initiative

4. How To Avoid Wastes That Drain The Energy Of Success

We have shown you that you have within you the potentialities of success in the form of latent mental energy. We have shown you that your ability to achieve depends upon your ability to utilize to the full your underground mental resources.

But success demands that you do more than merely use all your mental energies. You must use them intelligently.

Most men fail because they speed the bullet without aiming. They fire at random, and so bag no game.

Your pent-up mental energy is the powder in the cartridge. Its usefulness depends upon the man behind the gun.

To succeed in business you must intelligently control and direct (1) your own mental energies, (2) the mental energies of others.

The course of the average man through life is an aimless zigzag. It has neither direction nor purpose. It represents wasted energy capriciously expended.

Mental energy is like water: it has a tendency to scatter. It is diffusive. It seeks release in a thousand different directions at the same time.

As a boy, first learning to write, you were unable to prevent the simultaneous squirming of tongue and legs, all ludicrously irrelevant to your purpose of writing. So now, as a business man, unless you have learned the secret of self-mastery, you are unable to concentrate your efforts, your attention is easily distracted, you exhaust yourself in displays of passion, you are forever doing things during business hours that have no relation to your business, you are forever doing things in connection with your business that do not contribute to its progress, you expend just as much energy as the accomplished executive or the successful "hustler," but you fritter it away in unprofitable activities.

To correct this is to gain mastery and power.

Concentrate your mental energies on one thing at a time. Stop spreading them around. The promoter may have a dozen big enterprises under way at once, but he takes them up one at a time. He transfers his whole mind and thought from one to the next. You cannot of course be eternally doing the same thing; but make no mistake about it, the only way to succeed at anything is to consciously control your mental energies. You may throw them now into this attack, now into another; but you must always have a tight grip on yourself, or you cannot succeed.

You will often hear some "live-wire" business man spoken of as a "human dynamo." He has the faculty of turning out a stupendous amount of work in a comparatively short time. How he can carry in his mind the details of so many large projects, how he can accomplish so much in actual, tangible results in many directions, how he can pull the strings of so many enterprises without getting lost in the maze of detail, is the marvel of his associates. And yet this man is never "hurried, nor flurried, nor worried." But every word and every act is straight to the point and productive of results worth while.

"A cool brain is the reverse of a hot box. It carries the business of the day along with a steady drive, and is invariably the mark of the big man. The man who dispatches his work quietly, promptly and efficiently, with no trace of fuss and flurry, is a big man. It is not the hurrying, clattering and chattering individual who turns off the most work. He may imagine he is getting over a lot of track, but he wastes far more than the necessary amount of steam in doing it. The fable of the hare and the tortoise would not be a bad primer for a number of us, and the lesson relearned would not only be beneficial in a business-producing way, but it would help us in the full enjoyment of our work."

Progress in mental efficiency must result from the application of knowledge of the mental machine. Just as we watch the steam-engine and the electric motor to see that they are not "overloaded," so we must watch the mental machine, that no more power be turned on than can be profitably employed.

This principle has already been applied to physical labor by Mr. Frederick W. Taylor in his ground-breaking studies in "scientific management." Mr. Taylor's celebrated experiments in the handling of pig-iron, by which the quantity handled in a day by one man was increased from twelve and one-half tons to forty-seven and one-half tons, "showed that a man engaged in such extremely heavy work could only be under load forty-three per cent of the working day, and must be entirely free from load for fifty-seven per cent, to attain the maximum efficiency."

There is no reason why efficiency in mental effort should not be gauged just as accurately as in muscular activity. If there are times when your wits are not as keen, when you have not the same grasp of fundamentals, as at other times, it is because you are mentally "overloaded." It may be the result of a great variety of causes. It may be from too many hours of continuous mental effort. But the probabilities are that it is the result of vexation, worry, dissipation, or allowing the mind to be burdened with the strain of vicious, or at least irrelevant and distracting, impulses and desires. And so efficiency is lost.

The "human dynamo" is a man who long ago learned the lesson of scientific management of his own mental forces. He does one thing at a time, and does it the best he knows how. He directs the whole power of his mentality to the one problem and solves it with accuracy and dispatch. There is no more of a "load" on his "gray matter" than there is on that of the fretting, fuming, finger-biting fritterer, but every pound of steam is spent in useful work.

Look at the victim of St. Vitus' dance. There you have an illustration of wasted energy. And it is mental energy, for every muscular movement represents the release of thought power. The mental lives of most men are equally aimless. They are lives of ceaseless activity producing nothing.

Sometimes it happens that a man is not working to advantage because of some defect in his physical make-up. He may have defective vision or some peculiarity of hearing that renders him unable to respond as quickly as he should to the demands made upon him. If these defects are ascertained, it is usually a simple matter to correct the defects by mechanical means or readjust the relative duties of different persons so that the defects will be minimized.

