(By the end of the week our political conventions will have finished, each positively assuring us that the names at the top of the ballot will make us great or build us better, each speaking as if those candidates alone can do these things—as if there are not two other branches of government that could or must have a say. Dr. Frank Crane suggests that candidates and their parties and their promises are less important to us the we are to ourselves, not just today but—-)
EVERY DAY
Every day!
In those two words lies the secret of all attainment.
It’s not what we do once, with all our hearts, and with every splendid ounce of strength, that counts so much as the things we’ve been doing every day, whether we felt like it or not.
Every day! Therein is mastery. The marvelous, velvet, utterly exquisite beauty of such piano-playing of Paderewski’s, or such violin performances as Maud Powell’s—it looks spontaneous but it is the result of many a hateful day’s laborious routine.
Every day! That is the road to perfection. The speaker who can hold and charm an audience, the debater quick and ready and not to be confused, the baseball player, the woman always socially at ease—everybody, in fact, that can do anything well owes that poise and finish to the slow efforts of every day.
No matter how gifted an actor, how naturally endowed, he cannot be a master without infinite practice.
Young people do not realize the tremendous cumulative power that lies in time. Take ten years. Say you are twenty. By the time you are thirty what enormous efficiency you might build up if you would only use every day a certain amount of time.
Almost everybody wastes enough hours in ten years to get a doctor’s degree in any university.
In ten years you might be speaking and reading fluently in Spanish or French or Japanese, you might be an authority upon geology, botany, chemistry, English literature, history, or whatever fits your ambition, if you would only be faithful every day.
Every day! The universe is constructed on routine. The sun rises every day, the stars revolve, the seasons come and go by schedule, your heart beats and your lungs fill and empty as regularly as the clock ticks, every generation of men or of animals is the result of numberless preceding generations, over and over again Nature tries her hand and her matchless perfection is only the stored-up treasure of endless practice.
And in character every day means even more than anywhere else. The most honest man is the man who has been honest every day; the most virtuous woman is she who has behind her present virtue the inertia of a whole life full of virtuous thought and deed; the happiest person is the one who has long practiced being happy, and that soul is coolest and surest in a crisis who every day has schooled himself in self-mastery.
No force is so great in any man as the stored-up power of what he has been doing every day.
(Ignace Paderewski (pronounced Pad-er-efski’) was a Polish statesman, pianist, and composer who, as his country’s new Prime Minister and Foreign Minister signed the Treaty of Versailles that ended World War I. He was a spokesman for Polish independence who, during a concert tour of the United States, encouraged President Wilson to support an independent Poland as part of the Fourteen Points discussions that led to the treaty. He was 81 when he died in 1941, about two years after Hitler ended Poland’s freedom.
Maud Powell was the first American woman to achieve worldwide notoriety as a violinist. She was among the first instrumentalists to record for the Victor Talking Machine Company’s red seal records, which later became the classical label for RCA Victor’s recordings. Her recordings are still considered a standard for violin performance. She died in 1920, at 52.)
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