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  Name: Ghulam Mustafa Name of Institute: Pakistan Shorthand Institute (Ghulam Mustafa) Personal Assistant in Women Development Department, Punjab Civil Secretariat Lahore.

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700 Common Words Exercise No. 12 Longhand

The life story of the great man must end on the same note as the life story of the least important of men. We must come in our reading to the point where the great man gives up his work, leaving it to others to carry on what he has begun. His life with all its wonderful interest is past, and we who read are left with the memory of his life and with the results of his work. We know that this must be so, but we do not always like a thing better because we know that it is certainly waiting for us, and it is not surprising to find that there are people who can take no pleasure in this form of reading because they know from the outset what the end must be. It is, however, no more profitable to run away, to run our fact from facts in reading than it is in life itself, and it is better to take the wider view and to read for the pleasure and the profit to be found in the consideration of the whole life, with its many difficulties and its many success. In this way we can find both comfort and help for ourselves, whose lives many seem without set purpose, to have little value. We discover perhaps that some person whose name has been to us like a great white light, for away, beyond our touch that person met in his early days with many of the same difficulties which we are facing now, that he, like us, had no special advantages, no clearly marked course to follow; like us he had to make his own way, step by step, learning as he went. We find, for example, that one man who became world-known began his working life as a teacher, helping his brother in a small country school. Another worked on a farm, and a third made his first special observation while holding a small and not important position on a ship which was making its way to the South Seas. But these men did not wait for opportunity to come to them; they took immediate advantage of their conditions to make their own opportunity. In the book which we have specially in mind we find that in most cases the man’s work was valued during his lifetime. But the world is not always ready to take new ideas warmly to its heart. In every age there are those who feel certain that here is nothing left for man to discover; there are others who see in the new idea a danger to their own special interests. It is not always easy to look at something new with clear eyes, to judge truly the value either of our own work or, the work of others. We find ourselves thinking that because a thing has always been done in such and such a way in the past then that must be the best possible way for it to be done, or because a certain thing has not been done before then it should not be done now. We have to keep a careful watch upon ourselves in this respect, and try to keep an open mind. If we try new methods in our own work we shall sometimes be wrong, possibly we shall often be wrong, but sometimes we shall meet with success which makes worthwhile all our earlier labours. Probably no more than one or two men out of all the millions living today can hope to do something so important that that it will influence world thought and world action throughout the ages to come, but the methods which have served the great men of any age and helped them in their great work have value for us today in our less important work. By marking the course taken by those who have been successful in their special fields we can learn better how to deal with our own situation, our own difficulties, in the field of thought and of action in which we are ourselves most interested.


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