read a paper before the National Convention of the American Medical Association-a
paper entitled "Functional Neuroses as Complications of Organic Disease". In that paper,
Dr. Stokes listed eleven conditions under the title: "What to Look for in the Patient's
State of Mind". Here is the first item on that list:
"The sense of must or obligation; the unending stretch of things ahead that simply have
to be done."
But how can such an elementary procedure as clearing your desk and making decisions
help you avoid this high pressure, this sense of must, this sense of an "unending stretch
of things ahead that simply have to be done"? Dr. William L. Sadler, the famous
psychiatrist, tells of a patient who, by using this simple device, avoided a nervous
breakdown. The man was an executive in a big Chicago firm. When he came to Dr.
Sadler's office, he was tense, nervous, worried. He knew he was heading for a tailspin,
but he couldn't quit work. He had to have help.
"While this man was telling me his story," Dr. Sadler says, "my telephone rang. It was the
hospital calling; and, instead of deferring the matter, I took time right then to come to
a decision. I always settle questions, if possible, right on the spot. I had no sooner hung
up than the phone rang again. Again an urgent matter, which I took time to discuss. The
third interruption came when a colleague of mine came to my office for advice on a
patient who was critically ill. When I had finished with him, I turned to my caller and
began to apologise for keeping him waiting. But he had brightened up. He had a
completely different look on his face."
"Don't apologise, doctor!" this man said to Sadler. "In the last ten minutes, I think I've
got a hunch as to what is wrong with me. I'm going back to my offices and revise my
working habits .... But before I go, do you mind if I take a look in your desk?"
Dr. Sadler opened up the drawers of his desk. All empty-except for supplies. "Tell me,"
said the patient, "where do you keep your unfinished business?"
"Finished!" said Sadler.
"And where do you keep your unanswered mail?"
"Answered!" Sadler told him. "My rule is never to lay down a letter until I have answered
it. I dictate the reply to my secretary at once."
Six weeks later, this same executive invited Dr. Sadler to come to his office. He was
changed-and so was his desk. He opened the desk drawers to show there was no
unfinished business inside of the desk. "Six weeks ago," this executive said, "I had three
different desks in two different offices-and was snowed under by my work. I was never
finished. After talking to you, I came back here and cleared out a wagon-load of reports
and old papers. Now I work at one desk, settle things as they come up, and don't have a
mountain of unfinished business nagging at me and making me tense and worried. But
the most astonishing thing is I've recovered completely. There is nothing wrong any
more with my health!"
Charles Evans Hughes, former Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, said:
"Men do not die from overwork. They die from dissipation and worry." Yes, from
dissipation of their energies-and worry because they never seem to get their work done.
Good Working Habit No. 2: Do Things in the Order of Their Importance.
Henry L. Dougherty, founder of the nation-wide Cities Service Company, said that
regardless of how much salary he paid, there were two abilities he found it almost
impossible to find.
Those two priceless abilities are: first, the ability to think. Second, the ability to do
things in the order of their importance.
Charles Luckman, the lad who started from scratch and climbed in twelve years to
president of the Pepsodent Company, got a salary of a hundred thousand dollars a year,
and made a million dollars besides-that lad declares that he owes much of his success to
developing the two abilities that Henry L. Dougherty said he found almost impossible to
find. Charles Luckman said: "As far back as I can remember, I have got up at five o'clock
in the morning because I can think better then than any other time-I can think better
then and plan my day, plan to do things in the order of their importance." Franklin
Bettger, one of America's most successful insurance salesmen, doesn't wait until five
o'clock in the morning to plan his day. He plans it the night before-sets a goal for
himself-a goal to sell a certain amount of insurance that day. If he fails, that amount is
added to the next day-and so on.
I know from long experience that one is not always able to do things in the order of
their importance, but I also know that some kind of plan to do first things first is
infinitely better than extemporising as you go along.
If George Bernard Shaw had not made it a rigid rule to do first things first, he would
probably have failed as a writer and might have remained a bank cashier all his life. His
plan called for writing five pages each day. That plan and his dogged determination to
carry it through saved him. That plan inspired him to go right on writing five pages a day
for nine heartbreaking years, even though he made a total of only thirty dollars in those
nine years-about a penny a day.
