Part 1 (1/2)
Psychology and Achievement.
by Warren Hilton.
PREFATORY NOTE.
_Lest in the text of these volumes credit may not always have been given where credit is due, grateful acknowledgment is here made to Professor Hugo Munsterberg, Professor Walter Dill Scott, Dr. James H. Hyslop, Dr.
Ernst Haeckel, Dr. Frank Channing Haddock, Mr. Frederick W. Taylor, Professor Morton Prince, Professor F.H. Gerrish, Mr. Waldo Pondray Warren, Dr. J.D. Quackenbos, Professor C.A. Strong, Professor Paul Dubois, Professor Joseph Jastrow, Professor Pierre Janet, Dr. Bernard Hart and Professor G.M. Whipple, of the indebtedness to them incurred in the preparation of this work._
CHAPTER I
ATTAINMENT OF MIND CONTROL
[Sidenote: The Man of Tomorrow]
The men of the nineteenth century have harnessed the forces of the outer world. The age is now at hand that shall harness the energies of mind, new-found in the psychological laboratory, and shall put them at the service of humanity.
Are you fully equipped to take a valiant part in the work of the coming years?
[Sidenote: The Dollars and Cents of Mental Waste]
The greatest of all eras is at hand! Are you increasing your fitness to appreciate it and take part in it, or are you merely pa.s.sing your time away?
Take careful note for a week of the incidents of your daily life--your methods of work, habits of thought, modes of recreation. You will discover an appalling waste in your present random methods of operation.
How many foot-pounds of energy do you suppose you annually dump into the sc.r.a.p-heap of wasted effort? What does this mean to you in dollars and cents? In conscious usefulness? In peace and happiness?
[Sidenote: The Means to Notable Achievement]
Individual mental efficiency is an absolute prerequisite to any notable personal achievement or any great individual success. Your mental energies are the forces with which you must wage your battles in this world. Are you prepared to direct and deploy _Achievement__ these forces with masterful control and strategic skill? Are you prepared to use all your reserves of mental energy in the crises of your career?
A Mighty and Intelligent Power resides within you. Its marvelous resources are just now coming to be recognized.
Recent scientific research has revealed, beyond the world of the senses and beyond the domain of consciousness, a wide and hitherto hidden realm of human energies and resources.
[Sidenote: A Process for ”Making Good”]
These are mental energies and resources. They are phases of the mind, not of the ”mind” of fifty years ago, but of a ”mind” of whose operations you are unconscious and whose marvelous breadth and depth and power have but recently been revealed to the world by scientific experiment.
In this _Basic Course of Reading_ we shall lay before you in simple and clear-cut but scientific form the proof that you have at your command mental powers of which you have never before dreamed.
And we shall give you such specific directions for the use of these new-found powers, that whatever your environment, whatever your business, whatever your ambition, _you need but follow our plain and simple instructions in order to do the thing you want to do, to be the man you want to be, or to get the thing you want to have._
[Sidenote: Inadequacy of Body Training]
If you have any thought that the control of your hidden mental energies is to be acquired by mere hygienic measures, put it from you. The idea that you may come into the fulness of your powers through mere wholesome living, outdoor sports and bodily exercise is an idea that belongs to an age that is past. Good health is not necessary to achievement. It is not even a positive influence for achievement. It is merely a negative blessing. With good health you may hope to reach your highest mental and spiritual development free from the hara.s.sment of soul-racking pain. But without good health men have reached the summit of Parna.s.sus and have dragged their tortured bodies up behind them.
[Sidenote: Inadequacy of Business Specialization]
Nor does success necessarily follow or require long preparation in a particular field. The first occupation of the successful man is rarely the one in which he achieves his ultimate triumph. In the changing conditions of our day, one needs a better weapon than the mere knowledge of a particular trade, vocation or profession. _He needs that mastery of himself and others that is the fundamental secret of success in all fields of endeavor_.