The Dispatch News

MAKING AND BREAKING HABITS

We are all veritable bundles of habits. All our power for good and happiness would be lost if we were not such. The great thing comes to pass by doing the simple, good thing over and over again.

We get thrills in reading biographies, telling of the ways and means whereby men and women rose from obscurity to fame and large usefulness. And this is what we learn: hardship and hardship and hardship. Always hardship before applause, wealth and luxuries.

Joseph Pulitzer, late publisher of the New York World, came to America as a young man from Hungary. Even then he hated red tape and missed the boat on which he was to cross the ocean and walked to the shore of his adopted land. He stopped at a cheap hotel on the Bowery, New York. The clerk refused to take his ragged clothes and shoes. Twenty years later he bought that hotel, tore it down and put up the World building that stands upon the site.

Pulitzer learned the joy of reading very early. Reading was his delight. And after he had made his fortune he hired a dozen readers to read to him and questioned them as to what they had read. It was just a habit--the habit of getting the best out of life. To form a habit, concentrate on the thing you want to do until the earth seems to turn the other way. To break a habit, put something else in its place--something that will crowd your habit out of your mind. You can't have too many good habits and you can't afford to have too many bad ones.