Reserves of Power - Warren Hilton

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Reserves of power stored up. Energy not in use has
been given a name by scientific men. They call it
potential energy. In this way, it is distinguished from kinetic
or circulating energy, by which is meant energy that is
at work. For example, a ton of coal in the

(00:20):
bin contains a certain amount of potential energy, which is
capable of being converted into kinetic energy by combustion. You
have a vast amount of potential energy over and above
what you actually use. You have formed the habit of
giving up trying a thing as soon as you have
spent the usual amount of effort on it, and this
without regard to whether or not you have accomplished anything.

(00:44):
While we all have the power of sustain mental activity,
not one in ten thousand of us holds to the
top pace. Worse still, even such mental energy as we
do consume, is dispersed and scattered over a multitude of
trees interest. Instead of being focused upon some one pursuing aim.

(01:05):
We intend to show you how you can lose yourself
in your work with an absorbing passion, and how you can,
at any time make special requisition upon your hidden stores
of potential energy and draw new supplies of power that
will sweep you on to your goal. More than anything else.
It is the ability to do this that lifts the

(01:28):
great men of the race above the common run of mortals.
It is this that distinguishes genius from mediocrity. The master
man transforms his vast stores of reserve or potential energy
into circulating or kinetic energy. His work glows with living fire.
Yet for every such man there are a multitude of others,

(01:50):
equally gifted in some respect, but wanting that mysterious open
sesame which would discover their hidden mental riches, arouse them
from their accustomed inferiority to their best selves, and transform
potentiality into accomplishment. So it comes about that most of
us are gems that shine but to illuminate the dark,

(02:12):
unfathomed caves of ocean, flowers born to blush unseen. Take
an illustration of the way in which this reserve or
potential energy is transformed into circulating or kinetic energy. Suppose
that you are a countryman and come to live in
a large city. The speed with which we do things

(02:33):
are habits of quick decision. The whirlwind of activities of
the busy man in town appall you. You cannot see how
we live through it. A day in the business district
fills you with terror. The tumult and danger make it
seem like a permanent earthquake. But settle down to work here,
and in a year you will have caught the pulse beat.

(02:55):
You will vibrate to the city's rhythm. And if only
you make good in your work, you will enjoy the
strain and hurry. You will keep pace with the best
of us, and you will get more out of yourself
in a day in the city than you ever did
in a week on the farm. This change in degree
of mental activity does not necessarily mean that you are

(03:17):
making more of a success of life. Your activities may
be ill directed, your new found powers may be misspent
and dissipated, but you are mentally more alert. Your mental
forces have been stimulated by the stirring environment, and mark
this particularly, A number of mental pictures will pass across

(03:39):
the screen of your consciousness today in the same time
that one mental image formally required. Now you have learned
that with every idea cataloged in memory, there is wrapped
up and stowed away an associated feeling tone and an
associated impulse to some particular muscular action. Assuming this you

(04:01):
must at once see that here is an explanation of
your new found energy, your quickened step, your new found
decisiveness of action, your more observant eye, your clear cut
speech instead of the former drawling utterance, your livelier manner,
your freshened enthusiasm and enjoyment of life. All of these

(04:23):
are but manifestations of a quickened intelligence. They are the
working out through the motor paths of mental impulses to
muscular action. And these impulses to muscular action come thronging
into consciousness, because the livelier environment brings about a more
rapid reproduction of memory pictures. And here comes a particularly

(04:47):
striking fact. One would naturally suppose that the more energy
a man consumed and the faster he lived, the more
quickly his vitality would be exhausted, and the shorter his
life would be. As a matter of fact, by the
divine beneficence of providence, your organism is so ordered as

(05:08):
to adapt itself within certain wide limits to the demands
made upon it. You may call into play all the
stored up resources of your being and still not stake
everything upon a single throw. For the supply of mental
energy is as inexhaustible as the reservoir of all past experience,

(05:29):
while the supply of physical energy involved in brain and
nerve activity is like the immortal liver of Prometheus, renewed
as fast as depleted. Two sets of facts that have
been established by elaborate scientific experiment will convince you of
the truth of these propositions. Professor Patrick of the State

(05:51):
University of Iowa conducted some of these experiments. He caused
three young men to remain awake for four successive days
and nights. They were then allowed to go to sleep,
the purpose of the experiment being to determine just how
much time nature required to recuperate from the long vigil.

