Imperial Valley Press

Dale
Carnegie

If you are between sixteen and twenty years of age, you are faced with the problem of making a most important decision—a decision that will effect you every day as long as you live. And that is what you are going to do for a living.

Millions of people have wasted millions of years before finding out what they were best fitted to do. Sometimes a man doesn't know what he is best equipped by nature to do until he is thirty or forty years old. Then he has to begin the sort of work he should have gone into at first.

Well, for the next four days I'm going to give you specific and concrete suggestions for helping you to determine the sort of job at which you would be most likely to succeed. Maybe it will save you from fumbling, and wasting energy.

Today's rule will be negative—what not to do. Those on the three days to follow will be of a positive nature, containing suggestions on what you may do to advantage.

Rule 1. Don't waste time and money consulting such quacks and mountebanks as astrologers, phrenologists, numerologists and palmists.

No one capable of going through high school should fall for that; but they do, I'm sorry to say. Now a few words about astrologers. It is logical to think that astronomers—the scientists who spend their lives peering through the mighty telescopes at the stars—should know more about stars than any other people. Yet no astronomer in the world believes in astrology!

Professor Harry D. Kitson, of Columbia University, New York, in "How to Find the Right Vocation," gives a peep-show into the ways of astrologers. An investigator wanted to find out whether they agreed. So he sent the date of a friend's birth to sixteen astrologers, gave each exactly the same information, and asked what vocation this individual should pursue. (He was a commissioned officer in the United States Army.) Do you think these star experts were in accord? Not by a jugful. No two agreed. One astrologer said that the stars revealed that the person should apply himself to scientific research. Another that the man should become a salesman. The third didn't hedge his terms with any such modest statements. He said the person would succeed in anything he attempted!

The position the stars were in at the exact moment of your birth cannot, by the remotest stretch of the imagination, have any effect whatever on your ability to succeed. You might as well write the names of all the jobs you can think of on pieces of paper, throw them into the air, and then pick up one and say, "Here's what I'm fitted for."