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Years ago, when I started looking for my first job, wise advisers1 urged, "Barbara, be enthusiastic! Enthusiasm will take you further than any amount of experience." How right they were. Enthusiastic people can turn a boring drive into an adventure, extra work into opportunity and strangers into friends. "Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm," wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson. It is the paste that helps you hang in there when the going gets tough. It is the inner voice that whispers, "I can do it!" when others shout, "No, you can't." It took years and years for the early work of Barbara McClintock, a geneticist who won the 1983 Nobel Prize in medicine, to be generally accepted. Yet she didn't let up on her experiments. Work was such a deep pleasure for her that she never thought of stopping. We are all born with wide-eyed, enthusiastic wonder as anyone knows who has ever seen an infant's delight at the jingle2 of keys or the scurrying3 of a beetle4. It is this childlike wonder that gives enthusiastic people such a youthful air, whatever their age. At 90, cellist5 Pablo Casals would start his day by playing Bach. As the music flowed through his fingers, his stooped shoulders would straighten and joy would reappear in his eyes. Music, for Casals, was an elixir6 that made life a never ending adventure. As author and poet Samuel Ullman once wrote, "Years wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul." | 
