Success Secrets - Desire Leads to Success

"If I had read the life of Napoleon when I was a boy," said a great man, "my own life might have been very different. It would have filled me with an ambition to make the most of myself." A man cannot aspire if he looks down. God has not created us with aspirations and longings for heights to which we cannot climb. Live upward. The unattained still beckons us towards the summit of life's mountains, into the atmosphere where great souls live and breathe and have their being. Even hope is but a promise of the possibility of its own fulfillment. Life should be lived in earnest. It is no idle game, no farce to amuse and be forgotten. It is a stern reality, fuller of duties than the sky of stars. You cannot have too much of that yearning which we call aspiration, for, even though you do not attain your ideal, the efforts you make will bring nothing but blessing; while he who fails of attaining mere worldly goals is too often eaten up with the canker-worm of disappointed ambition.

To all will come a time when the love of glory will be seen to be but a splendid delusion, riches empty, rank vain, power dependent, and all outward advantages without inward peace a mere mockery of wretchedness. The wisest men have taken care to uproot selfish ambition from their breasts. Shakespeare considered it so near a vice as to need extenuating circumstances to make it a virtue. Avoid the content of the Asiatic on the one hand, who ploughs with a stick like that used by his ancestors thousands of years ago, and is satisfied with the crooked furrows; and on the other hand, do not be deluded with ambition beyond your power of reasonable attainment or tortured by wishes totally disproportioned to your capacity of fulfillment. You may, indeed, confidently hope to become eminent in usefulness or power, but only as you build upon a broad foundation of self-culture; while, as a rule, specialists in ambition as in science are apt to become narrow and one-sided. Darwin was very fond of music and poetry when young, but, after devoting his life to science, he was surprised to find Shakespeare tedious. He said that if he were to live his life again, he would read poetry and hear music every day, so as not to lose the power of appreciating such things.

"Every life," says Julia "Ward Howe, "has its actual blanks which the ideal must fill up, or which else remain bare and profitless forever." A man may aspire," says Beecher, "and yet be quite content until it is time to rise; and both flying and resting are but parts of one's contentment."

The ideal is the continual image that is cast upon the brain; and these images are as various as the stars, and, like them, differ one from another in magnitude. It is the quality of the aspiration that determines the true success or failure of a life. A man may aspire to be the best billiard-player, the best jockey, the best coachman, the best wardroom politician, the best gambler, or the most cunning cheat. He may rise to be eminent in his calling; but, compared with other men, his greatest height will be below the level of the failure of him who chooses an honest profession. No jugglery of thought, no gorgeousness of trappings can make the low high - the dishonest honest - the vile pure.

As is a man's ideal or aspiration, so shall his life be. Some aspire to dress better than their neighbors, and live in finer houses, and drive better automobiles. How many women are as frivolous as the Empress Anne of Eussia, who assembled the geniuses of her empire to build a palace of snow! "But," says Disraeli, "the youth who does not look up will look down, and the spirit that does not soar is destined perhaps to grovel."

Our longings are the prophecies of our destinies. Life never wholly fulfills the expectations of youthful hope. The future can never pay all that the present promises. Providence holds back part of our wages, lest we quit work. The prophecy of immortality is written in. our yearnings. "If the certainty of future fame bore Milton rejoicing through his blindness, or cheered Galileo in his dungeon," writes Bulwer, "what stronger and holier support shall not be given to him who has loved mankind as his brothers, and devoted his labors to their cause? - who has not sought, but relinquished, his own renown? - who has braved the present censures of men for their future benefit, and trampled upon glory in the energy of benevolence? Will there not be for him something more powerful than fame to comfort his sufferings and to sustain his hopes?"

The ambition that comprehends another's welfare first, is the highest we can have. Such is the secret of Buskin's success, and of the sway that Frances Willard holds in the hearts of every good woman in America and England. Yet to have one's name on the lips of men is not a worthy ambition. Some fast horses and prize-fighters are better known than those who have high and noble ideals. Every one knows the merits of the leading contestants in international yacht-races, but only a few, perhaps only one, knows the merits of him or her who surrendered hope, or perhaps life itself, to save a home, or keep a soul from the poorhouse, or to reform tenement and prison methods. Of necessity the above illustrations come from the lives of those whom the world delights to honor; but glory is rare and of secondary importance, and the lack of it implies no thought of failure in the judgment of Him who looks beneath the frame into the heart - who understands all aspiration - and who measures with honest scales the fervor which the soul expends.