Part Two In A Nutshell 15 страница

put an ad. in the Paris edition of The New York Herald and got a job selling steropticon

machines. If you are forty years old, you may remember those old-fashioned

stereoscopes that we used to hold up before our eyes to look at two pictures exactly

alike. As we looked, a miracle happened. The two lenses in the stereoscope transformed

the two pictures into a single scene with the effect of a third dimension. We saw

distance. We got an astounding sense of perspective.

Well, as I was saying, Kaltenborn started out selling these machines from door to door in

Paris-and he couldn't speak French. But he earned five thousand dollars in commissions

the 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 the

qualities 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 The

Congressional Record to French housewives.

That experience gave him an intimate understanding of French life that later proved

invaluable 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. He

would ring a door-bell, a housewife would answer, and Kaltenborn would begin

repeating his memorised sales talk with an accent so terrible it was funny. He would

show the housewife his pictures, and when she asked a question, he would shrug his

shoulders and say: " An American... an American. " He would then take off his hat and

point to a copy of the sales talk in perfect French that he had pasted in the top of his

hat. 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. He

told me that there was only one quality that pulled him through: his determination to

make the job interesting. Every morning before he started out, he looked into the

mirror 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 time

you ring a door-bell that you are an actor before the footlights and that there's an

audience out there looking at you. After all, what you are doing is just as funny as

something 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 he

had 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 America

who are eager to succeed, he said: " Yes, go to bat with yourself every morning. We talk

a lot about the importance of physical exercise to wake us up out of the half-sleep in

which so many of us walk around. But we need, even more, some spiritual and mental

exercises 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, it

is the very essence of sound psychology. " Our life is what our thoughts make it. " Those

words are just as true today as they were eighteen centuries ago when Marcus Aurelius

first 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 of

courage and happiness, thoughts of power and peace. By talking to yourself about the

things you have to be grateful for, you can fill your mind with thoughts that soar and

sing.

By thinking the right thoughts, you can make any job less distasteful. Your boss wants

you to be interested in your job so that he will make more money. But let's forget about

what 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 you

spend about one half of your waking hours at your work, and if you don't find happiness

in your work, you may never find it anywhere. Keep reminding yourself that getting

interested in your job will take your mind off your worries, and, in the long run, will

probably bring promotion and increased pay. Even if it doesn't do that, it will reduce

fatigue to a minimum and help you enjoy your hours of leisure.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Chapter 28: How To Keep From Worrying About Insomnia

Do you worry when you can't sleep well? Then it may interest you to know that Samuel

Untermyer-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 and

insomnia. He couldn't seem to cure either, so he decided to do the next best thing-take

advantage of his wakefulness. Instead of tossing and turning and worrying himself into a

breakdown, he would get up and study. The result? He began ticking off honours in all of

his 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't

worry. " Nature, " he said, " will take care of me. " Nature did. In spite of the small amount

of sleep he was getting, his health kept up and he was able to work as hard as any of

the young lawyers of the New York Bar. He even worked harder, for he worked while

they slept!

At the age of twenty-one, Sam Untermyer was earning seventy-five thousand dollars a

year; and other young attorneys rushed to courtrooms to study his methods. In 1931, he

was 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 started

dictating letters. By the time most people were just starting work, his day's work would

be almost half done. He lived to the age of eighty-one, this man who had rarely had a

sound night's sleep; but if he had fretted and worried about his insomnia, he would

probably have wrecked his life.

We spend a third of our lives sleeping-yet nobody knows what sleep really is. We know it

is a habit and a state of rest in which nature knits up the ravelled sleeve of care, but we

don't know how many hours of sleep each individual requires. We don't even know if we

have to sleep at all!

Fantastic? Well, during the First World War, Paul Kern, a Hungarian soldier, was shot

through the frontal lobe of his brain. He recovered from the wound, but curiously

enough, couldn't fall asleep. No matter what the doctors did-and they tried all kinds of

sedatives and narcotics, even hypnotism- Paul Kern couldn't be put to sleep or even

made to feel drowsy.

The doctors said he wouldn't live long. But he fooled them. He got a job, and went on

living in the best of health for years. He would lie down and close his eyes and rest, but

he got no sleep whatever. His case was a medical mystery that upset many of our

beliefs about sleep.

Some people require far more sleep than others. Toscanini needs only five hours a night,

but Calvin Coolidge needed more than twice that much. Coolidge slept eleven hours out

of every twenty-four. In other words, Toscanini has been sleeping away approximately

one-fifth of his life, while Coolidge slept away almost half of his life.

Worrying about insomnia will hurt you far more than insomnia. For example, one of my

students-Ira Sandner, of 173 Overpeck Avenue, Ridgefield Park, New Jersey-was driven

nearly to suicide by chronic insomnia.

