read a paper before the National Convention of the American Medical Association-apaper 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'sState of Mind". Here is the first item on that list:"The sense of must or obligation; the unending stretch of things ahead that simply haveto be done."But how can such an elementary procedure as clearing your desk and making decisionshelp you avoid this high pressure, this sense of must, this sense of an "unending stretchof things ahead that simply have to be done"? Dr. William L. Sadler, the famouspsychiatrist, tells of a patient who, by using this simple device, avoided a nervousbreakdown. 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 thehospital calling; and, instead of deferring the matter, I took time right then to come toa decision. I always settle questions, if possible, right on the spot. I had no sooner hungup than the phone rang again. Again an urgent matter, which I took time to discuss. Thethird interruption came when a colleague of mine came to my office for advice on apatient who was critically ill. When I had finished with him, I turned to my caller andbegan to apologise for keeping him waiting. But he had brightened up. He had acompletely different look on his face.""Don't apologise, doctor!" this man said to Sadler. "In the last ten minutes, I think I'vegot a hunch as to what is wrong with me. I'm going back to my offices and revise myworking 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 answeredit. I dictate the reply to my secretary at once."Six weeks later, this same executive invited Dr. Sadler to come to his office. He waschanged-and so was his desk. He opened the desk drawers to show there was nounfinished business inside of the desk. "Six weeks ago," this executive said, "I had threedifferent desks in two different offices-and was snowed under by my work. I was neverfinished. After talking to you, I came back here and cleared out a wagon-load of reportsand old papers. Now I work at one desk, settle things as they come up, and don't have amountain of unfinished business nagging at me and making me tense and worried. Butthe most astonishing thing is I've recovered completely. There is nothing wrong anymore 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, fromdissipation 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 thatregardless of how much salary he paid, there were two abilities he found it almostimpossible to find.Those two priceless abilities are: first, the ability to think. Second, the ability to dothings in the order of their importance.Charles Luckman, the lad who started from scratch and climbed in twelve years topresident 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 todeveloping the two abilities that Henry L. Dougherty said he found almost impossible tofind. Charles Luckman said: "As far back as I can remember, I have got up at five o'clockin the morning because I can think better then than any other time-I can think betterthen and plan my day, plan to do things in the order of their importance." FranklinBettger, one of America's most successful insurance salesmen, doesn't wait until fiveo'clock in the morning to plan his day. He plans it the night before-sets a goal forhimself-a goal to sell a certain amount of insurance that day. If he fails, that amount isadded to the next day-and so on.I know from long experience that one is not always able to do things in the order oftheir importance, but I also know that some kind of plan to do first things first isinfinitely better than extemporising as you go along.If George Bernard Shaw had not made it a rigid rule to do first things first, he wouldprobably have failed as a writer and might have remained a bank cashier all his life. Hisplan called for writing five pages each day. That plan and his dogged determination tocarry it through saved him. That plan inspired him to go right on writing five pages a dayfor nine heartbreaking years, even though he made a total of only thirty dollars in thosenine years-about a penny a day.Good Working Habit No. 3. When You Face a Problem, Solve It Then and There if YouHave 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 memberof 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 timeand come to a decision. No procrastination-no putting off. The decision might be to askfor additional facts; it might be to do something or do nothing. But a decision wasreached on each problem before passing on to the next. Mr. Howell told me that theresults were striking and salutary: the docket was cleared. The calendar was clean. Nolonger was it necessary for each member to carry home a bundle of reports. No longerwas 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 neverlearned 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 bydelegating authority to the wrong people. But difficult as it is to delegate authority, theexecutive 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, andsupervise, usually pops off with heart trouble in his fifties or early sixties-heart troublecaused by tension and worries. Want a specific instance? Look at the death notices inyour local paper.~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Chapter 27: How To Banish The Boredom That Produces Fatigue, Worry, And ResentmentOne 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 wasso 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 adance! Her eyes sparkled. Her spirits soared. She rushed upstairs, put on her Alice-bluegown, 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 fallasleep.Was Alice really and honestly tired eight hours earlier, when she looked and actedexhausted? 