Are you worrying that it is too late for you to be successful in your life? Do your parents or teachers think you may amount to little in your future? Read on and you may feel greatly encouraged by the stories of many great figures who were not promising at all when they were young.

    You and your parents can stop worrying — Pasteur, Edison, Darwin and lots more were far from being geniuses in their teens.¹
     History books seldom mention it, but the truth is that many of our greatest figures were practically “beatniks”（垮掉的一代）when they were teenagers. ² They were given to daydreaming, indecision（优柔寡断）, and showed no promise of being doctor, lawyer or Indian chief.
     So, young men and women, if you suffer from the same symptoms, don’t despair. The world was built by men and women whose parents worried that they would “never amount to a hill of beans.³” You don’t hear too much about their early failure because parents prefer to cite more inspiring examples.

A Man They Don’t Tell You About

    If you take piano lessons and your attitude towards practicing is marked by laziness, your parents might justly complain and flaunt（夸耀）before you the famous picture of little Mozart in his ruffled （弄皱的）nightshirt, playing the piano at midnight in the attic. But the point is, your parents would not show you a picture of a certain party who never showed a whit of interest in music during his formative years⁴. In fact he never showed talent in any direction whatever. Finally put to studying law, he barely passed his final exams. It was not until he was 22 that he suddenly became fired with a great passion for music, and his name was Peter Ilyitch Tschaikowsky.
     In the sciences, there have been hundreds of geniuses who aimed straight at the goal from earliest years, and hundreds who showed no aptitude（才能）at all. There were the teen-age Mayo brothers, who actually assisted their father in his crude country operating room. On the other hand, Harvey Cushing, one of the world’s greatest brain surgeons, might have become a professional ballplayer if his father hadn’t pleaded（恳求）that he give medicine a try⁵.
     The great Pasteur’s parents were in despair because teen-age Louis did nothing but draw pictures and go fishing. Pasteur was 20 years old before he became even faintly interested in science.

Edison Was “Addled”

    So it goes. You have the Wright brothers, who were brilliant at engineering in their early teens, and you have Thomas Alva Edison, whose teacher tried to get him out of the class because his brain was “addled（糊涂的）.” You have the Nobel Prize physicist Enrico Fermi, who at 17 had read enough mathematics to qualify for a doctor’s degree⁶. And you have the great Albert Schweitzer, who wavered（摇摆）between music and the church until he was 30. Then he started his medical studies.

Darwin Hated School

    Charles Darwin’s early life was a mess. He hated school, and his father once shouted: “You care for nothing but shooting dogs and rat-catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family.” He was sent to Glasgow to study medicine, but he couldn’t stand the sight of blood. He was sent to divinity school（神学院）and barely managed to graduate. Whereupon he chucked（放弃）the whole business and shipped to the South Seas on the famous exploring ship Beagle⁷. On that voyage, one of history’s greatest scientists was born. It was here that he collected the material for the book that would revolutionize biological science — The Origin of the Species.

Faulkner Failed in English

    Politics offers a familiar example of contrast. Herbert Hoover must have learned administration in the cradle（摇篮）. When he was at school he was drafted as football manager, though he didn’t know the game, and the glee club （合唱队） manager, though he couldn’t sing a note. Whatever he touched went smoothly, glee club or food for a starving Europe.
     But one of his successors（继任者）in the White House had about as checkered（变化无常的）a youth as can be imagined. Turned down by West Point because of poor vision, Harry Truman tried a dozen jobs, including farming and stretches in a drugstore, a bank, a bottling works, and a railroad yard. But he got there just the same.⁸
     Great writers are supposed to be born, not made, but here again there are many fascinating exceptions. William Faulkner quit school in the fifth grade and rattled around the country as a house painter and a dishwasher.
     Once he tried attending college, but failed in freshman English and quit. He wangled（哄骗）a postmaster’s job in a small Mississippi town, and infuriated（激怒）the populace（平民）by getting the mail all mixed up and closing the office whenever he felt like it.⁹ Faulkner was 25 before he started the writing career that won him a Nobel Prize.
     And just to show that girls can be as confusing as boys, take Pearl Buck, who from early youth made it a point to write at least a few lines every day of her life. Then take Edna Ferber, whose sole ambition was to be an actress; she never even thought of writing anything until she was in her 20’s and had to take a $3-a-week job on a newspaper to help her family.

How About Those Prodigies?

    Added to all the aforementioned（前面提到的）paradoxes（似非而可能正确的说法）you have a small army of child prodigies（奇才）who were graduated from college when they were 15, and are now obscure（无名的）clerks in accounting departments. And you have a small army of men who were too stupid or indolent（懒惰的）to get into or finish college and who are today presidents of the firms that hire the prodigies.
     So who’s to say what about youth? Any young boy or girl who knows what he wants to do in life is probably better off¹⁰ for it. But no teenager need despair of the future. He has that one special advantage over the greatest man alive — time!¹¹ If you don’t think time counts, look at Grandma Moses. She never sold a painting till she was 80. As Edison said, genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.

(964 words)