Awhile back, we put the word “hardihood” in a post and a couple of people asked if that was even a word. Well, not only is it a word-it’s a word that’s incredibly fun to say and is a real quality that every man should aspire to.

There are lots of quizzes these days designed to help you find the right field of work to match your proclivities and talents. The book How to Choose the Right Vocation, published in 1917, dispensed with the modern questions about creativity and being a “people-person” and asked men to rate themselves on things like their hardihood. The book argued that while hardihood was an absolute necessity in some vocations, it was a quality all men should seek to cultivate. How’s your hardihood? Ask yourself these questions and take some time to think it over.

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Hardihood is so often made synonymous in common usage with rashness, presumption and untoward boldness that its prime meaning is obscured in the minds of many people. This first meaning is—to speak by the book—”boldness and confidence in action, especially in encountering difficulty, danger or contempt; stout and persistent courage.”

Hardihood gives physical endurance; it gives to a degree immunity from exhaustion as it enables one to ignore the first onset of fatigue attendant upon vigorous physical activity or upon stressful mental application and easily to get one’s “second wind,” which makes prolonged effort comparatively easy.

Hardihood generates constitutional boldness in attempting difficult tasks or those where the outcome is doubtful; it drives one into actions that require courage and fortitude to attempt; it leads one to overcome opposition to one’s efforts and to exercise intrepidity without apparent fear regarding the consequences, to climb over obstacles that would daunt conservative judgment or ordinary daring, to set one’s teeth and make the Herculean effort that brings success from apparent failure. What could advantage one more vocationally than such “stout and persistent courage?”