seek to do as little as possible for what they receive, or to get all they can for the least possible service.  This applies not only to idlers who live entirely off the community without any service on their part, but also to those who have employment, but who seek to evade, by “time-serving” and otherwise “slacking,” the full responsibility of service.  We sometimes hear complaint in regard to public officials who draw good salaries without rendering adequate or honest public service in return, and to such we frequently apply the term of “grafter.”  But the principle is exactly the same when any person who has undertaken to do a piece of work fritters away his time or “loafs on the job.”

SATISFACTION IN SERVICE

After all, the chief return that we get for our work is not the wages or the profits, important as they are to us, but the satisfaction of doing something that is worthwhile.  If this pleasure is absent from the work we do, no amount of money returns can compensate us for it.  The happy man is a busy man, an industrious man; and his happiness is more in the doing than in the mere fact of money returns.

IMPORTANCE OF A RIGHT CHOICE

(2) The value of our work to the community and the pleasure that we derive from it both depend to a large extent upon our fitness for it.  It is important to choose our work carefully.  There are four important considerations in choosing a vocation:  (a) its usefulness to the community, (b) one’s own fitness for it, (c) one’s happiness in it, and (d) whether it offers an adequate living to one’s self and dependents.  The last of these is, of course, a most important consideration.  What a person receives for his work ought to be determined by the first two considerations, i.e. the usefulness of the work to the community and one’s fitness for it.  We have seen that this is not always true.  In such cases it often becomes necessary to make a further choice—­a choice between working primarily for one’s own profit and working primarily for the satisfaction that comes from important service well rendered.  It is not always easy to make this choice; but there are many people who have sacrificed large incomes for the sake of doing work that the community needs and for which they consider themselves well fitted.

A CHOICE OF VOCATION IS INEVITABLE

Many people seem to have little choice in the matter of vocation.  The farmer’s boy has to work on the farm whether he wants to or not; and many a man is a farmer apparently for no other reason than that he was raised on the farm and has seen no opportunity to do anything else.  Other people seem to be forced into other occupations by circumstances or drift into them by chance.  But even in these cases there is something of a choice.  The farmer’s boy “chooses” to remain on the farm rather than to take the chances involved in running away, or because he would rather be at home than in a strange city.  The discontented farmer might have chosen to be a lawyer if he had been willing to make enough sacrifices to get ready for it; and even now he “chooses” to remain on the farm in spite of his dislike for it because to do otherwise would mean sacrifice of some kind or other that he is unwilling to make.