| "HOW TO FIND YOURSELF. ‘First, early in life make it a point to find yourself. Second, make sure that you are right.’
This was the advice one time given in an address to students at Dartmouth College by its president.
One of the first steps toward self-discovery is, of course, an education, the broadest you can possibly get. Go to college if you can. If you can’t, give yourself a college education at home, in your spare time. Many a young man and young woman has done that.
One of the great advantages of education and wide experience is that these help us to uncover more and more of our hidden powers. And these seem inexhaustible, for, no matter how many successive discoveries we make in ourselves, there apparently is no diminution of the remainder. In fact, human life seems to be a sort of a funnel. We pass into the small end at birth, and the farther we go the larger and larger grows the funnel. Our horizon keeps ever pushing out towards the Infinite, and there seems no limit to our possible growth.
Many a youth whose whole idea before he started for college was to go into business, with his father, or to follow his father’s profession whatever it might be; but as he advanced in his studies and the inspiration of the college professors pushed his horizon of ignorance a little farther and farther away, new forces were opened up and he made discoveries in his nature which completely changed his life aim.
The most important thing, at the very outset of your career, is to get in touch with people who will stimulate your ambition, to get into an atmosphere which will awaken your dormant energies and call out your reserves.
Perhaps no other means of self-discovery is so potent as an inspiring book, and it is a great thing to keep such books near you, because ideals become dim if we do not constantly stimulate them by the right mental nourishment.
Reading the world’s great books – the Bible, Shakespeare, the life stories of great men and women, and associations with noble souls are great helps to young people on their voyage of self-discovery."
- Orison Swett Marden |