Читать книгу The Pelman System of Mind and Memory Training - Lessons I to XII - Анон - Страница 53

Can you do it?

“Yes,” you reply, “I want success.”

No doubt, but that is not an aim; it is a wish. An aim is a definite thing, a clear cut idea with hard outlines—not a general notion. You want success. But what kind of success? Money? Fame? Learning? Unless you know exactly what you want, you are hardly likely to have the energy to work for it: you can only work in a general way if your impelling idea is merely general. What you need is a particular aim: a concrete purpose like this: “I want to succeed in obtaining the post of Managing Director of the firm where I am at present an ordinary member of the staff.” We know it is a modern fashion to smile at a youth who takes himself and his career so seriously; but the smile changes faces eventually. “The ordinary member of the staff” may or may not reach the Managing Directorship, but his ambition is not different, psychologically, from that of the poet who seeks after “the light that never was on sea or land”; or of the litterateur who wills to embody his ideas in phrases that shew his mastery of words and style. The office man, the poet, and the prose writer are all ambitious; only the end is different. Of course, some critics would avow that poetry and high prose are nobler pursuits than mere worldly position; but to discuss the comparative values of occupations is no part of our work in these lessons. So long as an ambition is worthy, it does not matter much what other people think about it.