Translation Task One

Cinderella

The Major Decision of Your Life
   If you are under eighteen, you will probably soon be called upon to make the two most important decisions of your life-decisions that will profoundly alter all the days of your years：decisions that may have far-reaching effects upon your happiness，your income, your health; decisions that may make or break you. What are these two tremendous decisions?
   First: How are you going to make a living? Are you going to be a farmer, a mail career, a chemist, a forest ranger, a stenographer, a horse dealer, a college professor, or are you going to run a hamburger stand?
   Second: Whom are you going to select to be the father or mother of your children? Both of those great decisions are frequently gambles. How can you reduce the gamble in selecting a vocation? Read on; we will tell you as best we can.
   First, try, if possible, to find work that you enjoy. I once asked David M．Goodrich, Chairman of the Board, B. F. Goodrich Company - tyre manufacturers - what he considered the first requisite of success in business, and he replied: “Having a good time at your work. If you enjoy what you are doing, ” he said, “you may work long hours, but it won’t seem like work at all. It will seem like play."
   Edison was a good example of that. Edison - the unschooled newsboy who grew up to transform the industrial 1ife of America - Edison, the man who often ate and slept in his laboratory and toiled there for eighteen hours a day. But it wasn’t toil to him. "I never did a day's work in my life，”he exclaimed. “It was all fun.” No wonder he succeeded!
    I once heard Charles Schwab say much the same thing. He said, "A man can succeed at almost anything for which he has unlimited enthusiasm."
    But how can you have enthusiasm for a job when you haven't the foggiest idea of what you want to do? “The greatest tragedy I know of,” said Mrs. Edna Kerr, “is that so many young people never discover what they really want to do. I think no one else is so much to be pitied as the person who gets nothing at all out of his work but his pay.” Mrs. Kerr reports that even college graduates come to her and say: “I have a B.A. degree from Dartmouth or an M.A. from Cornell. Have you some kind of work I can do for your firm?” They don’t know themselves what they are able to do, or even what they would like to do. Is it any wonder that so many men and women who start out in life with competent minds and rosy dreams end up at forty in utter frustration and even with a nervous breakdown?
    In fact, finding the right occupation is important even for your health．When Dr．Raymond Pearl of Johns Hopkins made a study, together with some insurance companies, to discover the factors that make for a long life, he placed “the right occupation’’ high on the list. He might have said, with Thomas Carlyle: “Blessed is the man who has found his work. Let him ask no other blessedness."
    Paul W. Boynton said, “It is perfectly appalling to realise that a man will give more thought to buying a suit of clothes that will wear out in a few years than he will give to choosing the career on which his whole future depends—on which his whole future happiness and peace of mind are based!”
    You may think it strange that I am including a chapter like this in a book devoted to worry. But it isn’t strange at all, when you understand how many of our worries，regrets, and frustrations are spawned by work we despise.
    Dr. William Menninger, one of our greatest living psychiatrists, was in charge of the Army's neuro-psychiatric division during the war, and he says: “We learned much in the Army as to the importance of selection and of placement, of putting the right man in the right job… A conviction of the importance of the job at hand was extremely important. Where a man had no interest, where he felt he was misplaced, where he thought he was not appreciated, where he believed his talents were being misused, invariably we found a potential if not an actual psychiatric casualty.”
    Yes—and for the same reasons, a man may “crack up” in industry. If he despises his business, he can crack it up, too.
    Now, having said this, let me give you the following suggestions - some of them warnings - about choosing your work:
    1. Keep out of business and professions that are already jam-packed and overflowing!
    2. Stay out of activities where the chances are only one out of ten of your being able to make a living. As an example, take selling life insurance. Each year countless thousands of men--frequently unemployed men--start out trying to sell life insurance without bothering to find out in advance what is likely to happen to them! Here is approximately what does happen，according to Franklin L．Bettger，Real Estate Trust Building, Philadelphia. For twenty years Mr. Bettger was one of the outstandingly successful insurance salesmen in America．He declares that ninety per cent of the men who start selling life insurance get so heartsick and discouraged that they give it up within a year. Out of the ten who remain, one man will sell ninety per cent of the
insurance sold by the group of ten; and the other nine will sell only ten per cent. To put it another way: if you start selling life insurance, the chances are nine to one that you will fail and quit within twelve months, and the chances are only one in a hundred that you will make ten thousand a year out of it. Even if you remain at it, the chances are only one out of ten that you will be able to do anything more than barely scratch out a living.
    3. Spend weeks--even months, if necessary—finding out all you call about an occupation before deciding to devote your life to it!
    4. Get over the mistaken belief that you are fitted for only a single occupation! Every normal person can succeed at a number of occupations, and every normal person would probably fail in many occupations.