Focus Your Efforts

The tissue of the life to be

We weave with colors all our own,

And in the field of destiny

We reap as we have sown.

—Whittier.

“You lay down rather severe rules for one who wishes to succeed in life,” the reporter ventured, “working eighteen hours a day.”

Edison's response:
“Not at all,” he said. “You do something all day long, don’t you? Every one does. If you get up at seven o’clock and go to bed at eleven, you have put in sixteen good hours, and it is certain with most men that they have been doing something all the time. They have been either walking, or reading, or writing, or thinking. The only trouble is that they do it about a great many things and I do it about one. If they took the time in question and applied it in one direction, to one object, they would succeed. Success is sure to follow such application. The trouble lies in the fact that people do not have an object—one thing to which they stick, letting all else go.”

No man is born into this world whose work is not born with him.—Lowell.

“You have discovered much about it (electricity)?” The reporter asked, smiling.

“Yes,” Edison replied, “and yet very little in comparison with the possibilities that appear.”

“How many inventions have you patented?”

“Only six hundred,” he answered, “but I have made application for some three hundred more.”

“And do you expect to retire soon, after all this?”

“I hope not,” he said, almost pathetically. “I hope I will be able to work right on to the close. I shouldn’t care to loaf.”


To be thrown upon one’s own resources is to be cast into the very lap of fortune.—Franklin.