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Show w ) Author of "How to Win Friend and Influence People. BEATING FATE It's not so much what Destiny does to us, as what we do to Destiny. That's the force that counts ; that inner determination. And when you have that, Destiny Des-tiny may be baffled and beaten. Fate may take a man and tear off his leg, but it doesn't defeat him. It did that very thing to a young man, and made him a great aviation figure. That man? Alexander de Seversky. Sometimes Fate puts a person in bed and tells him he is defeated. That very thing happened to Florence Nightingale. She suffered an invalid's life for fifty years and established public nursing systems sys-tems which led to the Red Cross. . Fate took a young Australian boy and blinded him at birth. That young man has never seen a human hu-man being. But Fate didn't conquer the sturdy soul of Alec Templeton, the blind musician, singer, and entertainer. Fate took Immanuel Kant and struck him with its black rod and made him a hunchback and a dwarf; it gave him a body so ill-shaped that he never traveled more than 40 miles from home in all his life, so sensitive was he to his outward appearance. But it didn't conquer that noble spirit, for he became a great philosopher and wrote a book that shook the philosophical world to its foundations. The name of his immortal book : "The Critique of Pure Reason." Fate tried its hand again. It took a lad and racked rack-ed him with dyspepsia and chronic insomnia. So bad were the combined attacks of dyspepsia and sleeplessness, sleep-lessness, that he gave up all thought of trying to stay in bed, so he rose in the1 middle of the night and worked work-ed on his beloved mathematics. Page after page he filled while others slept ; and in those quiet hours he worked out "descriptive geometry." Still Fate thought it had the better of him, for it took him from the world at the age of 39 ; but it didn't succeed even then, for his theorems live on, and every ship that sails the sea pays a silent tribute to his genius as does every man or maid who clicks off the keys on a comptometer, for he invented the first adding machine ma-chine in history. :Blaise Pascal. ' Sometimes Fate says, "Ah! I'll strike him through his eyes. I'll make him shortsighted; I'll trouble and plague him all his life." And Fate does trouble and plague him; but also it makes him a Toscanini. This same monster, Fate, scourged a widow with ill health and poverty. So terrible was this wolf of poverty that howled outside her door, that she had to burn her furniture to keep warm; she could eat only one meal a day. But Fate didn't quite have his way, for that woman was Carrie Jacobs Bond, and she wrote a song that sold more copies than any other song ever composed in the Western world : "The End of a Perfect Day." If Fate seems to have marked you for its toy, think of others who have had the same mark and thrown it off. ' |