" I actually thought I was going insane, " Ira Sandner told me. " The trouble was, in the

beginning, that I was too sound a sleeper. I wouldn't wake up when the alarm clock

went off, and the result was that I was getting to work late in the morning. I worried

about it-and, in fact, my boss warned me that I would have to get to work on time. I

knew that if I kept on oversleeping, I would lose my job.

" I told my friends about it, and one of them suggested I concentrate hard on the alarm

clock before I went to sleep. That started the insomnia! The tick-tick-tick of that

blasted alarm clock became an obsession. It kept me awake, tossing, all night long!

When morning came, I was almost ill. I was ill from fatigue and worry. This kept on for

eight weeks. I can't put into words the tortures I suffered. I was convinced I was going

insane. Sometimes I paced the floor for hours at a time, and I honestly considered

jumping out of the window and ending the whole thing!

" At last I went to a doctor I had known all my life. He said: 'Ira, I can't help you. No one

can help you, because you have brought this thing on yourself. Go to bed at night, and if

you can't fall asleep, forget all about it. Just say to yourself: " I don't care a hang if I

don't go to sleep. It's all right with me if I lie awake till morning. " Keep your eyes closed

and say: " As long as I just lie still and don't worry about it, I'll be getting rest, anyway. " '

" I did that, " says Sandner, " and in two weeks' time I was dropping off to sleep. In less

than one month, I was sleeping eight hours, and my nerves were back to normal. "

It wasn't insomnia that was killing Ira Sandner; it was his worry about it.

Dr. Nathaniel Kleitman, professor at the University of Chicago, has done more research

work on sleep than has any other living man. He is the world's expert on sleep. He

declares that he has never known anyone to die from insomnia. To be sure, a man might

worry about insomnia until he lowered his vitality and was swept away by germs. But it

was the worry that did the damage, not the insomnia itself.

Dr. Kleitman also says that the people who worry about insomnia usually sleep far more

than they realise. The man who swears " I never slept a wink last night" may have slept

for hours without knowing it. For example, one of the most profound thinkers of the

nineteenth century, Herbert Spencer, was an old bachelor, lived in a boarding house,

and bored everyone with his talk about his insomnia. He even put " stoppings" in his ears

to keep out the noise and quiet his nerves. Sometimes he took opium to induce sleep.

One night he and Professor Sayce of Oxford shared the same room at a hotel. The next

morning Spencer declared he hadn't slept a wink all night. In reality, it was Professor

Sayce who hadn't slept a wink. He had been kept awake all night by Spencer's snoring.

The first requisite for a good night's sleep is a feeling of security. We need to feel that

some power greater than ourselves will take care of us until morning. Dr. Thomas

Hyslop, of the Great West Riding Asylum, stressed that point in an address before the

British Medical Association. He said: " One of the best sleep-producing agents which my

years of practice have revealed to me-is prayer. I say this purely as a medical man. The

exercise of prayer, in those who habitually exert it, must be regarded as the most

adequate and normal of all the pacifiers of the mind and calmers of the nerves. "

" Let God-and let go. "

Jeanette MacDonald told me that when she was depressed and worried and had

difficulty in going to sleep, she could always get " a feeling of security" by repeating

Psalm XXII: " The Lord is my Shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in

green pastures. He leadeth me beside the still waters. ... "

But if you are not religious, and have to do things the hard way, then learn to relax by

physical measures. Dr. David Harold Fink, who wrote Release from Nervous Tension, says

that the best way to do this is to talk to your body. According to Dr. Fink, words are the

key to all kinds of hypnosis; and when you consistently can't sleep, it is because you

have talked yourself into a case of insomnia. The way to undo this is to dehypnotise

yourself-and you can do it by saying to the muscles of your body: " Let go, let go-loosen

up and relax. " We already know that the mind and nerves can't relax while the muscles

are tense-so if we want to go to sleep, we start with the muscles. Dr. Fink recommends-

and it works out in practice-that we put a pillow under the knees to ease the tension on

the legs, and that we tuck small pillows under the arms for the very same reason. Then,

by telling the jaw to relax, the eyes, the arms, and the legs, we finally drop off to sleep

before we know what has hit us. I've tried it-I know. If you have trouble sleeping, get

hold of Dr. Fink's book, Release from Nervous Tension, which I have mentioned earlier It

is the only book I know of that is both lively reading and a cure for insomnia.

One of the best cures for insomnia is making yourself physically tired by gardening,

swimming, tennis, golf, skiing, or by just plain physically exhausting work. That is what

Theodore Dreiser did. When he was a struggling young author, he was worried about

insomnia, so he got a job working as a section hand on the New York Central Railway;

and after a day of driving spikes and shoveling gravel, he was so exhausted that he could

hardly stay awake long enough to eat.