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 withproducing 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 experimentsshowing how boredom produces fatigue. Dr. Barmack put a group of students through aseries of tests in which, he knew, they could have little interest. The result? Thestudents felt tired and sleepy, complained of headaches and eyestrain, felt irritable. Insome cases, even their stomachs were upset. Was it all "imagination"? No. Metabolismtests were taken of these students. These tests showed that the blood pressure of thebody and the consumption of oxygen actually decrease when a person is bored, and thatthe whole metabolism picks up immediately as soon as he begins to feel interest andpleasure 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 severaldays trout fishing along Corral Creek, fighting my way through brush higher than myhead, 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 highachievement: six cut-throat trout. But suppose I had been bored by fishing, then how doyou think I would have felt? I would have been worn out by such strenuous work at analtitude of seven thousand feet.Even in such exhausting activities as mountain climbing, boredom may tire you far morethan the strenuous work involved. For example, Mr. S. H. Kingman, president of theFarmers and Mechanics Savings Bank of Minneapolis, told me of an incident that is aperfect illustration of that statement. In July, 1943, the Canadian government asked theCanadian Alpine Club to furnish guides to train the members of the Prince of WalesRangers in mountain climbing. Mr. Kingman was one of the guides chosen to train thesesoldiers. He told me how he and the other guides-men ranging from forty-two to fiftynineyears of age-took these young army men on long hikes across glaciers and snowfields and up a sheer cliff of forty feet, where they had to climb with ropes and tinyfoot-holds and precarious hand-holds. They climbed Michael's Peak, the Vice-PresidentPeak, and other unnamed peaks in the Little Yoho Valley in the Canadian Rockies. Afterfifteen 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 utterlyexhausted.Was their fatigue caused by using muscles that had not been hardened by Commandotraining? Any man who had ever been through Commando training would hoot at such aridiculous question! No, they were utterly exhausted because they were bored bymountain climbing. They were so tarred, that many of them fell asleep without waitingto eat. But the guides-men who were two and three times as old as the soldiers-werethey 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 wereinterestedWhen Dr. Edward Thorndike of Columbia was conducting experiments in fatigue, he keptyoung men awake for almost a week by keeping them constantly interested. After muchinvestigation, Dr. Thorndike is reported to have said: "Boredom is the only real cause ofdiminution of work."If you are a mental worker, it is seldom the amount of work you do that makes youtired. You may be tired by the amount of work you do not do. For example, rememberthe day last week when you were constantly interrupted. No letters answered.Appointments broken. Trouble here and there. Everything went wrong that day. Youaccomplished nothing whatever, yet you went home exhausted-and with a splittinghead.The next day everything clicked at the office. You accomplished forty times more thanyou did the previous day. Yet you went home fresh as a snowy-white gardenia. You havehad that experience. So have I.The lesson to be learned? Just this: our fatigue is often caused not by work, but byworry, frustration, and resentment.While writing this chapter, I went to see a revival of Jerome Kern's delightful musicalcomedy, Show Boat. Captain Andy, captain of the Cotton Blossom, says, in one of hisphilosophical interludes: "The lucky folks are the ones that get to do the things theyenjoy doing." Such folks are lucky because they have more energy, more happiness, lessworry, and less fatigue. Where your interests are, there is your energy also. Walking tenblocks with a nagging wife can be more fatiguing than walking ten miles with an adoringsweetheart.And so what? What can you do about it? Well, here is what one stenographer did aboutit-a stenographer working for an oil company in Tulsa, Oklahoma. For several days eachmonth, she had one of the dullest jobs imaginable: filling out printed forms for oilleases, inserting figures and statistics. This taskwas so boring that she resolved, in self-defence, to make it interesting. How? She had adaily 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 andtried to better it the next day. Result? She was soon able to fill out more of these dullprinted 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 toprevent 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 thisstory is true, because I married that girl.Here is the story of another stenographer who found it paid to act as if her work wereinteresting. 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, asshe wrote it to me:"There are four stenographers in my office and each of us is assigned to take lettersfrom several men. Once in a while we get jammed up in these assignments; and oneday, when an assistant department head insisted that I do a long letter over, I started torebel. I tried to point out to him that the letter could be corrected without beingretyped-and he retorted that if I didn't do it over, he would find someone else whowould! I was absolutely fuming! But as I started to retype this letter, it suddenlyoccurred to me that there were a lot of other people who would jump at the chance todo the work I was doing. Also, that I was being paid a salary to do just that work. Ibegan to feel better. I suddenly made up my mind to do my work as if I actually enjoyedit-even though I despised it. Then I made this important discovery: if I do my work as if Ireally enjoy it, then I do enjoy it to some extent I also found I can work faster when Ienjoy my work. So there is seldom any need now for me to work overtime. This newattitude of mine gained me the reputation of being a good worker. And when one of thedepartment 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 thepower of a changed mental attitude," wrote Miss Golden, "has been a tremendouslyimportant 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 bebrave; 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 yourinterest 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. Heresolved 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 theother boys were playing ball or kidding the girls. Harlan Howard despised his job-butsince he had to stick to it, he resolved to study ice-cream-how it was made, whatingredients were used, why some ice-creams were better than others. He studied thechemistry of ice-cream, and became a whiz in the high-school chemistry course. He wasso interested now in food chemistry that he entered the Massachusetts State Collegeand majored in the field of "food technology". When the New York Cocoa Exchangeoffered a hundred-dollar prize for the best paper on uses of cocoa and chocolate-a prizeopen 