when the time comes for action." We are rather proud of our ability to
meet emergencies. So we do not plan and take precautions, that emergencies
may not arise. It is too easy to drift through school and college, taking
the traditional, conventional studies that others take, following the
lines of least resistance, electing "snap courses," going with the crowd.
It is too easy to take the attitude: "First I will get my education and
develop myself, and then I will know better what I am fitted to do for a
life work." And so we drift, driven by the winds of circumstance, tossed
about by the waves of tradition and custom. Eventually, most men find they
must be satisfied with "any port in a storm." Sailors who select a port
because they are driven to it have scarcely one chance in a thousand of
dropping anchor in the right one.

In our ignorance, we do not know how fatal to success and happiness is
this lack of purpose. We fail to impress it upon our youth. And, when one
demands chart and compass, we cannot supply them. No wonder belief in
luck, fate, stars, or a meddling, unreasonable Providence is almost
universal!

Ignorance and lack of definite purpose, the two prime causes of misfits,
have many different ways of bungling people into the wrong job and keeping
them there.

IMMATURE JUDGMENT

The first of these is immaturity of judgment on the part of young people.
There is a popular fallacy that the thing which a young man or a young
woman wants most to do must be the thing for which he or she is
preeminently fitted. "Let him follow his bent," say some advisors, "and he
will find his niche." This does not happen often. The average young man is