Make yourself necessary to the world, and mankind will give you bread.
Interpretation
Contributing meaningfully to society will lead to your own fulfillment and support.
This quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson emphasizes the importance of being valuable and indispensable in the world. When you make yourself essential by offering solutions, skills, or support, society will recognize your efforts and, in return, provide for your needs, symbolized here by 'bread'. It highlights a reciprocal relationship between selflessness and personal gain.
In practice
In a motivational speech about finding purpose in life, you could use this quote to inspire the audience.
It is plain that there is no separate essence called courage, no cup or cell in the brain, no vessel in the heart containing drops or atoms that make or give this virtue; but it is the right or healthy state of every man, when he is free to do that which is constitutional to him to do.
Few people have any next, they live from hand to mouth without a plan, and are always at the end of their line.
Men cease to interest us when we find their limitations
Tis the good reader that makes the good book; a good head cannot read amiss: in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakeably meant for his ear.
The world belongs to the energetic.
Hast thou named all the birds without a gun?
Perseverance is a choice. It's not a simple, one-time choice, it's a daily one. There's never a final decision.
The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays is coming to its close. In its place we are entering a period of consequences.
I'm a firm believer that in the theory that people only do their best at things they truly enjoy. It is difficult to excel at something you don't enjoy.
Everyone wants to be a world champion, but when you take that first punch it will tell you if you really want to be in this sport or not. For me, there was no doubt.
You should not allow yourself the luxuries of discouragement of despair. Bounce back immediately, and welcome the adversity because it produces harder thinking and harder drive to get to the objective.
Youths write me and tell me that their band will go nowhere because of all the bad bands in the world. I tell them there has always been awful music and that no great band ever wasted any time complaining, they just got it done. Their ropey ranting is just a way to get out of the hard work of making music that will do some lasting damage.
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