THE INFLUENCE OF ENVIRONMENT
Environment has a great deal to do with man’s ambition and achievement.
It may make all the difference to you, my friend, between success
and mediocrity, whether you are in a favorable environment and keep
close to people who inspire and encourage you, who communicate to you
the enthusiasm of their example, or whether you are surrounded by
discordant conditions, and associate with people who have an opposite
effect upon you.
We cannot associate with a really ambitious person without catching his
spirit to a greater or less extent. We unconsciously reflect the people
with whom we mingle much. Their mark is left upon us. We may not be
able to see it ourselves, but other people can detect it.
Our Indian schools sometimes publish, side by side, photographs of
the Indian youths as they come from the reservation and as they look
when they are graduated--well dressed, intelligent, with the fire of
ambition in their eyes. We predict great things for them; but the
majority of those who go back to their tribes after struggling awhile
to keep up their new standard gradually drop back to their old manner
of living. There are, of course, many notable exceptions, but these
are unusually strong characters, able to resist the downward-dragging
tendencies about them.
If you interview the great army of failures, you will find that
multitudes in it have failed because they never got into a stimulating,
encouraging environment, because their ambition was never aroused,
or because they were not strong enough to rally under depressing,
discouraging, or vicious surroundings.
How often we see men and women with splendid brain power, with robust
physiqúe, apparently superbly equipped for great careers, and yet they
are living very ordinary lives, plodding along perhaps in mediocrity!
This may be because they have never been aroused, and are totally
ignorant of their powers. They may never have looked into the mirror of
others who were succeeding along their lines and caught a glimpse of
their own possibilities.
Whatever you do in life, make any sacrifice necessary to keep in an
ambition-arousing atmosphere, an environment that will stimulate you to
self-development. Keep close to people who understand you, who believe
in you, who will help you to discover yourself and encourage you to
make the most of your life. Choose companions and friends who are in
sympathy with your ambition and who will give you their moral support
and make you do what you are capable of doing. A few such friends may
make all the difference to you between a grand success and a mediocre
existence. We are all diamonds in the rough. Our environment may grind
one, two or twenty facets. Some people never come in contact with
the wheel which grinds a facet and lets in the light to reveal the
hidden wonders. Many are buried as rough diamonds even though there
may have been locked up in them great brilliancy and enormous value.
Comparatively few human diamonds are ever so completely ground that all
the hidden treasures are revealed.
Yet how trifling are the things which sometimes reveal the man! It may
be the sight of a motto, the hearing of a sermon, a speech, the reading
of some inspiring life history or some stirring ambition-arousing book,
the encouraging conversation of a friend, of some one who believes in
us and sees in us something which we never knew was there.
I know men who had apparently lost their ambition, who had been
literally down and out, but who, by the reading of an inspiring book,
or listening to a stimulating sermon, were thoroughly aroused to their
possibilities even in a most discouraging environment and so completely
transformed in a few months that they did not seem like the same
individuals.
The speeches of Wendell Phillips, Webster, and Henry Clay, started a
fire in many an ambitious youth which never went out, but which became
a beacon light in American history.
We all know that the old-fashioned debating societies and clubs woke
up the ambition of many a youth in the early days of our country, who
might never have been heard from outside of his own little community
but for the arousing influence of these debates.
The ambition of the boy who has lived on a farm in the back country is
often aroused for the first time when he goes to the city. To him the
metropolis is a colossal world’s fair, where everybody’s achievement is
on exhibition. The progressive spirit which pervades the city is like
an electric shock to him and arouses all of his latent energies, calls
out his reserves. Everything he sees seems to be a summons to him to go
forward, to push on.
He is constantly reminded by his city environment of what others have
done. He sees the tremendous engineering feats, great factories and
offices, vast businesses, all huge advertisers of man’s achievement,
and is stirred by an ambition to do something great himself.
