He cannot respect himself, hence he cannot be respected.
You can enter all kinds of horses for a race, but only those which have natural adaptation for speed will make records; the others will only make themselves ridiculous by their lumbering, unnatural exertions to win.

How many truck and family-horse lawyers make themselves ridiculous by trying to speed on the law track, where courts and juries only laugh at them.

The effort to redeem themselves from scorn may enable them by unnatural exertions to become fairly passable, but the same efforts along the line of their strength or adaptation would make them kings in their line.
"Jonathan," said Mr.Chace, when his son told of having nearly fitted himself for college, "thou shalt go down to the machine-shop on Monday morning." It was many years before Jonathan escaped from the shop to work his way up to the position of a man of great influence as a United States Senator from Rhode Island.
Galileo was sent to the university at Pisa at seventeen, with the strict injunction not to neglect medical subjects for the alluring study of philosophy or literature.

But when he was eighteen he discovered the great principle of the pendulum by a lamp left swinging in the cathedral.
John Adams' father was a shoemaker; and, trying to teach his son the art, gave him some "uppers" to cut out by a pattern which had a three-cornered hole in it to hang it up by.

The future statesman followed the pattern, hole and all.
There is a tradition that Tennyson's first poems were published at the instigation of his father's coachman.