is, from lack of experience, puzzled over the future.  He looks above him and sees the towering successes.  He reads in the papers of the massive characters who have risen from the bottom to the top.  Naturally he would like to meet one of these giants of success and hear what he has to say.  The interview is quite needless. “Get busy and profit by experience,” is about all the advice one man can give to another.  There is no way to profit by experience until we have had experience so there is nothing to do but get busy and experience will come as fast as we can absorb it.  Our duty is to strive for success and not expect to attain it except by successive steps.  A wholesale consignment would be our undoing.  Quick successes through luck or good fortune have not the lasting value of those won by virtue of knowing how—­of accomplishing what we started out to do.

Faith in one’s self does not come from the outside—­it must spring up naturally from within.  A healthy body and a sane mind are the best foundations for this.  The young man who begins his career with these facts in mind is given a running start over his competitors.  Poverty and failure are the result of an ignorance of the value of experience.  Worry, anxiety, fear of not doing the right thing, lack of insight into character ... these, too, are the result of a lack of experience.

Good health is necessary to experience, but a majority neglect to take care of it.  If we are to profit by what we learn we must have the vim with which to push forward.  We must have every ounce of vitality we possess at command—­ready for use.  This we conserve for the big emergency which we know is coming.  New experiences are pushing us forward and previous experiences are helping to move the load.  Experience tells us what to do at this point and that—­and at last puts its shoulder to the wheel and “over she goes!”

Every mind is in possession of an enormous amount of dormant power and only experience can release it into proper action.  We often hear a fond mother say that her son is full to bursting with the old nick, which means that the youngster is overflowing with pent-up energy.  With experience he could find good use for it—­but without it this surplus may turn out to be a dangerous possession.  Young men of this type should be guarded most carefully and advised to “get busy” early in life at something worth while.  Many a bright fellow brimming with excess power has gone as a lamb to the slaughter into the maelstrom of vice because of being held back from legitimate occupation.  He just had to blow off steam so he did it in a gin mill rather than a rolling mill.