If you want to succeed, keep your counsel. Be determined in your effort.

WHEN questions requiring decision arise the man who works by reason must depend upon the results of past experience. If he has had no experience bearing on that particular point he is adrift upon a tempestuous sea of doubt. The man who has reached the higher wisdom can go into his room and get help from the source of power. More than half of the American world are aimless. They rush hither and thither with one idea to-day, another to-morrow, throwing their force away in fruitless effort. This will never accomplish enough to acquire a competence. Wait! Find yourself! Make the decision as to what the occupation shall be with due deliberation.
Keep the idea before you during your leisure and let it remain in the consciousness while employed. The decision will come. When it does hold it in a tight grip. It makes no difference what the aim is. Nothing is beyond you if your power is developed. Nothing can be farther above you than was my desire for understanding was from me. Ignorant, uncouth, antagonistic, I was everywhere wrong. Mine worked out through persistent determined effort. Yours will also. Do not talk. This is imperative. If you do some one will laugh at you, or sneer, or pour cold water some other way, and diminish your resolve if not destroy it entirely. They bring you into touch with the current of world doubt. If you want to succeed, keep your counsel. Be determined in your effort. If some one tells you that God is withholding the realization of ideals for some purpose which we are forbidden to examine, put him down for a false prophet, laugh, and go serenely upon your way. You will get whatever your mind feels it must have if you keep after it with all the wisely directed vigor of your soul. Do not allow yourself to become subservient. The cringing type of man draws scorn, ridicule and figurative blows. His society is nowhere welcome. No one trusts such a man. Do not " look up " to any man. You are the peer of all. Not as fully developed perhaps, filled with fears, perhaps : but in the reality none are superior. Get expression from your soul and live from within, then this subserviency will leave you. Neither should you be domineering. Holding yourself dominant in order to repel insolence does not imply that one should domineer. The latter is the other extreme of subserviency. It draws disrespect, opposition and hostility.

Into The Light by Bruce Maclelland - 1916