choice of its life work. A mistake in this choice destroys all the real
joy of living--it almost means a lost life."

Consider the stone wall against which the misfit batters his head:

He uses only his second rate, his third rate, or even less effective
mental and physical equipment. He is thus handicapped at the start in the
race against those using their best. He is like an athlete with weak legs,
but powerful arms and shoulders, trying to win a foot race instead of a
hand-over-hand rope-climbing contest.

Worse than his ineptitude, however, is the waste and atrophy of his best
powers through disuse. Thus the early settlers of the Coachela Valley
fought hunger and thirst while rivers of water ran away a few feet below
the surface of the richly fertile soil.

No wonder, then, that the misfit hates his work. And yet, his hate for it
is the real tragedy of his life.

Industry, like health, is normal. All healthy children, even men, are
active. Activity means growth and development. Inactivity means decay and
death. The man who has no useful work to do sometimes expresses himself in
wrong-doing and crime, for he has to do something industriously to live.
Even our so-called "idle rich" and leisure classes are strenuously active
in their attempts to amuse themselves.

When, therefore, a man hates his work, when he is dissatisfied and
discontented in it, when his work arouses him to destructive thoughts and
feelings, rather than constructive, there is something wrong, something
abnormal, and the abnormality is his attempt to do work for which he is