Try always to stand on your own
feet. Exhaust your own resources before
you ask for help. Live by the code: “Eat
it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without.” But there are times when you must seek
help. Don’t be so proud that you cannot
learn from others r that you won’t let others enter your life. When I was in
If you can keep your
head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you
But make allowance for their doubting too,
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream--and not make
dreams your master,
If you can think--and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:
If you can make one heap of all your
winnings
And risk it all on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on!"
If you can talk with crowds and keep
your virtue,
Or walk with kings--nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much,
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And--which is more--you'll be a Man, my son!
But I must
have been a fright at that time. At the
Army-Navy store, I found a black Eskimo coat that made me look a bit like one
of my favorite toys as a child. More
than one person dropped their groceries in fright when the hotel elevator door
opened and they saw me for the first time—a six foot high gollywog. I find I never lack for self-confidence when
I face a buttoned-down hot-shot executive and imagine him in my shoes a quarter
century ago. Several months after a
manager at the