A failure or so, in itself, would not matter, if it did not incur a loss of self-esteem and of self-confidence.  But just as nothing succeeds like success, so nothing fails like failure.  Most people who are ruined are ruined by attempting too much.  Therefore, in setting out on the immense enterprise of living fully and comfortably within the narrow limits of twenty-four hours a day, let us avoid at any cost the risk of an early failure.  I will not agree that, in this business at any rate, a glorious failure is better than a petty success.  I am all for the petty success.  A glorious failure leads to nothing; a petty success may lead to a success that is not petty.

So let us begin to examine the budget of the day’s time.  You say your day is already full to overflowing.  How?  You actually spend in earning your livelihood—­how much?  Seven hours, on the average?  And in actual sleep, seven?  I will add two hours, and be generous.  And I will defy you to account to me on the spur of the moment for the other eight hours.

IV

THE CAUSE OF THE TROUBLES

In order to come to grips at once with the question of time-expenditure in all its actuality, I must choose an individual case for examination.  I can only deal with one case, and that case cannot be the average case, because there is no such case as the average case, just as there is no such man as the average man.  Every man and every man’s case is special.

But if I take the case of a Londoner who works in an office, whose office hours are from ten to six, and who spends fifty minutes morning and night in travelling between his house door and his office door, I shall have got as near to the average as facts permit.  There are men who have to work longer for a living, but there are others who do not have to work so long.

Fortunately the financial side of existence does not interest us here; for our present purpose the clerk at a pound a week is exactly as well off as the millionaire in Carlton House-terrace.

Now the great and profound mistake which my typical man makes in regard to his day is a mistake of general attitude, a mistake which vitiates and weakens two-thirds of his energies and interests.  In the majority of instances he does not precisely feel a passion for his business; at best he does not dislike it.  He begins his business functions with reluctance, as late as he can, and he ends them with joy, as early as he can.  And his engines while he is engaged in his business are seldom at their full “h.p.” (I know that I shall be accused by angry readers of traducing the city worker; but I am pretty thoroughly acquainted with the City, and I stick to what I say.)

Yet in spite of all this he persists in looking upon those hours from ten to six as “the day,” to which the ten hours preceding them and the six hours following them are nothing but a prologue and epilogue.  Such an attitude, unconscious though it be, of course kills his interest in the odd sixteen hours, with the result that, even if he does not waste them, he does not count them; he regards them simply as margin.