You must use your thought as directed in previous chapters, and begin to do what you can do where you are; and you must do ALL that you can do where you are. You can advance only by being larger than your present place; and no man is larger than his present place who leaves undone any of the work pertaining to that place.
The world is advanced only by those who more than fill their present places.
If no man quite filled his present place, you can see that there must be a going backward in everything. Those who do not quite fill their present places are a dead weight upon society, government, commerce, and industry; they must be carried along by others at a[111] great expense. The progress of the world is retarded only by those who do not fill the places they are holding; they belong to a former age and a lower stage or plane of life, and their tendency is toward degeneration. No society could advance if every man was smaller than his place; social evolution is guided by the law of physical and mental evolution. In the animal world, evolution is caused by excess of life.
When an organism has more life than can be expressed in the functions of its own plane, it develops the organs of a higher plane, and a new species is originated.
There never would have been new species had there not been organisms which more than filled their places. The law is exactly the same for you; your getting rich depends upon your applying this principle to your own affairs.
Every day is either a successful day or a day of failure; and it is the successful days which get you what you want.[112] If every day is a failure, you can never get rich; while if every day is a success, you cannot fail to get rich.
If there is something that may be done to-day, and you do not do it, you have failed in so far as that thing is concerned; and the consequences may be more disastrous than you imagine.
You cannot foresee the results of even the most trivial act; you do not know the workings of all the forces that have been set moving in your behalf. Much may be depending on your doing some simple act; it may be the very thing which is to open the door of opportunity to very great possibilities. You can never know all the combinations which Supreme Intelligence is making for you in the world of things and of human affairs; your neglect or failure to do some small thing may cause a long delay in getting what you want.
Do, every day, ALL that can be done that day.
There is, however, a limitation or[113] qualification of the above that you must take into account.
You are not to overwork, nor to rush blindly into your business in the effort to do the greatest possible number of things in the shortest possible time.
You are not to try to do to-morrow’s work to-day, nor to do a week’s work in a day.
It is really not the number of things you do, but the EFFICIENCY of each separate action that counts.
Every act is, in itself, either a success or a failure.
Every act is, in itself, either effective or inefficient.
Every inefficient act is a failure, and if you spend your life in doing inefficient acts, your whole life will be a failure.
The more things you do, the worse for you, if all your acts are inefficient ones.
On the other hand, every efficient act is a success in itself, and if every act[114] of your life is an efficient one, your whole life MUST be a success.
The cause of failure is doing too many things in an inefficient manner, and not doing enough things in an efficient manner.
You will see that it is a self-evident proposition that if you do not do any inefficient acts,............