Initiative Psychic Energy - Warren Hilton (urban books to read .TXT) 📗
- Author: Warren Hilton
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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
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