Your Forces and How to Use Them (Complete Six Volume Edition). Prentice Mulford
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to act them out with your body.
A steady situation and good wages for life in any calling is not the road to any permanent or growing success. You are then but a screw in the great business machine, and, when worn-out, will be mercilessly replaced by the newer screw. If in skill you are in your business at the top, and as to wages near the bottom, it is because, while skilled in your trade, you are not so in getting your just reward for that skill. You must aspire to manage a business founded on your skill. You must not be content to be managed by others who, taking advantage of your skill, get your industry and article before the public, and, with that, three-fourths of the profits. You must use this your power of thought, to get it and yourself before the public.
You must, to gain the greatest success, manage a business, or a department of a business, and be its sole governor without interference or hinderance from another. Responsibility alone can bring out your fullest power and its attendant happiness.
Otherwise you will, as a mere employee, be fettered by an employer’s demands, or by conditions made by others in which you will be obliged to work. You will see your best ideas imperfectly carried out, because you cannot fully control their carrying out yourself.
VI.
HOW TO KEEP YOUR STRENGTH.
Thoughts are Things.
A principal means for holding and increasing both physical and mental strength lies in the training of the mind and body to do but one thing at a time; in other words, to put all the thought necessary for the performance of any act in that act, and to put aside all other thought whatever save what belongs to that act.
The body is but the machine used by the mind. If it be weak, the power of our thought may be largely used and almost uselessly expended in resisting its weakness. The mind is then the workman endeavoring to carry out his design with an imperfect tool. Eventually, this defective tool may derange and destroy entirely the workman’s power.
Strength of mind and body is the corner-stone of all enjoyment and success. The weak body enjoys little or nothing. Our bodies are reservoirs of force. Eating and sleeping are means for filling up with that force; in other words, for filling up with thought. When so filled up we enjoy our walk, our business, our effort of any kind. What is most desirable for all to know is, how to retain the most of that force during our waking hours and if possible to increase it; because this force has a commercial value in dollars and cents. The weak and exhausted body is neither the body for “business” or pleasure, and all business is best done when it is a pleasure to do it.
An old system of philosophy says, “What thou doest, that do with all thy might.”
Not the spasmodic, fleeting might of fury or anger. That is not might at all. That is waste of strength. It implies that every act of our lives, from the tying of a shoe-string, the forming of a letter, or the sharpening of a pencil, should be done with the might of method, precision, exactness, care; in brief, the might of concentration. When a boy, I was doing my first day’s shovelling in the California gold-diggings. An old miner said to me, “Young man, you make too hard work of shovelling: you want to put more mind in that shovel.”
Pondering over this remark, I found that shovelling dirt needed co-operation of mind with muscle,—mind to give direction to muscle; mind to place the shovel’s point where it should scoop up most dirt with least outlay of strength; mind to give direction to the dirt as thrown from the shovel; and infinitesimal portions of mind, so to speak, in the movement of every muscle brought into play while shovelling. I found that the more thought I put in the shovel the better could I shovel: the less like work it became, the more like play it became, and the longer my strength for shovelling lasted. I found when my thought drifted on other things (no matter what), that soon the less strength and enjoyment had I for shovelling, and the sooner it became an irksome task.
Every thought is a thing and a force made of invisible substance. Thinking uses up a certain amount of the body’s force. You are working and using up this force even in what you call your “idlest moments.” If, while doing one act with the body, you are thinking of something else, you are wasting your strength and thought. Before you pick up a pin from the floor, you send from you, in thought, substance,—a plan for picking up that pin. That plan is force. You direct and use that force on your body, the instrument for picking up the pin. You should not mix that plan with one for doing any thing else while the body is picking up that pin. If you do, you are sending your force—or trying to—in two directions at once. You mingle and confuse the plan and force for one act with the plan and force for another.
Every impatient act and thought, no matter how small, costs us an unprofitable outlay of force. If, sometime, when you are tired with walking,—that is, walking with your legs, while your brain has been working, wool gathering, or worrying, planning, and scheming,—you will drive all such thought away and put all your mind, attention, and force in your limbs and feet, you may be surprised to find your strength return and your fatigue leave you. Because every physical act costs a thought, and every thought costs a certain outlay of force. Every step you take involves a plan to give that step direction. Plan involves outlay of thought. Thought means outlay of force. If you think of other things while walking, you are expending force in two directions at once.
Do you think that an acrobat could so readily ascend a rope hand over hand, did he not put his whole mind as well as strength on the act? or that an orator could thrill an audience, were he obliged to turn a grindstone while speaking? Yet in so many of our acts do we not unconsciously burthen ourselves by turning that grindstone, in thinking and planning one thing, while doing, or trying to do, another? If you are going up a hill and are continually looking with impatience toward the top, and wishing you were at the top, you will soon become tired. If you are near that hilltop in imagination, while your body is near the bottom, you are sending your force of thought to the top of the hill, leaving only enough in the poor, outraged body to drag it wearily upward. If you hold all that force to that body, and concentrate it on each step, you ascend far easier; because your power is then concentrated in those parts of your body (your legs) that most need that power. When you concentrate all your strength in each step, you make each step easier, you get a certain pleasure out of each step, and you forget also your trouble,—that being the impatient desire of being at the hilltop.
This law holds good in every act of life. Do you not wish you could forget your trouble, your disappointment, your sense of loss, through concentrating all your thought on something else, and becoming so absorbed in it, and enjoying it, as to forget all things else?
This is a possibility of mind, and is one well worth the striving for. It can be attained by the practice of concentration; or, in other words, the putting of one’s whole mind on the doing of so-called trivial things, and every second expended in such practice brings one nearer the result desired. Each effort brings us its atom of gain in increased power for putting either our whole volume of power or only the amount of power necessary to be used for doing the act in hand. This atom of increased power for concentration is never lost. You need this at every moment in your daily business. You need it to keep your mind from straying off on other things while you are driving bargains.
How long can we concentrate our whole thought on any one act at once? Can you tie three knots in a string and put your whole thought in the tying of those three knots, letting no other thought intervene? You say, perhaps, “I can tie a knot just as well, and think of many other things.” Possibly you can; but can you tie those three knots and think only of knots ? Or has your mind so fallen into the habit of straying off and over a dozen different matters a minute that you have lost the power of focusing it on any single thing for ten consecutive seconds?
Do not call this trivial. Train for concentrative power in the doing of any one act and you train to throw your whole mind, thought, and force on all acts. Train to put your whole thought on each act, and prevent that thought from straying off on any thing else, and we are training to throw the same full current of power in our speech when we talk, in our skill when we work with tools, in our voice when we