Ambition is contagious. When a man meets others at the restaurant
or club, or in other social ways, and hears accounts of their great
successes, greater achievement, he immediately says to himself, “Why
can’t I do it?” “Why don’t I do it?” and if he is of any account he
probably says, “I _will_ do it!” Then he goes back to his business with
a new determination, perhaps with new ideas and new conceptions of the
possibilities of his own success.
I have known young business men in the country who have not been
specially successful who got tremendous impetus to their ambition by
visiting larger city concerns in the same line of business. The greater
successes touched their pride and they went back home and began to
brace up and build up.
The same thing is true in professional life. The young country doctor
visits a city hospital, attends clinics, sees operations by noted
surgeons, and he goes home with his ambition fired and makes a vigorous
resolution to try harder to be somebody in his own profession.
Men who are in business in small towns where they have no competition,
and where they very seldom come in contact with those who are
successful in their line of trade, are in constant danger of getting
into a rut. Their ambition unconsciously becomes dulled, the energy
oozes out of their efforts, and they take things easier, jog along in
the same old manner year after year, and before they realize it dry rot
gets into their business.
It is much easier to keep up one’s interest and enthusiasm to do things
worth while when we are right in touch with the ambitious, with those
who are forging ahead with all their might, and who are perhaps working
under great difficulties.
One of the unfortunate things about small towns and country places is
the lack of stimulus to ambition. Many people living in remote country
districts do not come in contact with standards by which they can
measure and compare their own powers. They live a quiet uneventful
life, and there is little in their environment to arouse the faculties
which are not active in their vocation.
If you are ambitious to get on you will learn some splendid lessons
from studying the qualities of those who have succeeded along the
line of your ambition. You will find that it is a characteristic of
the winner, that he is always thinking upon his life theme, is always
headed towards the goal of his ambition, always planning along the
line of his dreams. He talks the things, acts in the same direction,
his whole life is absorbed in his theme. He radiates law, medicine,
engineering, or manufacturing. By keeping his mind in a positive,
creative condition he is constantly encouraging his mental magnet to
attract the thing he is studying. If he is studying law he thinks law,
pictures himself pleading at court, or giving advice in his office. He
becomes a law magnet to attract law.
I know a man who says he will not take chances of the demoralization
and the deterioration which would be worked in his nature by
associating with habitual failures. He will have nothing to do with
such people. He avoids doing business with them, for he says he finds
that no matter how he may protest against it, he is unconsciously
influenced by them.
There is no denying that there is much truth in this. We are
unconsciously affected by the atmosphere surrounding us. Like attracts
like. Successful people attract successful people. Failure attracts
failure. Unlucky people attract unlucky people. Slovenly, slipshod
people attract others of the same sort. “Birds of a feather flock
together.” The failures get together; the successes come together
naturally.
On every hand we see young men who started out with brilliant prospects
when they left college. Their friends predicted great things for them,
but somehow or other, the enthusiasm of their school or college days
soon oozed out. The continual suggestion of possibility which came to
them from their school environment, the contagion from the ambitious
spirit all about them, seemed then to multiply their prospects,
to magnify their ability and to stir up their ambition until they
really thought they were going to amount to something in the world,
were going to accomplish something; but after they got away from the
battery-charging institutions, they gradually lost their enthusiasm;
their ambition dwindled. Their ideals changed with their environment.
Little by little their dreams faded, and they resigned themselves to
mediocrity or hopeless failure.
There is no environment so unfavorable, so discouraging, no situation
so disheartening that a youth who is made of the right kind of material
cannot change it. Lincoln, Benjamin Franklin, Fred Douglas, John
Wanamaker, Marshall Field and thousands of other American boys found
themselves in the midst of the most disheartening environment but made
a new environment for themselves. It is possible for you to do the
same.
The great trouble with most of us is that we never get aroused, never
discover ourselves until late in life,--often too late to make much
out of the remnant that is left. It is very important that we become
aroused to our possibilities when young, thus we may overcome the most
unfavorable environment and get the greatest possible efficiency out of
our lives.