(06:11):
They were allowed to sleep themselves out, and all woke
up thoroughly rested. Yet the one who slept the longest
slept only one third longer than his customary night's sleep.
You have doubtless had the same experience yourself many times.
It all goes to show that if we are awake
four times as long as usual, we do not make

(06:33):
up for it by sleeping four times as long but
four times as soundly as customary. The hard working mechanic
requires no more hours of sleep than the corner loafer,
the active man of affairs no more than the dawdler.
The time of tissue repair is about the same with

(06:53):
all men under all conditions. It is the rate of
repair that varies with the demand that has been put
upon the body. Again, look at the same subject from
the standpoint of food supply. On what you now eat
and drink. You have a certain average weight, Eat, digest,
and assimilate a larger quantity of food, and your weight

(07:15):
will increase. This increase will be greatest at the start,
and will gradually slow up until you shall have reached
the point beyond which you can gain no more. Given
the same hygienic conditions that you have been accustomed to,
you will maintain yourself at the increased weight on the
increased food supply. Now, all this involves clearly enough a

(07:38):
greatly increased rate of activity on the part of bodily
organs of assimilation and repair. It is a situation on
all fours with that of the countrymen whose rate of
brain activity has been stimulated by an increased mental demand.
No man will maintain that better. More nourishing and more

(07:59):
liberal food ran transformed into increased bodily tissue with a
consequent greater weight and greater muscle strength would result in
a loss of vitality or the shortening of a man's life.
Pigmies cannot become giants physically or intellectually. But as the
puny youth can, by systematic exercise, broaden his frame and

(08:23):
develop his muscle into at least a semblance of an athlete,
and can then go through his healthier appetite and his
faster rate of repair, maintain himself without effort at the
new standard, so can the mentally inert call forth their
reserves of energy and maintain a higher standard of activity
and fruitfulness. Few men live on the plane of their

(08:47):
highest efficiency. Few search the recesses of the well springs
of power. The lives of most of us are passed
among the shallows of the mine, without thought of the
possibilities that lurk within in the deeper pools. This accumulation
of potential subconscious reserve energy is a result of the

(09:07):
evolution of man and the growing complexity of his life.
No man could if he would respond to all the
impulses to muscular action aroused in him by sense impressions,
It would be still less possible for him to respond
to every impulse to muscular action awakened from the past,

(09:27):
with the remembered thought with which it is associated, desire, interest, attention,
and the selective will must pick and choose among these
multitudinous tendencies to action. Here, then, is another fact that
has immediate bearing upon your ability to carry out any
ambition you may have. Your every action is the net

(09:50):
result of selection among a number of impulses and inhibitory
forces or tendencies. As a general thing, consciousness is made
up of a number of conflicting ideas, each with its
associated feeling and its impulse to action. Just what you
do in any particular case depends upon what mental picture

(10:12):
is strongest, is most vivid in consciousness, and thus able
to overcome all contrary tendencies. As life becomes more and
more complex, the number and variety of our sensory experiences
increase correspondingly, and so it comes about that we have
untold millions of sensorary experiences, carrying with them the impulses

(10:37):
to muscular response, none of which, on account of the
multiplicity of conflicting ideas, is ever allowed to find release
and actually take form in muscular activity. The consequence is
that only an exceedingly small proportion of the mental energy
that is developed within us is ever actually displayed. The

(10:59):
rest is somehow and somewhere locked up behind the inhibitory threshold.
It is stored away in sub consciousness with the sensory
experiences of the past with which it is associated. Quoting
mister Waldo. P. Warren, much of the strength within men
is hidden, awaiting an occasion to reveal it. The head

(11:21):
of a department in a great manufacturing concern severed his
connection with the firm, his work falling upon a young
man of twenty five years. The young man rose to
the occasion and in a very short time was conceded
to be the stronger executive of the two. He had
been with the concern for several years and was regarded

(11:42):
as a bright fellow, but his marked success was a
surprise to all who knew him, even to himself. The
fact is, the young man had that ability all the
time and didn't know it, and his employers didn't know it.
He might have been doing greater things all along if
there had been the occasion to reveal his strength. Do

(12:03):
your employers and superior officers in business realize how much
of this hidden strength there is in your men. Perhaps
a word from you, giving certain men more scope, would
liberate that ability for the development of both your business
and your men. Do you workers know your own strength?
Are you working up to your capacity? Or are you

(12:27):
accepting the limits which the circumstances place about you.