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Today's reading was edited and adapted from essays on work and culture by Hamilton Wright-Mabey published in 1898.

The person whose life is intelligently ordered is always preparing themselves for the highest demands of their work.

They are not only doing their work with adequate skill from day to day,

but always fitting themselves in advance for more exacting and difficult tasks.

If you are to become an artist in your work,

your specific preparation for particular occasions and tasks must be part of a general preparation for all possible occasions and tasks, because it is not only impossible to foresee opportunities, but often impossible to recognize their importance.

The days which comes so unobtrusively and go so silently are opportunities in disguise.

And to learn how to discern those opportunities is one of the great ends of that education

which always must precede real success.

For nothing which endures is ever done without some kind of preliminary training.

People do not happen by chance upon greatness. They achieve it. Noble work of any kind

is the fruit of laborious apprenticeship, and from the higher forms of success, the idler and the

amateur are forever shut out. Emerson said that the gods sell anything, and to everybody,

at a fair price. He might have added that they give nothing away. Whatever we secure

...