Where large numbers of people are employed, it is comparatively easy to use tests for discovering defects of sight or hearing by simple apparatus without requiring the services of a high-priced expert. By adopting these test methods any manager of a large industrial establishment can satisfy himself whether his employees are up to certain normal standards. He can even apply the tests to himself.

Optical tests can be conducted by securing an ordinary letter chart such as is used by oculists and opticians. Seat the subject twenty feet away. If he can read all the lines of letters from the largest down to the smallest his eyesight is practically perfect. In a large percentage of cases the smaller lines of type are blurred and invisible. To detect the cause and degree of defects of the eyes it is necessary to try out the eyes by using a trial spectacle frame and inserting detached lenses before the right eye and the left eye alternately. One of the most common forms of defective vision is astigmatism. A chart has been designed with a series of circles and straight lines radiating from the center. If the subject is astigmatic he will see some of the straight lines distinctly while others will be blurred. For instance, one or two of the vertical lines may appear very black and strong while all others will look like a hazy network. This defect, due to unevenness of the spherical surface of the eyeball, is easily corrected with properly ground glasses.

Defects in hearing can be easily determined by means of an "acoumeter." This little instrument measures the acuteness of the hearing very accurately by means of shot dropped from varying heights upon strips of glass, copper and cardboard. Tests with this device indicate whether the subject's hearing is above or below normal.

Stop wasting your energy.

Heretofore you have used your powers in a more or less haphazard way, with a vast amount of waste and no efficient direction. From now on you are to exercise more intelligence in this respect and make all your energies contribute to your business progress and your personal success.

You are losing power in fruitless outward activities.

You are losing power in the thinking of useless thoughts. You cannot stop the ceaseless activity of the mind. But you can conserve its forces by directing them into channels that are worth while.

You are losing power in a turmoil of inward mental strains and inharmonies. Catch yourself at some moment when you are forging ahead in a crowded day's work. You will then see what an inner whirlwind of excitement is in progress, what stresses and strains are at work, what contrary impulses, what frictions and obstacles are being overcome.

Now, to the engineer every one of these words--friction, obstacle, strain--spells loss of efficiency, and in this Course we shall teach you how you may do away with antagonistic impulses, may bring your combined mental forces to bear upon the common enemy, and may hurl yourself into the struggles of business and practical life with a joyful and headlong impetuosity that no obstacle can withstand.

Professor Walter Dill Scott, of Northwestern University, has said: "In studying the lives of contemporary business men, two facts stand out pre-eminently. The first is that their labors have brought about results that to most of us would have seemed impossible. Such men appear as giants in comparison with whom ordinary men sink to the size of pygmies. The second fact, which a study of successful business men (or any class of successful men) reveals, is that they never seem rushed for time.

"Such men have time to devote to objects in no way connected with their business. It cannot be regarded as accidental that this characteristic of mind is found so commonly among successful men during the years of their most fruitful labor. According to the American ideal, the man who is sure to succeed is the one who is continuously 'keyed up to concert pitch'--who is ever alert and is always giving attention to his business or profession."

And again: "It is not necessarily true that the greatest and most constant display of energy accompanies the greatest presence of energy. The tug-boat on the river is constantly blowing off steam and making a tremendous display of energy, while the ocean liner proceeds on its way without noise and without commotion. The man who frets and fumes, who is nervous and excited, is strung up to such a pitch that energy is being dissipated in all directions."

Many business men know they are going at a pace that kills, and at the same time they feel that they are accomplishing too little. For such the pertinent question is, How may I reduce the expenditure of energy without reducing the efficiency of my labor?

One of the busiest and most efficient men in England is quoted as having explained his own accomplishment of big results with the least expenditure of effort: "By organizing myself to run smoothly, as well as my business; by schooling myself to keep cool, and to do what I have to do without expending more nervous energy on the task than is necessary; by avoiding all needless friction. In consequence, when I finish my day's work, I feel nearly as fresh as when I started."

The late Professor James, of Harvard University, often referred to as the founder of modern psychology, spoke thus disparagingly of untrained effort: "Your convulsive worker breaks down and has bad moods so often that you never know where he may be when you most need his help,--he may be having one of his 'bad days.' We say that so many of our fellow-countrymen collapse and have to be sent abroad to rest their nerves, because they work so hard. I suspect that this is an immense mistake, I suspect that neither the nature nor the amount of our work is accountable for the frequency and the severity of our breakdowns, but that their cause lies rather in those absurd feelings of hurry and having no time, in the breathlessness and tension, that anxiety of feature and solicitude for results, that lack of inner harmony and ease, in short, by which with us the work is apt to be accompanied."

