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Success (Second Edition) by Baron Max Aitken Beaverbrook
page 50 of 67 (74%)
cure for depression.



XI


FAILURE


The bitterest thing in life is failure, and the pity is that it is
almost always the result of some avoidable error or misconception. With
the rare exception of a man who is by nature a criminal or a waster,
there need be no such thing as failure. Every man has a career before
him, or, at worst, every man can find a niche in the social order into
which he can fit himself with success.

The trouble in so many cases is that it takes time and opportunity for a
man to discover in what direction his natural bent lies. He springs from
a certain stock or class, and the circumstances which surround him in
youth naturally dictate to him the choice of a career. In many cases it
will be a method of living to which he is totally unsuited. But once he
is embarked on it the clogs are about his feet, and it is hard to break
away and begin all over again. And this ill-fitting of men to jobs may
not even embrace so wide a divergence as that between one kind of
activity and business and another. A young man may be in the right
business for him, and yet in the wrong department of it. In any case,
the result is the same. The employer votes him no use, or at least just
passable, or second rate. Much worse, the employee knows himself that he
has failed to make good, and that at the best nothing but a career of
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