Читать книгу The Pelman System of Mind and Memory Training - Lessons I to XII - Анон - Страница 45

1. When taking up this Course of Training you were no doubt conscious of certain defects in the working of your mental machinery: perhaps you could not focus your attention easily; or you had contracted the habit of forgetting; or you lacked self-confidence, or will power. To use the language of electricity, something had gone wrong with the powerhouse, and irregularities of working were the natural result.

In this lesson we shall first deal with the human power-house, describing it in detail and showing its relation to success—any kind of success—the success of the student and scholar just as much as that of the merchant. We shall take up no partisan standpoint as to those teachers who make money-getting and success synonymous terms; to us, success is the striving to achieve a great purpose, as well as actual achievement, and great purposes are always relative to the mind that conceives them. A grocer’s assistant who hopes and strives for a big shop of his own in ten years’ time is moved by a great purpose just as surely as an astronomer who is determined to solve the mystery of sun-spots, or a pathologist who wills to discover a cure for cancer. In each of these cases, the power-house is working under normal conditions; at times it may work abnormally, and a fatigue period follows; but, after recuperation, the full current is put on and life moves vigorously forward to its goal; the grocer’s assistant to a shop of his own; the astronomer to the mastery of the sun; and the pathologist to the solution of the cancer problem.

Your own aim in life may be modest or ambitious; it may be an ideal good you are seeking, or it may be purely worldly; but whatever it is—and we shall venture to offer some criticisms later for your guidance—you need energy and a trained mind to compass its achievement.