"Yes, he's a right good worker, when you once get him started," a
country newspaper editor said to a friend who was inquiring about a boy
who had been in the office three months. "Watch him now; you'll see what
I mean."
The boy had just brought from the express office the package of "patent
insides," as the papers for the weekly edition of the newspaper, already
half printed in the nearby city, were called. With a sigh he dragged
these up the stairs and laid them on the folding table. With another
sigh he contemplated the pile and thought how much time would be
required to fold the eight hundred papers. After lengthy calculation he
stopped to read a column of jokes from the top paper in the pile. At
least five minutes passed before the first paper was folded. At the end
of ten minutes he had succeeded in folding perhaps twenty-five papers.
When the noon hour arrived not one third of the task was completed.
While he ate his lunch he was thinking of the dread ordeal of the
afternoon--six hundred more papers to be folded! Would he ever be done?
He was still pitying himself as he walked slowly back to the office.
Just before reaching the doorway into which he must turn, he spied an
acquaintance. He made his way over to the boy who had attracted him, not
because he had anything to say to him, but that he might delay a little
longer the moment of beginning work at the folding table.
"What are you going to do?" he asked idly of the boy, who had taken off
his coat and was rolling up his sleeves.
"The boss wants me to sort that lot of old iron," was the reply.
"What, that huge pile! It will take you a week, won't it? Just think how
much of it there is!"
"No, there isn't time to think how much of it there is," was the reply.
"And what would be the good? Not a bit of use getting discouraged at the
very start, and that is what would happen if I didn't pitch in hard. The
job is going to be done before night--that is, if I'm not interrupted by
too many loafers coming in to ask fool questions."
The boy from the printing office was about to resent this speech of the
boy at the iron pile, but he thought better of it. "Perhaps there is
something in what he says," he said to himself, as he went up the
stairs. "Suppose I try to pitch in hard."
So he surprised the foreman by beginning at the pile of six hundred
papers as if he was to be sent to a ball game when he finished. And he
surprised himself by finishing his task in a little more than an hour.
The lesson he learned that day stood him in good stead when later he was
taking his first difficult examination in a technical school. His
neighbor stopped to look over the paper from beginning to end, and was
heard to mutter, "How do they expect us to get through ten questions
like these in an hour's time?" The boy from the printing office had no
time for such an inquiry, but began work at once on the first question,
without troubling himself about those that came later until he was ready
for them.
So it was when, his technical course completed, he was confronted by his
first great railroad task, the clearing up of a wreck that looked to his
assistants like an inextricable tangle. After one good look at it he
pitched in for all he was worth, thus inspiring the men who had felt the
task was impossible, and within a few hours the tracks were clear.
The ability to pitch in at once on a hard job is one characteristic of
the man who accomplishes tasks that make others sit up and take notice.
John Shaw Billings, the famous librarian, had this ability. To a friend
who praised him for the performance of what others thought to be a most
difficult task, he said:
"I'll let you into the secret--it is nothing really difficult if you
only begin. Some people contemplate a task until it looks so big it
seems impossible, but I just begin, and it gets done somehow. There
would be no coral islands if the first bug sat down and began to wonder
how the job was to be done."