How to Succeed | Page 6

and examining the chair. He
found a great deal of rattan thrown away by the East India merchant
ships, whose cargoes were wrapped in it. He began the manufacture of
rattan chairs and other furniture, and has astonished the world by what
he has done with what was before thrown away. While this man was
dreaming about some far off success, he at that very time had fortune
awaiting only his ingenuity and industry.
If you want to get rich, study yourself and your own wants. You will
find millions of others have the same wants, the same demands. The
safest business is always connected with men's prime necessities. They
must have clothing, dwellings; they must eat. They want comforts,
facilities of all kinds, for use and pleasure, luxury, education, culture.
Any man who can supply a great want of humanity, improve any
methods which men use, supply any demand or contribute in any way
to their well-being, can make a fortune.
But it is detrimental to the highest success to undertake anything
merely because it is profitable. If the vocation does not supply a human
want, if it is not healthful, if it is degrading, if it is narrowing, don't
touch it.
A selfish vocation never pays. If it belittles the manhood, blights the
affections, dwarfs the mental life, chills the charities and shrivels the
soul, don't touch it. Choose that occupation, if possible, which will be
the most helpful to the largest number.

It is estimated that five out of every seven of the millionaire
manufacturers began by making with their own hands the articles on
which they made their fortune.
One of the greatest hindrances to advancement and promotion in life is
the lack of observation and the disinclination to take pains. A keen,
cultivated observation will see a fortune where others see only poverty.
An observing man, the eyelets of whose shoes pulled out, but who
could ill afford to get another pair, said to himself, "I will make a
metallic lacing hook, which can be riveted into the leather." He
succeeded in doing so and now he is a very rich man.
An observing barber in Newark, N. J., thought he could make an
improvement on shears for cutting hair, and invented "clippers" and
became very rich. A Maine man was called from the hayfield to wash
out the clothes for his invalid wife. He had never realized what it was to
wash before. He invented the washing-machine and made a fortune. A
man who was suffering terribly with toothache, said to himself, "There
must be some way of filling teeth to prevent them aching;" he invented
gold filling for teeth.
The great things of the world have not been done by men of large
means. Want has been the great schoolmaster of the race: necessity has
been the mother of all great inventions. Ericsson began the construction
of a screw-propeller in a bath-room. John Harrison, the great inventor
of the marine chronometer, began his career in the loft of an old barn.
Parts of the first steamboat ever run in America were set up in the
vestry of an old church in Philadelphia by Fitch. McCormick began to
make his famous reaper in an old grist-mill. The first model dry-dock
was made in an attic. Clark, the founder of Clark University of
Worcester, Mass., began his great fortune by making toy wagons in a
horse-shed.
Opportunities? They crowd around us. Forces of nature plead to be
used in the service of man, as lightning for ages tried to attract his
attention to electricity, which would do his drudgery and leave him to
develop the God-given powers within him.

There is power lying latent everywhere, waiting for the observant eye
to discover it.
First find out what the people need and then supply that want. An
invention to make the smoke go the wrong way in a chimney might be
a very ingenious thing, but it would be of no use to humanity. The
patent office at Washington is full of wonderful devices, ingenious
mechanism; not one in hundreds is of earthly use to the inventor or to
the world, and yet how many families have been impoverished and
have struggled for years mid want and woe, while the father has been
working on useless inventions. These men did not study the wants of
humanity. A. T. Stewart, as a boy, lost eighty-seven cents when his
capital was one dollar and a half, in buying buttons and thread which
people would not purchase. After that he made it a rule never to buy
anything which people did not want.
The first thing a youth, entering the city to make his home there, needs
to do is to make himself a necessity to the person who employs him,