So Take Your Choice

With a limited amount of money, we can’t buy everything. With a limited amount of life, we can’t be everything. Much as we may wish it were otherwise, whenever we decide to do one thing, we decide not to do other things. If a man has more than one talent, he is constantly faced with a decision as to which talent he wants to give his time to. When lack of talent doesn’t limit his choice, lack of time does. No man can know all there is to know, not even in one profession and perhaps not even in one part of one profession. Everything takes time. Even active friendship takes time. When we choose to spend a day with some people, we don’t spend it with others. Even people of greatest capacity are limited as to how much they can get around and how many lives they can touch on intimate terms. Some men can do more things than others. Some men can be more things than others. Some men don’t have to narrow their choices as much as others do. But no man can be all things to all people not even to himself. And even though we may think we can be acceptable in all kinds of company, even though we may think we would like to be taken seriously by serious people, and lightly by light people, and carouse with those who carouse, and be sanely sober with those who are sober, at every instance we have to make a choice, even as a man of limited means has to make his choice of what is offered on the market. We can’t be acceptable to all circles. Any profession we pick, any life we choose, any friends we favor, all means some giving up of other things. We can’t play the whole field. We can’t have the whole world, no more than a youngster with his penny can buy one of everything at the candy counter. This is one of life’s great lessons, and it is a momentous matter, this deciding of what we want to be, and being prepared to pay the price of being it for there is no such thing as success for the man who casts himself in all characters. In the limitless life ahead, there may be time and opportunity to be everything worth while that we want to be, but here and now, we have to take our choice.