Good Working Habit No. 3. When You Face a Problem, Solve It Then and There if You
Have the Facts Necessary to Make a Decision. Don't Keep Putting off Decisions.
One of my former students, the late H.P. Howell, told me that when he was a member
of the board of directors of U.S. Steel, the meetings of the board were often longdrawn-
out affairs-many problems were discussed, few decisions were made. The result:
each member of the board had to carry home bundles of reports to study.
Finally, Mr. Howell persuaded the board of directors to take up one problem at a time
and come to a decision. No procrastination-no putting off. The decision might be to ask
for additional facts; it might be to do something or do nothing. But a decision was
reached on each problem before passing on to the next. Mr. Howell told me that the
results were striking and salutary: the docket was cleared. The calendar was clean. No
longer was it necessary for each member to carry home a bundle of reports. No longer
was there a worried sense of unresolved problems.
A good rule, not only for the board of directors of U.S. Steel, but for you and me.
Good Working Habit No. 4: Learn to Organise, Deputise, and Supervise.
Many a business man is driving himself to a premature grave because he has never
learned to delegate responsibility to others, insists on doing everything himself. Result:
details and confusion overwhelm him. He is driven by a sense of hurry, worry, anxiety,
and tension. It is hard to learn to delegate responsibilities. I know. It was hard for me,
awfully hard. I also know from experience the disasters that can be caused by
delegating authority to the wrong people. But difficult as it is to delegate authority, the
executive must do it if he is to avoid worry, tension, and fatigue.
The man who builds up a big business, and doesn't learn to organise, deputise, and
supervise, usually pops off with heart trouble in his fifties or early sixties-heart trouble
caused by tension and worries. Want a specific instance? Look at the death notices in
your local paper.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Chapter 27: How To Banish The Boredom That Produces Fatigue, Worry, And Resentment
One of the chief causes of fatigue is boredom. To illustrate, let's take the case of Alice,
a stenographer who lives on your street. Alice came home one night utterly exhausted.
She acted fatigued. She was fatigued. She had a headache. She had a backache. She was
so exhausted she wanted to go to bed without waiting for dinner. Her mother pleaded
... . She sat down at the table. The telephone rang. The boy friend! An invitation to a
dance! Her eyes sparkled. Her spirits soared. She rushed upstairs, put on her Alice-blue
gown, and danced until three o'clock in the morning; and when she finally did get home,
she was not the slightest bit exhausted. She was, in fact, so exhilarated she couldn't fall
asleep.
Was Alice really and honestly tired eight hours earlier, when she looked and acted
exhausted? Sure she was. She was exhausted because she was bored with her work,
perhaps bored with life. There are millions of Alices. You may be one of them.
It is a well-known fact that your emotional attitude usually has far more to do with
producing fatigue than has physical exertion. A few years ago, Joseph E. Barmack,
Ph.D., published in the Archives of Psychology a report of some of his experiments
showing how boredom produces fatigue. Dr. Barmack put a group of students through a
series of tests in which, he knew, they could have little interest. The result? The
students felt tired and sleepy, complained of headaches and eyestrain, felt irritable. In
some cases, even their stomachs were upset. Was it all "imagination"? No. Metabolism
tests were taken of these students. These tests showed that the blood pressure of the
body and the consumption of oxygen actually decrease when a person is bored, and that
the whole metabolism picks up immediately as soon as he begins to feel interest and
pleasure in his work!
We rarely get tired when we are doing something interesting and exciting. For example,
I recently took a vacation in the Canadian Rockies up around Lake Louise. I spent several
days trout fishing along Corral Creek, fighting my way through brush higher than my
head, stumbling over logs, struggling through fallen timber-yet after eight hours of this,
I was not exhausted. Why? Because I was excited, exhilarated. I had a sense of high
achievement: six cut-throat trout. But suppose I had been bored by fishing, then how do
you think I would have felt? I would have been worn out by such strenuous work at an
altitude of seven thousand feet.
