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A SECRET OF PERSONAL POWER

Greater efficiency is the watchword of the hour. The pages of every technical and even educational magazine bristle with it. One is driven to wonder whether the principle does not require that in every printing office the word "efficiency" be stereotyped to save the cost of setting. We are told how one manager of a creamery saved annually the amount of his own salary to the company by having the dents in the supply cans pounded out and so getting more milk from the farmers. But though the lengths to which the insistence on efficiency is carried may sometimes provoke a smile, we have no inclination to disparage it; we realize that efficiency has far more than a mere money value to society; it is rather our purpose in the present paper to ask whether the efficiency man has ever thought to turn his searchlight in upon himself and discover whether he has not latent and unexpected powers that may be evoked to the great increase of his own efficiency.

We have nothing historically new to offer, though the principle we are to mention is practically unknown or at least unutilized. It is the great, controlling principle of Forethought, the application of which is far wider than thought itself, extending to all the functions of the soul and even affecting bodily energy and health. The action of Forethought is based on the fact that there is more to ourselves than we are aware of. We are not ordinarily conscious of our past lives, for instance, yet a supreme crisis, such as falling from a height, may make a man's whole past in an instant flash before him in review. Under sudden stress a man may develop powers of leadership or resolution that nobody could have foreseen and that he himself cannot account for. Our selves as we know them are, so to speak, only the top soil of our entire natures. Every conscious personality is like a farm in an oil district. It is underlain by an unrealized wealth that may never be brought to light. Some accident may reveal the treasure, but if the owner suspects its existence he may bore for it. To show how this boring may be done is one of the purposes of the present paper. But let us first assure ourselves further of the existence of this hidden fund of energy.

If in the early fifties of the last century a vote had been taken on the two men in America who ten years later would stand head and shoulders above their countrymen in position and recognized ability, it is probable that not one single vote would have been cast for a slouchy Missouri farmer or a shabby Illinois lawyer, certainly not for the former. Grant and Lincoln themselves would not have expected a vote. Yet their powers existed then, unrealized by their owners, and only needing the proper stimulus to bring them out. That stimulus was responsibility; and, great as their achievements were under this stimulus, neither man appears to have reached his limit; each apparently had still a fund of reserve power to be expended on yet greater occasions had they arisen. This is not to say that all men have an equal fund of unrecognized ability. The experiences of the great struggle out of which Lincoln and Grant came supreme are alone sufficient to show how unequal are men's endowments. A McClellan proves himself an unsurpassed organizer, but no fighter; a Burnside displays marked ability in leading fifteen or twenty thousand men, but beyond this number he fails disastrously. Neither Foresight nor any other device can create ability. A gallon can will hold only a gallon, no matter how carefully its sides are rounded. But in the case of any given man no one knows his capacity until he has had a chance to show it. His nature may hold only a pint, or, as with the men who have mastered great occasions with still unexhausted powers, it may seem like the horn which the god Thor tried to drain but could not, for its base was connected with the ocean itself. Not every man can hope to be called to a responsibility that shall bring out his latent powers; most of us, if we are ever to get the call, will first have to show the ability.

How can a man tap the unknown resources, be they great or small, of his unconscious self? The method here to be suggested has at least the merit of great simplicity. I have called it Forethought; it might perhaps as exactly be called Forewilling. The point is that this unconscious part of a man's nature is not out of his control; he can send word to it and direct it, even if he has to do so by a kind of wireless telegraphy. However mysterious this may sound, there is nothing mystical about it, neither is it something vague and indefinite, but a practice to be applied to actual cases in hand. Suppose a business man is trying to get an important contract, and is to have an interview on the morrow that will decide the question. Let him, before he falls asleep at night, go over the whole ground in his mind, set before himself clearly the thing to be done with the particular difficulties to be met, and let him will himself to meet those difficulties, to carry his case. Let him will that at that time he shall be cheerful and vigorous; and, having given these instructions to his unconscious self--which has perhaps been waiting years for just this chance to do its part in the common endeavor--let him dismiss the whole matter from his conscious thought and go to sleep. On awaking in the morning let him review the matter and again dismiss it from his mind until the occasion arrives. If he will do this faithfully, he may not succeed the first time in carrying his point, but he will certainly feel a great increase of power, and ultimately, if he persists in making his unconscious self an active partner in his life, he will find himself far more successful than he could have been while depending on a single side of his nature. The same principle will hold, of course, in a myriad cases; if we have to-morrow, or even at a later date, to plead a cause, to make an after-dinner speech, to write a report or an article, to learn a lesson, to entertain guests, to handle a difficult case of discipline, we have only to take this counsel of our pillow, to reënforce it with our first morning thought, and we shall find ourselves making a new record of success.

It is obvious that a principle so effective cannot be limited to the active or the intellectual life. If a man has a fault or a besetting weakness or sin, here is a way out of it. How long will a bad habit stand such an assault upon itself as the evening and morning practice of Forethought? One will actually feel the new force within him, like a gyroscopic stabilizer, holding him to his predetermined course. There is literally a world of hope for mankind in the application of this principle on its moral side. But the business of our article is with other applications and we must dismiss this, the greatest of all, with a mere mention.

If anyone questions whether this principle is true or not, the best answer will be to bid him test it. Though it be true universally, some people may not easily apply it, and some may not have the patience to subject themselves to such a discipline. But most will have no difficulty, and many will succeed well enough to inspire themselves to continue. Some, indeed, will say, and with perfect truth, that there is nothing new in this doctrine, that they have long known and applied it. The principle has doubtless been known for thousands of years, but it has certainly not been widely taken up by our race, which is curiously external in its notions of self-education and self-control. One American writer, the late Charles Godfrey Leland, a man of the most varied powers and accomplishments, has written in advocacy of it and gives us as his own experience that after the age of seventy he was able to do a greater amount of literary work, and with less fatigue, than ever before simply by calling in the aid of his unconscious self. If one were to read the lives and writings of eminent men with this principle of Forethought in mind, one would find numberless instances of its more or less unconscious practice. The best scholar in my own class, for instance, applied it to his studies. Does anyone suppose that the old Puritan's sweetening of his mind with a little Calvin before he went to bed was without its effect on his devotion to Calvinism? Erasmus, the wittiest of scholars, writing nearly four hundred years ago to his special friend, Christian of Lubeck, recommends the practice both of the evening instruction and the morning review as something that he himself has followed from his childhood; and we cannot doubt that in it he reveals one of the secrets of his world-wide influence. He says to his youthful friend: "A little before you go to sleep read something choice and worth remembering, and think it over until you fall asleep. When you awake in the morning make yourself give an account of it." Though this is clearly an application of the principle to study and the strengthening of the memory, experiment will show that the potency of Forethought is not limited to the memory or the intellect in general, but applies to man's entire nature and equally to the least and the greatest of its concerns.

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