Success, in any particular business, depends for one thing upon your possessing in a well-developed state the faculties required in that business.
Without good musical faculty no one can succeed as a teacher of music; without well-developed mechanical faculties no one can achieve great success in any of the mechanical trades; without tact and the commercial faculties no one can succeed in mercantile pursuits. But to possess in a well-developed state the faculties required in your particular vocation does not insure getting rich. There are musicians who have remarkable talent, and who yet remain poor; there are blacksmiths, carpenters, and so on who have excellent mechanical ability, but who do not get rich; and there are merchants with good faculties for dealing with men who nevertheless fail.
The different faculties are tools; it is essential to have good tools, but it is also essential that the tools should be used in the Right Way. One man can take a sharp saw, a square, a good plane, and so on, and build a handsome article of furniture; another man can take the same tools and set to work to duplicate the article, but his production will be a botch. He does not know how to use good tools in a successful way.
The various faculties of your mind are the tools with which you must do the work which is to make you rich; it will be easier for you to succeed if you get into a business for which you are well equipped with mental tools.
Generally speaking, you will do best in that business which will use your strongest faculties; the one for which you are naturally “best fitted.” But there are limitations to this statement, also. No man should regard his vocation as being irrevocably fixed by the tendencies with which he was born.
You can get rich in ANY business, for if you have not the right talent for it you can develop that talent; it merely means that you will have to make your tools as you go along, instead of confining yourself to the use
of those with which you were born. It will be EASIER for you to succeed in a vocation for which you already have the talents in a well- developed state; but you CAN succeed in any vocation, for you can develop any rudimentary talent, and there is no talent of which you have not at least the rudiment.
You will get rich most easily in point of effort, if you do that for which you are best fitted; but you will get rich most satisfactorily if you do that which you WANT to do.
Doing what you want to do is life; and there is no real satisfaction in living if we are compelled to be forever doing something which we do not like to do, and can never do what we want to do. And it is certain that you can do what you want to do; the desire to do it is proof that you have within you the power which can do it.
Exercise
Make a commitment that you will memorise the following quote by Thomas Troward
“My mind is a centre of divine operation. The divine operation is always for expansion and fuller expression and this means the production of something beyond what has gone before, something entirely new, not included in past experience, though proceeding out of it by an orderly sequence of growth. Therefore, since the divine cannot change its inherent nature, it must operate in the same manner in me; consequently, in my special world, of which I am the centre, it will move forward to produce new conditions always in advance of any that have gone before.”