Environment has a great deal to do with man’s ambition and achievement. It may make all the difference to you, my friend, between success and mediocrity, whether you are in a favorable environment and keep close to people who inspire and encourage you, who communicate to you the enthusiasm of their example, or whether you are surrounded by discordant conditions, and associate with people who have an opposite effect upon you.

We cannot associate with a really ambitious person without catching his spirit to a greater or less extent. We unconsciously reflect the people with whom we mingle much. Their mark is left upon us. We may not be able to see it ourselves, but other people can detect it.

Our Indian schools sometimes publish, side by side, photographs of the Indian youths as they come from the reservation and as they look when they are graduated—well dressed, intelligent, with the fire of ambition in their eyes. We predict great things for them; but the majority of those who go back to their tribes after struggling awhile to keep up their new standard gradually drop back to their old manner of living. There are, of course, many notable exceptions, but these are unusually strong characters, able to resist the downward-dragging tendencies about them.

If you interview the great army of failures, you will find that multitudes in it have failed because they never got into a stimulating, encouraging environment, because their ambition was never aroused, or because they were not strong enough to rally under depressing, discouraging, or vicious surroundings.

How often we see men and women with splendid brain power, with robust physiqÚe, apparently superbly equipped for great careers, and yet they are living very ordinary lives, plodding along perhaps in mediocrity! This may be because they have never been aroused, and are totally ignorant of their powers. They may never have looked into the mirror of others who were succeeding along their lines and caught a glimpse of their own possibilities.

Whatever you do in life, make any sacrifice necessary to keep in an ambition-arousing atmosphere, an environment that will stimulate you to self-development. Keep close to people who understand you, who believe in you, who will help you to discover yourself and encourage you to make the most of your life. Choose companions and friends who are in sympathy with your ambition and who will give you their moral support and make you do what you are capable of doing. A few such friends may make all the difference to you between a grand success and a mediocre existence. We are all diamonds in the rough. Our environment may grind one, two or twenty facets. Some people never come in contact with the wheel which grinds a facet and lets in the light to reveal the hidden wonders. Many are buried as rough diamonds even though there may have been locked up in them great brilliancy and enormous value. Comparatively few human diamonds are ever so completely ground that all the hidden treasures are revealed.Yet how trifling are the things which sometimes reveal the man! It may be the sight of a motto, the hearing of a sermon, a speech, the reading of some inspiring life history or some stirring ambition-arousing book, the encouraging conversation of a friend, of some one who believes in us and sees in us something which we never knew was there.

I know men who had apparently lost their ambition, who had been literally down and out, but who, by the reading of an inspiring book, or listening to a stimulating sermon, were thoroughly aroused to their possibilities even in a most discouraging environment and so completely transformed in a few months that they did not seem like the same individuals.

The speeches of Wendell Phillips, Webster, and Henry Clay, started a fire in many an ambitious youth which never went out, but which became a beacon light in American history.

We all know that the old-fashioned debating societies and clubs woke up the ambition of many a youth in the early days of our country, who might never have been heard from outside of his own little community but for the arousing influence of these debates.The ambition of the boy who has lived on a farm in the back country is often aroused for the first time when he goes to the city. To him the metropolis is a colossal world’s fair, where everybody’s achievement is on exhibition. The progressive spirit which pervades the city is like an electric shock to him and arouses all of his latent energies, calls out his reserves. Everything he sees seems to be a summons to him to go forward, to push on.

He is constantly reminded by his city environment of what others have done. He sees the tremendous engineering feats, great factories and offices, vast businesses, all huge advertisers of man’s achievement, and is stirred by an ambition to do something great himself.

Ambition is contagious. When a man meets others at the restaurant or club, or in other social ways, and hears accounts of their great successes, greater achievement, he immediately says to himself, “Why can’t I do it?” “Why don’t I do it?” and if he is of any account he probably says, “I will do it!” Then he goes back to his business with a new determination, perhaps with new ideas and new conceptions of the possibilities of his own success.I have known young business men in the country who have not been specially successful who got tremendous impetus to their ambition by visiting larger city concerns in the same line of business. The greater successes touched their pride and they went back home and began to brace up and build up.

The same thing is true in professional life. The young country doctor visits a city hospital, attends clinics, sees operations by noted surgeons, and he goes home with his ambition fired and makes a vigorous resolution to try harder to be somebody in his own profession.

Men who are in business in small towns where they have no competition, and where they very seldom come in contact with those who are successful in their line of trade, are in constant danger of getting into a rut. Their ambition unconsciously becomes dulled, the energy oozes out of their efforts, and they take things easier, jog along in the same old manner year after year, and before they realize it dry rot gets into their business.

It is much easier to keep up one’s interest and enthusiasm to do things worth while when we are right in touch with the ambitious, with those who are forging ahead with all their might, and who are perhaps working under great difficulties.

One of the unfortunate things about small towns and country places is the lack of stimulus to ambition. Many people living in remote country districts do not come in contact with standards by which they can measure and compare their own powers. They live a quiet uneventful life, and there is little in their environment to arouse the faculties which are not active in their vocation.

If you are ambitious to get on you will learn some splendid lessons from studying the qualities of those who have succeeded along the line of your ambition. You will find that it is a characteristic of the winner, that he is always thinking upon his life theme, is always headed towards the goal of his ambition, always planning along the line of his dreams. He talks the things, acts in the same direction, his whole life is absorbed in his theme. He radiates law, medicine, engineering, or manufacturing. By keeping his mind in a positive, creative condition he is constantly encouraging his mental magnet to attract the thing he is studying. If he is studying law he thinks law, pictures himself pleading at court, or giving advice in his office. He becomes a law magnet to attract law.

I know a man who says he will not take chances of the demoralization and the deterioration which would be worked in his nature by associating with habitual failures. He will have nothing to do with such people. He avoids doing business with them, for he says he finds that no matter how he may protest against it, he is unconsciously influenced by them.

There is no denying that there is much truth in this. We are unconsciously affected by the atmosphere surrounding us. Like attracts like. Successful people attract successful people. Failure attracts failure. Unlucky people attract unlucky people. Slovenly, slipshod people attract others of the same sort. “Birds of a feather flock together.” The failures get together; the successes come together naturally.

On every hand we see young men who started out with brilliant prospects when they left college. Their friends predicted great things for them, but somehow or other, the enthusiasm of their school or college days soon oozed out. The continual suggestion of possibility which came to them from their school environment, the contagion from the ambitious spirit all about them, seemed then to multiply their prospects, to magnify their ability and to stir up their ambition until they really thought they were going to amount to something in the world, were going to accomplish something; but after they got away from the battery-charging institutions, they gradually lost their enthusiasm; their ambition dwindled. Their ideals changed with their environment. Little by little their dreams faded, and they resigned themselves to mediocrity or hopeless failure.

There is no environment so unfavorable, so discouraging, no situation so disheartening that a youth who is made of the right kind of material cannot change it. Lincoln, Benjamin Franklin, Fred Douglas, John Wanamaker, Marshall Field and thousands of other American boys found themselves in the midst of the most disheartening environment but made a new environment for themselves. It is possible for you to do the same.The great trouble with most of us is that we never get aroused, never discover ourselves until late in life,—often too late to make much out of the remnant that is left. It is very important that we become aroused to our possibilities when young, thus we may overcome the most unfavorable environment and get the greatest possible efficiency out of our lives.