The fact is that to be a truly busy man you must be never in a hurry. You must work systematically. You must economize effort. You must permit no distractions and do your work leisurely. You must take time to think things over in a natural way. You must waste no thoughts in business hours on social or pleasurable pursuits that would dissipate your mental capital. You must work when you work, and you may play when you play, but your business must be the most fascinating of games and the only one you play during business hours.

Another thing you need is poise. One trouble with you now is that you waste your priceless powers in useless anxiety.

The minute business falls off you begin to worry. You fritter your mental energies in fretting until you are incapable of real thought, and being unable to think your way out you get excited.

Remember it is all just a game, and you are in it only for the fun of the thing. You will never win out if you persist in tearing your hair.

Before he crossed the Rubicon Julius Cæsar was staggered at the greatness of the undertaking before him. The more he reflected and took counsel of his friends, the greater loomed the difficulties of the attempt and the more appalling the calamities his passage of that river would bring upon the Roman world. But when at last with the cry, "The die is cast!" he plunged into the river, there was an end for him to mental dissension, a freedom to plan and execute, an expansion of courage and power.

So it will be with you. With doubt and uncertainty the pressure may be high in the gauge, but the engine does not move. Make up your mind, and you release energies previously wasted in conflicts between opposing thought complexes struggling for supremacy.

A fine illustration of this is shown in the religious experience known as conversion. To the convert, conversion means the profound acceptance of a mighty spiritual truth. It means positive knowledge taking the place of doubt or indifference. Conflicting ideas are no longer present in his consciousness. Pent-up energies are released. He wants to do things. His soul is fired with overmastering impulses to action. He wants to go forth and preach the gospel of his faith. He is lifted to a high plane of exhilaration. He experiences the "peace that passeth understanding."

"Christian Science," "Truth," "The New Thought," and similar movements all achieve their really marvelous results in much the same way. All proclaim doctrines of exuberant optimism, having a tendency to banish fear-thoughts and self-consciousness and self-depreciation, and to set up in their stead ideas of courage and of achievement and of individual power. If these teachings are successful--that is to say, if they inherently possess the right appeal for the particular individual--they have the happy effect of begetting a stoical indifference to petty physical disorders and social vexations and bringing about a concentration upon the main business of life of the mental energies thus previously wasted.

Decide the matter that is troubling you. Make an end of hesitation and uncertainty and fear. Your very act of decision will release large stores of pent-up mental power and add immeasurably to your effectiveness.

So long as you are in doubt and perplexity conflicting ideas and impulses balance each other. You are not then a man of action; you are a wavering coward. You are afflicted with paralysis of will and mental stagnation.

Decide the matter--that is to say, let one mental picture assume a greater vividness than the other until it possesses your soul--and forthwith the banked fires of your mental energy will burst into flame.

Another thing: Stop wasting your time.

How much time do you spend in rest and relaxation? How much should you spend? Can you answer these questions accurately?

Thomas A. Edison has contended for years that four hours' sleep a day was sufficient for any man. He has conducted experiments with a large number of men, giving careful attention to matters of diet and exercise, and the results have seemed in a measure to support his theory.

Dr. Fred W. Eastman reports that owing to pressure of work he was recently unable to get more than three or four hours' sleep out of the twenty-four during a period of many months, and that so far from being hurt by it he gained five pounds. He says: "If restoration during sleep is a task so relatively small, the question arises whether, in order to complete restoration, it is necessary for us to spend so much time in sleep as we do. Perhaps on account of popular opinion and personal habit, we waste much time in this jelly-fish condition that could more profitably be spent in active pursuit of our ambitions. The answer, of course, depends upon the nature of our occupations. If there is muscular effort involved, with a correspondingly large amount of waste in the cells and blood, eight hours or more are probably necessary. But if the work is of a sedentary nature, and mainly of the brain, there is naturally a smaller quantity of accumulated waste, and less time is required for removal. Many are the instances of great men, past and present, who have lived healthily and worked unceasingly and strenuously on only four or five hours of sleep, or half the laborer's portion. Surely we do not suppose that these men were or are physically different from others, but rather that by inclination or necessity they have developed a habit of sleeping intensely for a short period, with resulting gain of time and efficiency."

So far as this matter of relaxation, rest and sleep is concerned, the rule to follow is obviously this: Determine accurately by experiment the proper relation between periods of work and periods of rest in your own case, then increase your efficiency by maintaining this relation.

In Denmark they feed cows scientifically. Day by day they increase the allowance of milk-producing food. Day by day the yield of milk increases. At last there comes a day when measurement shows that there is no longer any increase in the production of milk. They then decrease the food till the output of milk diminishes. So they determine the normal.

So with you and your hours of work and leisure. Give more and more time to your business each day until there comes an impairment in the quality of your work. Stop short of this. You have found your norm of efficiency.