Your Calling Will Find You

Let no woman dream that the question of what career to pursue will ever be adequately answered except by her own heart. No time is more uselessly employed than in listening to advice on this subject. Ralph Waldo Emerson declared, “The soul’s emphasis is always right,” and I would add that the emphasis of any soul, the decision of any mind except one’s own is far more likely to work disaster than to bring satisfaction or success.

Yet every girl wants a career that will bring success. The difficulty is in determining what that means, for to scarcely two people in the world would it be represented by the same thing.

“Would you exchange places with that woman, performing her duties and receiving her income?” I asked a poorly remunerated literary toiler, in reference to one of the buyers in a large dry goods establishment, who earned several thousand dollars a year.

“Never!” was the quick reply. “I should rather write for $3 a week than to bargain for fabrics and faces at a hundred.'”

No amount of money, on the one hand, or of literary creation, however largely rewarded, on the other, would have made the work of one of these women a success for the other.

The shivering, starving, disappointed life of the artist Jean-François Millet, whose hardships continued till nearly the end of his days, was to the painter of The Angelus a greater success than would have been represented by the millions made by industrialist Cornelius Vanderbilt, had he been obliged to employ Vanderbilt’s methods to secure them.

Do you think that to ornithologist John James Audubon, to whom knowing every bird of the forest by the shade of its feathers or the fibre of its notes was of utmost importance, the splendid triumphs of inventor Thomas Edison would have meant success? And to the master of the lightning what could have seemed less like success than to become accurately acquainted with the habits of birds?

Success is ever an individual thing.

What career shall you choose? The career that has chosen you—the work that means success to you. In this choice lies your only safety, since there is no real dynamic power outside one’s soul.

The talent is the call, a call that can remain unheeded only with the direst results.

Suppose that the literary worker, tempted by visions of gain, had attempted a commercial life? Or that the buyer of fabrics, motivated by thoughts of fame, had undertaken to become a writer?

What if Millet had chosen a mercantile career? Audubon to master the secrets of electricity? Edison to become a naturalist? The chances are that each would have met with complete financial failure and missed satisfaction as well because the person was attempting work he or she was not born to do.

No one can effectively handle that which does not belong to him. Pythagoras, the learned philosopher and mathematician, had no wiser rule than this: “That which concerns me I will attend to. That which concerns me not I will let alone.”

Some women are tempted to choose a career because they believe the work is genteel. Remember that to be truly genteel, work must be genteelly done; that it is not the occupation itself, but the manner of handling it that makes it fine or unfine work.

A book written by a born milliner will not be a fine book. A bonnet trimmed by one appointed to be a poet will not rank among works of art. Many a girl can handle cooking utensils genteelly whose painting would be a bungle. Many a splendid stenographer would distract the neighborhood by her music.