Josh Mitteldorf (@mitteldorf)

It's a little-known historic footnote that when a young Rudyard Kipling submitted his poem IF for publication, the assigned editor was Lao Tzu whose name is sometimes translated as The Ancient Child. Indeed, the Master was more than 2400 years old at the time he served as Kipling's editor. The upshot was that young Rudyard didn't understand where the Master was coming from and he simply re-submitted his poem to a more receptive editor. The result is the version we know today. But I thought that the Master's editorial revision might be of interest to some of my readers on this site.