Work--a Principle and a Privilege

To young people preparing for the future – to them, earnestly and urgently, we would say: Consider carefully the kind of work you want to do, the kind of work you are best adapted to do, and don’t make avoiding work you ideal or objective. If you do, you won’t develop your talents or your full powers of performance. IF you do, you’ll deteriorate faster than you would with working. If you do, you will have a feeling of frustration and futility and a discontent inside yourselves – for any day that closes without a sincere sense of accomplishment is an empty and unsatisfying day. Furthermore, there is not real prestige without work. (Anyone who supposes that he can have influence without responsibility or prestige without paying a price, or real sense of satisfaction without willing work, is only deceiving himself). The philosophy of being free from work is a false philosophy and the fashion of being free from. Emerson said: “In every variety of human employment…. there are [those] who do their task perfunctorily, as we say, or just to pass, and as badly as they dare… [and there are] those who love work, and love to see it rightly done, who finish their task… and the state is happy, and the business, the family, the country, and community, that has the most of such finishers…Work is victory.”¹ And from Carlyle we quote: “Idleness alone is without hope: work earnestly at anything, and you will by degree learn to work at almost all things.”² “For there is a perennial nobleness, and even sacredness, in Work…. There is always hope in a man that actually and earnestly works:…”³ “For that is the thing a man is born to … to expend every particle of strength that God Almighty has given him, in doing the work he finds he is fit for; to stand up to it to the last breath of life, ad to do his best. …I would bid you stand up to your work, whatever it may be, and not be afraid of it.”⁴