These are the pitfalls that most frequently threaten that daring that we sometimes find in the timid.

Their very defects preventing them from making proper comparisons, they are altogether too prone to ignore their faults and to magnify their virtues and so fall an easy prey to the designer and the sharper.

Their very carelessness in estimating other people becomes the foundation of an involuntary partiality the moment they are called upon to judge their own actions.

It is not deliberate self-indulgence that drives them to act in this way, but their inexperience, which gives rise in them to the desire for perfection, and this necessarily provokes, simultaneously with the despair caused by their failure to attain it, a fear of having this failure remarked or commented upon.

The man who possesses poise is too familiar with the realities of life not to be aware that the search for such an ideal is a Utopian dream.

But he is also aware that, if actual perfection does not exist, it is the bounden duty of man to struggle always in pursuit of good and to show appreciation of it in whatsoever form it may manifest itself.

Sincerity toward himself thus becomes for him an easy matter indeed, and for the very reason that his poise leaves him absolutely free to form a correct estimate of others.

Serious self-examination throws a clear light for him upon those merits of which he has a right to be proud, while revealing to him at the same time the faults to which he is most likely to yield.

The habit of estimating himself and his own qualities without fear or favor gives him great facility for gaging the motives of other people.

He thus avoids the pitfalls that a biased viewpoint spreads before the feet of the foolish, and at the same time represses that feeling of vanity which might lead him to believe that he is altogether too clever to fall into them.

He watches himself constantly to avoid getting into the bypaths which he sees with sorrow that others are following, and does not fail to estimate accurately the value of the victories he achieves over himself as well as over the duplicity of most of the people who surround him.

And this superiority is what makes certain his poise.  More difficult perhaps than anything else to acquire is the power to resist the appeals of one’s own self-love.

We will explain this later at greater length.  Lack of poise is often due to nothing so much as an excess of vanity which throws one back upon oneself from the fear of not being able to shine in the front rank.

Such a person does not say to himself:  “I will conquer this place by sheer merit.”  He contents himself with envying those who occupy it, quite neglecting to put forth the efforts which would place him there beside them.

There is nothing worse than yielding to an exaggerated tenderness toward ourselves, which, by magnifying our merits in our own eyes, frequently leads us to make attempts which result in failure and expose us to ridicule.