Do not aim to become a muscular specialist. Avoid defects and one-sided development. Eschew violent or spasmodic exertion. Observe a correct posture when you sit or stand. EXERCISES Walter Camp's Suggestion Exercises Walter Camp, the famous developer of athletes at Yale, offers some advice on "How to be fit" which is useful to almost every man. He says: Drink without eating and eat without drinking. Warm feet and a cool head need no physician. Dress coolly when you walk and warmly when you ride. Your nose, not your mouth, was given you to breathe through. Getting mad makes black marks on the health. You'll never get the gout from walking. Tennis up to the thirties but golf after forty. Two hours of outdoor exercise by the master never yet made him over-critical of the cook. Too many drinks at the nineteenth hole undo all the good of the other eighteen. The best way to use the Sunday supplement is to stick it under your vest while you walk an hour against the wind and then come home and read it. Many a man finds too late that his motor car has cost him more in health and legs than it has in tires and gasoline. The men who chase the golf ball don't have to pursue the doctor. Health Culture Chart The rules for health culture of the present chapter have been conveniently listed as standards for your daily observance. Test Chart 16 proves useful as a definite check upon each observance from day to day, and when summarized at the close of the week not only permits ready comparison with other weeks, but enables you to survey your habits of living fairly and accurately. In grading yourself, go over the chart at the close of each day: (1) credit yourself with a "r" in the proper space opposite each of the fourteen items you have conscientiously observed; (2) put a zero opposite the items violated or neglected; and (3) credit yourself with a "4," a "1⁄2," or a "34" opposite each item partially observed. The various credits when added indicate your total for the day. Fourteen credits represent a perfect score for the day, and 7 times 14, or 98, the correct observance of the health rules for a week. Since two credits should be awarded for general good behavior or the performance of something especially meritorious in health culture, the perfect score for the week totals 100 points. Would not two curves which show graphically both daily and weekly health credits steadily rising as time goes on represent about as solid an achievement in personal management as you could make? CHAPTER XVII POWER OF WILL Will-power is the tap root of efficiency. A Hard Drive Toward the Goal In pushing an enterprise to its full completion, the business man encounters a considerable amount of hard, grinding work. "Nearly every man who develops a new idea works it up to a point where it looks impossible," says Thomas A. Edison, "and then he gets discouraged. That's not the place to get discouraged, that's the place to get interested. Hard work and forever sticking to a thing till it's done, are the main things an inventor needs. "I can't recall a single problem in my life, of any sort," continued Mr. Edison, "that I ever started on that I didn't solve, or prove that I couldn't solve it. I never let up until I had done everything that I could think of, no matter how absurd it might seem as a means to the end I was after. Take the problem of the best material for phonograph records. We started out using wax. That was too soft. Then we tried every kind of wax that is made, and every possible mixture of wax with hardening substances. We invented new waxes. There was something objectionable about all of them. Then somebody said something about soap. So we tried every kind of soap. That worked better, but it wasn't what we wanted. I had seven men scouring India, China, Africa, everywhere, for new vegetable bases for new soaps. After five years we got what we wanted, and worked out the records that are in use today. They are made of soap too hard to wash with and unlike any other in use, but soap just the same." This incident illustrates very well Mr. Edison's remark that genius is not inspiration but perspiration, and his reasons also for the selection of persistence as the inventor's first essential. Men, once they have decided upon a course of action, must urge themselves forward with a certain pitilessness; they must possess driving power. The Business of Mind Building The struggle for business existence, in the last analysis, decides that those who substitute wishbone for backbone, either in themselves or in subordinates, shall be shunted into obscure places and their positions filled by persons of positive qualities. Men in business must stand for something, must champion it with emphasis. "We have to 'sell' every man with whom we come in contact," declares one of these positive contenders in the business field, E. St. Elmo Lewis, "whether it be our value as a man or the brand of merchandise we offer, or the value of the service of our corporation, or even our opinion of himself." In this process of reaching out from the control of self to the direction of others, mental domination is essential; the minds of these others must be impressed and success compelled. The projectors of the larger American enterprises and the ruling spirits within them today have brought to this task a certain ruggedness of personality, an imperious mold which brooks no opposition, a dynamic force which in the old days ruled over kingdoms and dukedoms and which in the men of tomorrow will spell success as heretofore. Achievement such as this is denied the man who flies all too readily the white flag of surrender, who constantly dreads and nervously prepares for things which never will occur; the nonentity who has capitulated to the devil of fear. Negative |