Even in such exhausting activities as mountain climbing, boredom may tire you far more
than the strenuous work involved. For example, Mr. S. H. Kingman, president of the
Farmers and Mechanics Savings Bank of Minneapolis, told me of an incident that is a
perfect illustration of that statement. In July, 1943, the Canadian government asked the
Canadian Alpine Club to furnish guides to train the members of the Prince of Wales
Rangers in mountain climbing. Mr. Kingman was one of the guides chosen to train these
soldiers. He told me how he and the other guides-men ranging from forty-two to fiftynine
years of age-took these young army men on long hikes across glaciers and snow
fields and up a sheer cliff of forty feet, where they had to climb with ropes and tiny
foot-holds and precarious hand-holds. They climbed Michael's Peak, the Vice-President
Peak, and other unnamed peaks in the Little Yoho Valley in the Canadian Rockies. After
fifteen hours of mountain climbing, these young men, who were in the pink of condition
(they had just finished a six-week course in tough Commando training), were utterly
exhausted.
Was their fatigue caused by using muscles that had not been hardened by Commando
training? Any man who had ever been through Commando training would hoot at such a
ridiculous question! No, they were utterly exhausted because they were bored by
mountain climbing. They were so tarred, that many of them fell asleep without waiting
to eat. But the guides-men who were two and three times as old as the soldiers-were
they tired? Yes, but not exhausted. The guides ate dinner and stayed up for hours,
talking about the day's experiences. They were not exhausted because they were
interested
When Dr. Edward Thorndike of Columbia was conducting experiments in fatigue, he kept
young men awake for almost a week by keeping them constantly interested. After much
investigation, Dr. Thorndike is reported to have said: "Boredom is the only real cause of
diminution of work."
If you are a mental worker, it is seldom the amount of work you do that makes you
tired. You may be tired by the amount of work you do not do. For example, remember
the day last week when you were constantly interrupted. No letters answered.
Appointments broken. Trouble here and there. Everything went wrong that day. You
accomplished nothing whatever, yet you went home exhausted-and with a splitting
head.
The next day everything clicked at the office. You accomplished forty times more than
you did the previous day. Yet you went home fresh as a snowy-white gardenia. You have
had that experience. So have I.
The lesson to be learned? Just this: our fatigue is often caused not by work, but by
worry, frustration, and resentment.
While writing this chapter, I went to see a revival of Jerome Kern's delightful musical
comedy, Show Boat. Captain Andy, captain of the Cotton Blossom, says, in one of his
philosophical interludes: "The lucky folks are the ones that get to do the things they
enjoy doing." Such folks are lucky because they have more energy, more happiness, less
worry, and less fatigue. Where your interests are, there is your energy also. Walking ten
blocks with a nagging wife can be more fatiguing than walking ten miles with an adoring
sweetheart.
And so what? What can you do about it? Well, here is what one stenographer did about
it-a stenographer working for an oil company in Tulsa, Oklahoma. For several days each
month, she had one of the dullest jobs imaginable: filling out printed forms for oil
leases, inserting figures and statistics. This task
was so boring that she resolved, in self-defence, to make it interesting. How? She had a
daily contest with herself She counted the number of forms she filled out each morning,
and then tried to excel that record in the afternoon. She counted each day's total and
tried to better it the next day. Result? She was soon able to fill out more of these dull
printed forms than any other stenographer in her division. And what did all this get her?
Praise? No. ... Thanks? No. ... Promotion? No. ... Increased pay? No. ... But it did help to
prevent the fatigue that is spawned by boredom. It did give her a mental stimulant.
Because she had done her best to make a dull job interesting, she had more energy,
more zest, and got far more happiness out of her leisure hours. I happen to know this
story is true, because I married that girl.
Here is the story of another stenographer who found it paid to act as if her work were
interesting. She used to fight her work. But no more. Her name is Miss Vallie G. Golden,
and she lives at 473 South Kenilworth Avenue, Elmhurst, Illinois. Here is her story, as
she wrote it to me:
"There are four stenographers in my office and each of us is assigned to take letters
from several men. Once in a while we get jammed up in these assignments; and one
day, when an assistant department head insisted that I do a long letter over, I started to
rebel. I tried to point out to him that the letter could be corrected without being
retyped-and he retorted that if I didn't do it over, he would find someone else who
would! I was absolutely fuming! But as I started to retype this letter, it suddenly
occurred to me that there were a lot of other people who would jump at the chance to
do the work I was doing. Also, that I was being paid a salary to do just that work. I
began to feel better. I suddenly made up my mind to do my work as if I actually enjoyed
it-even though I despised it. Then I made this important discovery: if I do my work as if I
really enjoy it, then I do enjoy it to some extent I also found I can work faster when I
enjoy my work. So there is seldom any need now for me to work overtime. This new
attitude of mine gained me the reputation of being a good worker. And when one of the
department superintendents needed a private secretary, he asked for me for the job-
because, he said, I was willing to do extra work without being sulky! This matter of the
power of a changed mental attitude," wrote Miss Golden, "has been a tremendously
important discovery to me. It has worked wonders!"
