Читать книгу The Pelman System of Mind and Memory Training - Lessons I to XII - Анон - Страница 49

6. Interest power, the strong tendency propelling us in one specific direction, is a natural gift. Thus, one man may be a clerk but his whole soul is in painting, or he may have been fortunate enough to have his tendency recognised early, and by being sent to an art school, he avoided years of unhappiness at an office desk. Another man is a stockbroker, but the “House” is only a means to an end, and that end is literature—in which he puts his whole soul, and at which he works with his fullest energy, as in the case of the late E. C. Stedman, the American critic. Such instances could be multiplied by the score, but those we have quoted are sufficient to indicate more clearly the fact we are trying to emphasize: that human energy has its primary origin in a desire born in us for some kind of special work. We can see it in the boy—sometimes before he has left school. He is always buying or selling something; he wants to be an engineer, and is never happy unless he is hanging about the locomotive shops; he is perhaps a sailor—and builds ships by day and dreams of voyages by night. We are not speaking of the stages through which every boy passes with more or less enthusiasm, but of the deep down instinct to live for a certain kind of work. Doubtless some boys show no predilection for any particular occupation; they just fall in with parental suggestion—or with necessity; for unfortunately in many instances choice is out of the question, and more’s the pity.

Presumably, however, you have already arrived at years of responsibility, and if your daily duties are such as appeal strongly to you, there can be no doubt you are already provided with the first basis of human energy: you are engaged in work you like. If you study the biography of achievement, you will find this fact in the foreground of every success. Men of might in any calling have been men who loved their work, whatever its nature, and this deep interest is in the main responsible for excellence: indeed some authorities regard it as the first mark of genius.