This being the case, what possible reason can we have for depreciating ourselves or for lacking poise?

Timid people suffer without recognizing their own defects in the matter of insight.

They torture themselves by building their judgments upon indications and not upon facts.

If the perception of a man of resolution causes him to understand at once the emptiness of criticisms based on envy or spleen, the timid man, always ready to seize upon anything that can be possibly construed into an appearance of ridicule directed against himself, will give up a project that he hears criticized without stopping to weigh the value of the arguments advanced.

Far from arguing the question out, or attempting a rebuttal, he never even dreams of it. The very thought of a contest, however courteously it may be conducted, frightening him to such an extent that he loses all his ideas.

The unfortunate shrinking which characterizes him makes him an easy prey for people of exaggerated enthusiasms as well as to quick disillusionment.

A token of apparent sympathy touches him so profoundly that he does not wait to estimate its value and to decide whether it be sincere or not.

He passes in a moment from careless gaiety to the blackest despair if he imagines that he has observed even the appearance of an unsympathetic gesture.

He does not need to be sure, to be miserable. It is enough for him if the circumstances that he thought favorable become seemingly hostile and antagonistic.

How utterly different is the attitude of the man who is endowed with poise!

His firmness of soul saves him from unconsidered enthusiasms and he jealously preserves his control in the presence of excessive protestations as well as when confronting indications of aimless antagonism.

How can such a man as this possibly fail to form a correct judgment and to benefit by all the qualities that depend upon it?

Absolute sincerity toward oneself is one of the forms of sound judgment.

Without indulging in excessive modesty, it is a good thing to endeavor to become intimately acquainted with one's aptitudes and one's failings, and to admit the latter with the utmost frankness in order to set about the work of correcting them.

It is also necessary to know exactly what sort of territory it is in which one is taking one's risks.

The world of affairs, whatever these last may happen to be, may be likened to a vast preserve containing traps for wild beasts.

The man who wishes to walk in such a place without coming to harm will, first of all, make a careful study of the ground for the purpose of avoiding the traps and pitfalls that may engulf him or wound him as he passes.

Just as soon as he has located these dangers his step becomes firm and he can advance with a tranquil gait and head upraised along the paths which he knows do not conceal any dangerous surprizes.

These are the pitfalls that most frequently threaten that daring that we sometimes find in the timid.

Their very defects preventing them from making proper comparisons, they are altogether too prone to ignore their faults and to magnify their virtues and so fall an easy prey to the designer and the sharper.

Their very carelessness in estimating other people becomes the foundation of an involuntary partiality the moment they are called upon to judge their own actions.

It is not deliberate self-indulgence that drives them to act in this way, but their inexperience, which gives rise in them to the desire for perfection, and this necessarily provokes, simultaneously with the despair caused by their failure to attain it, a fear of having this failure remarked or commented upon.

The man who possesses poise is too familiar with the realities of life not to be aware that the search for such an ideal is a Utopian dream.

But he is also aware that, if actual perfection does not exist, it is the bounden duty of man to struggle always in pursuit of good and to show appreciation of it in whatsoever form it may manifest itself.

Sincerity toward himself thus becomes for him an easy matter indeed, and for the very reason that his poise leaves him absolutely free to form a correct estimate of others.

Translated By Francis Medhurst, D.Litt.
Authorized Edition
1916

Tags: Personal Growth