If we get tired enough, nature will force us to sleep even while we are walking. To

illustrate, when I was thirteen years old, my father shipped a car-load of fat hogs to

Saint Joe, Missouri. Since he got two free railroad passes, he took me along with him.

Up until that time, I had never been in a town of more than four thousand. When I

landed in Saint Joe-a city of sixty thousand-I was agog with excitement. I saw

skyscrapers six storeys high and-wonder of wonders-I saw a street-car. I can close my

eyes now and still see and hear that street-car. After the most thrilling and exciting day

of my life, Father and I took a train back to Ravenwood, Missouri. Arriving there at two

o'clock in the morning, we had to walk four miles home to the farm. And here is the

point of the story: I was so exhausted that I slept and dreamed as I walked. I have often

slept while riding horseback. And I am alive to tell it!

When men are completely exhausted they sleep right through the thunder and horror

and danger of war. Dr. Foster Kennedy, the famous neurologist, tells me that during the

retreat of the Fifth British Army in 1918, he saw soldiers so exhausted that they fell on

the ground where they were and fell into a sleep as sound as a coma. They didn't even

wake up when he raised their eyelids with his fingers. And he says he noticed that

invariably the pupils of the eyes were rolled upward in the sockets. " After that, " says Dr.

Kennedy, " when I had trouble sleeping, I would practice rolling up my eyeballs into this

position, and I found that in a few seconds I would begin to yawn and feel sleepy. It was

an automatic reflex over which I had no control. "

No man ever committed suicide by refusing to sleep and no one ever will. Nature would

force a man to sleep in spite of all his will power. Nature will let us go without food or

water far longer than she will let us go without sleep.

Speaking of suicide reminds me of a case that Dr. Henry C. Link describes in his book,

The Rediscovery of Man. Dr. Link is vice-president of The Psychological Corporation and

he interviews many people who are worried and depressed. In his chapter " On

Overcoming Fears and Worries", he tells about a patient who wanted to commit suicide.

Dr. Link knew arguing would only make the matter worse, so he said to this man: " If you

are going to commit suicide anyway, you might at least do it in a heroic fashion. Run

around the block until you drop dead. "

He tried it, not once but several times, and each time felt better, in his mind if not in

his muscles. By the third night he had achieved what Dr. Link intended in the first place-

he was so physically tired (and physically relaxed) that he slept like a log. Later he

joined an athletic club and began to compete in competitive sports. Soon he was feeling

so good he wanted to live for ever!

So, to keep from worrying about insomnia, here are five rules:

1. If yon can't sleep, do what Samuel Untermyer did. Get up and work or read until you

do feel sleepy.

2. Remember that no one was ever killed by lack of sleep. Worrying about insomnia

usually causes far more damage than sleeplessness.

