The Path Between the Seas

by David McCullough

Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory or defeat. —THEODORE ROOSEVELT

At age forty-two he was not only the youngest President in history, he was an entirely novel figure in American politics—an eastern Republican with national appeal (phenomenal national appeal, as the campaign had shown). Where McKinley had been Midwestern, “of the plain people,” “TR” was big-city gentry, raised among nursemaids and gilded mirrors. He was a Harvard-trained, Harvard-sounding reader of books (two a day on the average); he was the Rough Rider, author, historian . . . a bird watcher! . . . and the most tireless political warrior the country had ever encountered. As the Vice-Presidential candidate he had been seen in twenty-four states, traveled twenty-one thousand miles, made nearly seven hundred speeches, all in one tour, while William McKinley, as was his custom, kept to the shade of his front porch in Canton, Ohio. Violent fate in the form of Leon Czolgosz had put Roosevelt in power at a time when the country was prospering, just as Mark Hanna had promised; when his party was in control of Congress; when the national spirit was expansive, confidence boundless; when the average American felt “400 percent bigger” than he had before the turn of the century, as Senator Chauncey Depew observed. And he had every intention of exercising power as it had not been in a very long time. “I did not care a rap for the mere form and show of power,” he would write, “I cared immensely for the use that could be made of the substance.”

Everything Trump is not...

The Influence of Sea Power upon History,

“Men who achieve greatness,” the brothers Mayo were to write in an essay about Gorgas, “do not work more complexly than the average man, but more simply . . . . In dealing with complex problems, with the simplicity natural to him he went directly to the point, unaffected by the confusion of details in which a smaller man would have lost himself.”

“You won’t get fired if you do something, you will if you don’t do anything. Do something if it is wrong, for you can correct that, but there is no way to correct nothing.”

The spirit of the times. Roosevelt embodied this in his actions and talk. And it is a basic precept of All fields of science, engineering, and discovery: you learn from your mistakes.

“To the Young Engineers Who Must Carry On,”

Want to read: Kathi Library version available and downloaded for free. The concepts that make any engineer especially successful our hard work, and willingness to make mistakes, and even more importantly a willingness to take credit and responsibility for the mistake and to learn from them and grow. Mistakes are no less vital and important to a company as part of their intellectual capital as their patents and IRAD projects. And it’s just it’s important to know why you were on the right path has to be on the right path.