If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you
But make allowance for their doubting too,
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:


Read the remainder of this poem with video, here


“If” is a poem by English Nobel laureate Rudyard
Kipling, written around 1895. The poem, first published in
Rewards and Fairies (1910), is written in the form of
paternal advice to the poet’s son, John. “If” first
appeared in the “Brother Square Toes” chapter of the
book Rewards and Fairies, a collection of Kipling’s poetry
and short-story fiction, published in 1910. In his
posthumously published autobiography, Something of Myself
(1937), Kipling said that, in writing the poem, he was
inspired  by the military actions of Leander Starr Jameson.


If you know the poem, you'll enjoy the accompanying video


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