3. Try prayer-or repeat Psalm XXIII, as Jeanette MacDonald does.

4. Relax your body. Read the book " Release from Nervous Tension. "

5. Exercise. Get yourself so physically tired you can't stay awake.

~~~~

Part Seven In A Nutshell - Six Ways To Prevent Fatigue And Worry And Keep Your Energy

And Spirits High

RULE 1: Rest before you get tired. RULE 2: Learn to relax at your work.

RULE 3: If you are a housewife, protect your health and appearance by relaxing at home

RULE 4: Apply these four good working habits

a. Clear your desk of all papers except those relating to the immediate problem at

hand.

b. Do things in the order of their importance.

c. When you face a problem, solve it then and there if you have the facts necessary to

make a decision.

d. Learn to organise, deputise, and supervise.

RULE 5: To prevent worry and fatigue, put enthusiasm into your work.

RULE 6: Remember, no one was ever killed by lack of sleep. It is worrying about

insomnia that does the damage-not the insomnia

-----------------------------

Part Eight - How To Find The Kind Of Work In Which You May Be Happy And Successful

Chapter 29: The Major Decision Of Tour Life

(This chapter is addressed to young men and women who haven't yet found the work

they want to do. If you are in that category, reading this chapter may have a profound

effect upon the remainder of your life. )

If you are under eighteen, you will probably soon be called upon to make the two most

important decisions of your life- decisions that will profoundly alter all the days of your

years: decisions that may have far-reaching effects upon your happiness, your income,

your health; decisions that may make or break you.

What are these two tremendous decisions?

First: How are you going to make a living? Are you going to be a farmer, a mail carrier, a

chemist, a forest ranger, a stenographer, a horse dealer, a college professor, or are you

going to run a hamburger stand?

Second: Whom are you going to select to be the father or mother of your children?

Both of those great decisions are frequently gambles. " Every boy, " says Harry Emerson

Fosdick in his book, The Power to See It Through, " every boy is a gambler when he

chooses a vocation. He must stake his life on it. "

How can you reduce the gamble in selecting a vocation? Read on; we will tell you as

best we can. First, try, if possible, to find work that you enjoy. I once asked David M.

Goodrich, Chairman of the Board, B. F. Goodrich Company-tyre manufacturers-what he

considered the first requisite of success in business, and he replied: " Having a good time

at your work. If you enjoy what you are doing, " he said, " you may work long hours, but it

won't seem like work at all. It will seem like play. "

Edison was a good example of that. Edison-the unschooled newsboy who grew up to

transform the industrial life of America-Edison, the man who often ate and slept in his

laboratory and toiled there for eighteen hours a day. But it wasn't toil to him. " I never

did a day's work in my life, " he exclaimed. " It was all fun. "

No wonder he succeeded!

I once heard Charles Schwab say much the same thing. He said: " A man can succeed at

almost anything for which he has unlimited enthusiasm. "

But how can you have enthusiasm for a job when you haven't the foggiest idea of what

you want to do? " The greatest tragedy I know of, " said Mrs. Edna Kerr, who once hired

thousands of employees for the Dupont Company, and is now assistant director of

industrial relations for the American Home Products Company-" The greatest tragedy I

know of, " she told me, " is that so many young people never discover what they really

want to do. I think no one else is so much to be pitied as the person who gets nothing at

all out of his work but his pay. " Mrs. Kerr reports that even college graduates come to

her and say: " I have a B. A. degree from Dartmouth [or an M. A. from Cornell]. Have you

some kind of work I can do for your firm? " They don't know themselves what they are

able to do, or even what they would like to do. Is it any wonder that so many men and

women who start out in life with competent minds and rosy dreams end up at forty in

utter frustration and even with a nervous breakdown? In fact, finding the right

occupation is important even for your health. When Dr. Raymond Pearl, of Johns

Hopkins, made a study, together with some insurance companies, to discover the factors

that make for a long life, he placed " the right occupation" high on the list. He might

have said, with Thomas Carlyle: " Blessed is the man who has found his work. Let him ask

no other blessedness. "

I recently spent an evening with Paul W. Boynton, employment supervisor for the

Socony-Vacuum Oil Company. During the last twenty years he has interviewed more than

seventy-five thousand people looking for jobs, and he has written a book entitled 6

Ways to Get a Job. I asked him: " What is the greatest mistake young people make today

in looking for work? " " They don't know what they want to do, " he said. " It is perfectly

appalling to realise that a man will give more thought to buying a suit of clothes that

will wear out in a few years than he will give to choosing the career on which his whole

future depends-on which his whole future happiness and peace of mind are based! "

And so what? What can you do about it? You can take advantage of a new profession

called vocational guidance. It may help you-or harm you-depending on the ability and

character of the counselor you consult. This new profession isn't even within gunshot of

perfection yet. It hasn't even reached the Model T stage. But it has a great future. How

can you make use of this science? By finding out where, in your community, you can get

vocational tests and vocational advice.

Such advice can only take the form of suggestions. You have to make the decisions.

Remember that these counselors are far from infallible. They don't always agree with

one another. They sometimes make ridiculous mistakes. For example, a vocational-

guidance counselor advised one of my students to become a writer solely because she

had a large vocabulary. How absurd! It isn't as simple as that. Good writing is the kind

that transfers your thoughts and emotions to the reader- and to do that, you don't need

a large vocabulary, but you do need ideas, experience, convictions, examples and

excitement. The vocational counselor who advised this girl with a large vocabulary to

become an author succeeded in doing only one thing: he turned an erstwhile happy

stenographer into a frustrated, would-be novelist.

The point I am trying to make is that vocational-guidance experts, even as you and I,

are not infallible. Perhaps you had better consult several of them-and then interpret

their findings in the sunlight of common sense.

You may think it strange that I am including a chapter like this in a book devoted to

worry. But it isn't strange at all, when you understand how many of our worries, regrets,

and frustrations are spawned by work we despise. Ask your father about it-or your

neighbour or your boss. No less an intellectual giant than John Stuart Mill declared that

industrial misfits are " among the heaviest losses of society". Yes, and among the

unhappiest people on this earth are those same " industrial misfits" who hate their daily

work!

Do you know the kind of man who " cracked up" in the Army? The man who was

misplaced! I'm not talking about battle casualties, but about the men who cracked up in

ordinary service. Dr. William Menninger, one of our greatest living psychiatrists, was in

charge of the Army's neuro-psychiatric division during the war, and he says: " We learned

much in the Army as to the importance of selection and of placement, of putting the

right man in the right job. ... A conviction of the importance of the job at hand was