How to Analyze People on Sight. Elsie Lincoln Benedict
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DEDICATED TO OUR STUDENTS
Modern science has proved that the fundamental traits of every
individual are indelibly stamped in the shape of his body, head, face
and hands--an X-ray by which you can read the characteristics of any
person on sight.
The most essential thing in the world to any individual is to understand
_himself_. The next is to understand the other fellow. For life is
largely a problem of running your own car as it was built to be run,
plus getting along with the other drivers on the highway.
From this book you are going to learn which type of car you are and the
main reasons why you have not been getting the maximum of service out of
yourself.
Also you are going to learn the makes of other human cars, and how to
get the maximum of co-operation out of them. This co-operation is vital
to happiness and success. We come in contact with our fellowman in all
the activities of our lives and what we get out of life depends, to an
astounding degree, on our relations with him.
Reaction to Environment
The greatest problem facing any organism is successful reaction to its
environment. Environment, speaking scientifically, is the sum total of
your experiences. In plain United States, this means fitting
vocationally, socially and maritally into the place where you are.
If you don't fit you must move or change your environment to fit _you_.
If you can't change the environment and you won't move you will become a
failure, just as tropical plants fail when transplanted to the Nevada
desert.
Learn From the Sagebrush
But there is something that grows and keeps on growing in the Nevada
desert--the sagebrush. It couldn't move away and it couldn't change its
waterless environment, so it did what you and I must do if we expect to
succeed. It adapted itself to its environment, and there it stands, each
little stalwart shrub a reminder of what even a plant can do when it
tries!
Moving Won't Help Much
Human life faces the same alternatives that confront all other forms
of life--of adapting itself to the conditions under which it must live
or becoming extinct. You have an advantage over the sagebrush in that
you can move from your city or state or country to another, but after
all that is not much of an advantage. For though you may improve your
situation slightly you will still find that in any civilized country the
main elements of your problem are the same.
Understand Yourself and Others
So long as you live in a civilized or thickly populated community you
will still need to understand your own nature and the natures of other
people. No matter what you desire of life, other people's aims,
ambitions and activities constitute vital obstructions along your
pathway. You will never get far without the co-operation, confidence and
comradeship of other men and women.
Primitive Problems
It was not always so. And its recentness in human history may account
for some of our blindness to this great fact.
In primitive times people saw each other rarely and had much less to do
with each other. The human element was then not the chief problem. Their
environmental problems had to do with such things as the elements,
violent storms, extremes of heat and cold, darkness, the ever-present
menace of wild beasts whose flesh was their food, yet who would eat them
first unless they were quick in brain and body.
Civilization's Changes
But all that is changed. Man has subjugated all other creatures and
now walks the earth its supreme sovereign. He has discovered and
invented and builded until now we live in skyscrapers, talk around the
world without wires and by pressing a button turn darkness into
daylight.
Causes of Failure
Yet with all our knowledge of the outside world ninety-nine lives out
of every hundred are comparative failures.
The reason is plain to every scientific investigator. We have failed
to study ourselves in relation to the great environmental problem of
today. The stage-setting has been changed but not the play. The game is
the same old game--you must adjust and adapt yourself to your
environment or it will destroy you.
Mastering His Own Environment
The cities of today _look_ different from the jungles of our ancestors
and we imagine that because the brain of man overcame the old menaces no
new ones have arisen to take their place. We no longer fear
extermination from cold. We turn on the heat. We are not afraid of the
vast oceans which held our primitive forebears in thrall, but pass
swiftly, safely and luxuriously over their surfaces. And soon we shall
be breakfasting in New York and dining the same evening in San
Francisco!
Facing New Enemies
But in building up this stupendous superstructure of modern
civilization man has brought into being a society so intricate and
complex that he now faces the new environmental problem of human
relationships.
The Modern Spider's Web
Today we depend for life's necessities almost wholly upon the
activities of others. The work of thousands of human hands and thousands
of human brains lies back of every meal you eat, every journey you take,
every book you read, every bed in which you sleep, every telephone
conversation, every telegram you receive, every garment you wear.
And this fellowman of ours has multiplied, since that dim distant dawn,
into almost two billion human beings, with at least one billion of them
after the very things you want, and not a tenth enough to go around!
Adapt or Die
Who will win? Nature answers for you. She has said with awful and
inexorable finality that, whether you are a blade of grass on the Nevada
desert or a man in the streets of London, you can win only as you adapt
yourself to your environment. Today