Without perhaps being conscious of it. Miss Vallie Golden was using the famous "as if"
philosophy. William James counseled us to act "as if" we were brave, and we would be
brave; and to act "as if" we were happy, and we would be happy, and so on.
Act "as if" you were interested in your job, and that bit of acting will tend to make your
interest real. It will also tend to decrease your fatigue, your tensions, and your worries.
A few years ago, Harlan A. Howard made a decision that completely altered his life. He
resolved to make a dull job interesting-and he certainly had a dull one: washing plates,
scrubbing counters, and dishing out ice-cream in the high-school lunch-room while the
other boys were playing ball or kidding the girls. Harlan Howard despised his job-but
since he had to stick to it, he resolved to study ice-cream-how it was made, what
ingredients were used, why some ice-creams were better than others. He studied the
chemistry of ice-cream, and became a whiz in the high-school chemistry course. He was
so interested now in food chemistry that he entered the Massachusetts State College
and majored in the field of "food technology". When the New York Cocoa Exchange
offered a hundred-dollar prize for the best paper on uses of cocoa and chocolate-a prize
open to all college students-who do you suppose won it? ... That's right. Harlan Howard.
When he found it difficult to get a job, he opened a private laboratory in the basement
of his home at 750 North Pleasant Street, Amherst, Massachusetts. Shortly after that, a
new law was passed. The bacteria in milk had to be counted. Harlan A. Howard was
soon counting bacteria for the fourteen milk companies in Amherst-and he had to hire
two assistants.
Where will he be twenty-five years from now? Well, the men who are now running the
business of food chemistry will be retired then, or dead; and their places will be taken
by young lads who are now radiating initiative and enthusiasm. Twenty-five years from
now, Harlan A. Howard will probably be one of the leaders in his profession, while some
of his class-mates to whom he used to sell ice-cream over the counter will be sour,
unemployed, cursing the government, and complaining that they never had a chance.
Harlan A. Howard might never have had a chance, either, if he hadn't resolved to make
a dull job interesting.
Years ago, there was another young man who was bored with his dull job of standing at
a lathe, turning out bolts in a factory. His first name was Sam. Sam wanted to quit, but
he was afraid he couldn't find another job. Since he had to do this dull work, Sam
decided he would make it interesting. So he ran a race with the mechanic operating a
machine beside him. One of them was to trim off the rough surfaces on his machine,
and the other was to trim the bolts down to the proper diameter. They would switch
machines occasionally and see who could turn out the most bolts. The foreman,
impressed with Sam's speed and accuracy, soon gave him a better job. That was the
start of a whole series of promotions. Thirty years later, Sam -Samuel Vauclain-was
president of the Baldwin Locomotive Works. But he might have remained a mechanic all
his life if he had not resolved to make a dull job interesting.
H. V. Kaltenborn-the famous radio news analyst-once told me how he made a dull job
interesting. When he was twenty-two years old, he worked his way across the Atlantic
on a cattle boat, feeding and watering the steers. After making a bicycle tour of
England, he arrived in Paris, hungry and broke. Pawning his camera for five dollars, he
put an ad. in the Paris edition of The New York Herald and got a job selling steropticon
machines. If you are forty years old, you may remember those old-fashioned
stereoscopes that we used to hold up before our eyes to look at two pictures exactly
alike. As we looked, a miracle happened. The two lenses in the stereoscope transformed
the two pictures into a single scene with the effect of a third dimension. We saw
distance. We got an astounding sense of perspective.
Well, as I was saying, Kaltenborn started out selling these machines from door to door in
Paris-and he couldn't speak French. But he earned five thousand dollars in commissions
the first year, and made himself one of the highest-paid salesmen in France that year.
H.V. Kaltenborn told me that this experience did as much to develop within him the
qualities that make for success as did any single year of study at Harvard. Confidence?
He told me himself that after that experience, he felt he could have sold The
Congressional Record to French housewives.
