THE little cab driver who used to come for me when, on rainy days, I took a taxi to save myself from the inclement weather was a cheerful soul. He was always careful, always courteous, always on time, always considerate of my comfort. He met me late one especially stormy night when the thermometer was down and the wind was cutting like a razor through the heaviest garments.
"Don't you get sick and tired of this dog's life?" I asked as he tucked me snugly into the back seat.
"Oh, no," he replied smiling, "you see it's my job."
The memory of his cheerful face and his suggestive words has helped me often since. When the days have been long, and the callers irritating and the problems difficult to solve, when I might have grown discouraged over the honest effort which resulted only in failure, I have tried to take it cheerfully because it was my job.
I don't know what your job is, for the problem of no two men in this world is quite the same. It may be getting to class regularly every day, or keeping up your college work while you earn a precarious living. It may be pursuing a difficult study or teaching a stupid class that you do not enjoy, or leading a clean life when a thousand passions are urging you on to the rocks. It may be fighting homesickness or discouragement or despondency or moral temptations or mental lethargy. I don't know what it is, but you do.
Very likely yours is not an easy job or at all times a pleasant one, and there will be all sorts of temptations to slight it, to evade its responsibilities, to put off its unpleasant, disagreeable features, to complain because it is more galling and exacting than other men's jobs. Usually, if we could only know we should discover that every job has its difficulties to be overcome and the reason we think otherwise is because we have never done the job.
No matter how difficult your job is, you will find it half done if when it presents itself you go at it cheerfully, energetically. The work that is taken up with determination and enthusiasm loses half its difficulty. And the best part of it all is that having done one job well you are getting yourself ready for another. It is an old, tried proverb that nothing so succeeds as success; nothing so strengthens us as doing some difficult task well.
I met the little cab driver yesterday; he had a new job and a better one, probably a more exacting one, but he was meeting his new problem in just as happy and cheerful a way as ever. He gave me courage.
October