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 basementof his home at 750 North Pleasant Street, Amherst, Massachusetts. Shortly after that, anew law was passed. The bacteria in milk had to be counted. Harlan A. Howard wassoon counting bacteria for the fourteen milk companies in Amherst-and he had to hiretwo assistants.Where will he be twenty-five years from now? Well, the men who are now running thebusiness of food chemistry will be retired then, or dead; and their places will be takenby young lads who are now radiating initiative and enthusiasm. Twenty-five years fromnow, Harlan A. Howard will probably be one of the leaders in his profession, while someof 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 makea dull job interesting.Years ago, there was another young man who was bored with his dull job of standing ata lathe, turning out bolts in a factory. His first name was Sam. Sam wanted to quit, buthe was afraid he couldn't find another job. Since he had to do this dull work, Samdecided he would make it interesting. So he ran a race with the mechanic operating amachine 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 switchmachines 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 thestart of a whole series of promotions. Thirty years later, Sam -Samuel Vauclain-waspresident of the Baldwin Locomotive Works. But he might have remained a mechanic allhis 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 jobinteresting. When he was twenty-two years old, he worked his way across the Atlanticon a cattle boat, feeding and watering the steers. After making a bicycle tour ofEngland, he arrived in Paris, hungry and broke. Pawning his camera for five dollars, heput an ad. in the Paris edition of The New York Herald and got a job selling steropticonmachines. If you are forty years old, you may remember those old-fashionedstereoscopes that we used to hold up before our eyes to look at two pictures exactlyalike. As we looked, a miracle happened. The two lenses in the stereoscope transformedthe two pictures into a single scene with the effect of a third dimension. We sawdistance. We got an astounding sense of perspective.Well, as I was saying, Kaltenborn started out selling these machines from door to door inParis-and he couldn't speak French. But he earned five thousand dollars in commissionsthe 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 thequalities 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 TheCongressional Record to French housewives.That experience gave him an intimate understanding of French life that later provedinvaluable 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. Hewould ring a door-bell, a housewife would answer, and Kaltenborn would beginrepeating his memorised sales talk with an accent so terrible it was funny. He wouldshow the housewife his pictures, and when she asked a question, he would shrug hisshoulders and say: "An American ... an American." He would then take off his hat andpoint to a copy of the sales talk in perfect French that he had pasted in the top of hishat. 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. Hetold me that there was only one quality that pulled him through: his determination tomake the job interesting. Every morning before he started out, he looked into themirror 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 timeyou ring a door-bell that you are an actor before the footlights and that there's anaudience out there looking at you. After all, what you are doing is just as funny assomething 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 hehad 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 Americawho are eager to succeed, he said: "Yes, go to bat with yourself every morning. We talka lot about the importance of physical exercise to wake us up out of the half-sleep inwhich so many of us walk around. But we need, even more, some spiritual and mentalexercises 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, itis the very essence of sound psychology. "Our life is what our thoughts make it." Thosewords are just as true today as they were eighteen centuries ago when Marcus Aureliusfirst 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 ofcourage and happiness, thoughts of power and peace. By talking to yourself about thethings you have to be grateful for, you can fill your mind with thoughts that soar andsing.By thinking the right thoughts, you can make any job less distasteful. Your boss wantsyou to be interested in your job so that he will make more money. But let's forget aboutwhat 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 youspend about one half of your waking hours at your work, and if you don't find happinessin your work, you may never find it anywhere. Keep reminding yourself that gettinginterested in your job will take your mind off your worries, and, in the long run, willprobably bring promotion and increased pay. Even if it doesn't do that, it will reducefatigue to a minimum and help you enjoy your hours of leisure.~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Chapter 28: How To Keep From Worrying About InsomniaDo you worry when you can't sleep well? Then it may interest you to know that SamuelUntermyer-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 andinsomnia. He couldn't seem to cure either, so he decided to do the next best thing-takeadvantage of his wakefulness. Instead of tossing and turning and worrying himself into abreakdown, he would get up and study. The result? He began ticking off honours in all ofhis 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'tworry. "Nature," he said, "will take care of me." Nature did. In spite of the small amountof sleep he was getting, his health kept up and he was able to work as hard as any ofthe young lawyers of the New York Bar. He even worked harder, for he worked whilethey slept!At the age of twenty-one, Sam Untermyer was earning seventy-five thousand dollars ayear; and other young attorneys rushed to courtrooms to study his methods. In 1931, hewas 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 starteddictating letters. By the time most people were just starting work, his day's work wouldbe almost half done. He lived to the age of eighty-one, this man who had rarely had asound night's sleep; but if he had fretted and worried about his insomnia, he wouldprobably have wrecked his life.