That experience gave him an intimate understanding of French life that later proved
invaluable in interpreting, on the radio, European events.
How did he manage to become an expert salesman when he couldn't speak French? Well,
he had his employer write out his sales talk in perfect French, and he memorised it. He
would ring a door-bell, a housewife would answer, and Kaltenborn would begin
repeating his memorised sales talk with an accent so terrible it was funny. He would
show the housewife his pictures, and when she asked a question, he would shrug his
shoulders and say: "An American ... an American." He would then take off his hat and
point to a copy of the sales talk in perfect French that he had pasted in the top of his
hat. The housewife would laugh, he would laugh-and show her more pictures. When H.
V. Kaltenborn told me about this, he confessed that the job had been far from easy. He
told me that there was only one quality that pulled him through: his determination to
make the job interesting. Every morning before he started out, he looked into the
mirror and gave himself a pep talk: "Kaltenborn, you have to do this if you want to eat.
Since you have to do it-why not have a good time doing it? Why not imagine every time
you ring a door-bell that you are an actor before the footlights and that there's an
audience out there looking at you. After all, what you are doing is just as funny as
something on the stage. So why not put a lot of zest and enthusiasm into it?"
Mr. Kaltenborn told me that these daily pep talks helped him transform a task that he
had once hated and dreaded into an adventure that he liked and made highly profitable.
When I asked Mr. Kaltenborn if he had any advice to give to the young men of America
who are eager to succeed, he said: "Yes, go to bat with yourself every morning. We talk
a lot about the importance of physical exercise to wake us up out of the half-sleep in
which so many of us walk around. But we need, even more, some spiritual and mental
exercises every morning to stir us into action. Give yourself a pep talk every day."
Is giving yourself a pep talk every day silly, superficial, childish? No, on the contrary, it
is the very essence of sound psychology. "Our life is what our thoughts make it." Those
words are just as true today as they were eighteen centuries ago when Marcus Aurelius
first wrote them in his book of Meditations: "Our life is what our thoughts make it."
By talking to yourself every hour of the day, you can direct yourself to think thoughts of
courage and happiness, thoughts of power and peace. By talking to yourself about the
things you have to be grateful for, you can fill your mind with thoughts that soar and
sing.
By thinking the right thoughts, you can make any job less distasteful. Your boss wants
you to be interested in your job so that he will make more money. But let's forget about
what the boss wants. Think only of what getting interested in your job will do for you.
Remind yourself that it may double the amount of happiness you get out of life, for you
spend about one half of your waking hours at your work, and if you don't find happiness
in your work, you may never find it anywhere. Keep reminding yourself that getting
interested in your job will take your mind off your worries, and, in the long run, will
probably bring promotion and increased pay. Even if it doesn't do that, it will reduce
fatigue to a minimum and help you enjoy your hours of leisure.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Chapter 28: How To Keep From Worrying About Insomnia
Do you worry when you can't sleep well? Then it may interest you to know that Samuel
Untermyer-the famous international lawyer-never got a decent night's sleep in his life.
When Sam Untermyer went to college, he worried about two afflictions-asthma and
insomnia. He couldn't seem to cure either, so he decided to do the next best thing-take
advantage of his wakefulness. Instead of tossing and turning and worrying himself into a
breakdown, he would get up and study. The result? He began ticking off honours in all of
his classes, and became one of the prodigies of the College of the City of New York.
Even after he started to practice law, his insomnia continued. But Untermyer didn't
worry. "Nature," he said, "will take care of me." Nature did. In spite of the small amount
of sleep he was getting, his health kept up and he was able to work as hard as any of
the young lawyers of the New York Bar. He even worked harder, for he worked while
they slept!
At the age of twenty-one, Sam Untermyer was earning seventy-five thousand dollars a
year; and other young attorneys rushed to courtrooms to study his methods. In 1931, he
was paid-for handling one case-what was probably the highest lawyer's fee in all history:
a cool million dollars-cash on the barrelhead.
Still he had insomnia-read half the night-and then got up at five A.M. and started
dictating letters. By the time most people were just starting work, his day's work would
be almost half done. He lived to the age of eighty-one, this man who had rarely had a
sound night's sleep; but if he had fretted and worried about his insomnia, he would
probably have wrecked his life.
