Years ago, there was another young man who was bored with his dull job of standing at a lathe, turning out bolts in a factory. His first name was Sam. Sam wanted to quit, but he was afraid he couldn’t find another job. Since he had to do this dull work, Sam decided he would make it interesting. So he ran a race with the mechanic operating a machine beside him. One of them was to trim off the rough surfaces on his machine, and the other was to trim the bolts down to the proper diameter. They would switch machines occasionally and see who could turn out the most bolts. The foreman, impressed with Sam’s speed and accuracy, soon gave him a better job. That was the start of a whole series of promotions. Thirty years later, Sam -Samuel Vauclain-was president of the Baldwin Locomotive Works. But he might have remained a mechanic all his life if he had not resolved to make a dull job interesting.
H. V. Kaltenborn-the famous radio news analyst-once told me how he made a dull job interesting. When he was twenty-two years old, he worked his way across the Atlantic on a cattle boat, feeding and watering the steers. After making a bicycle tour of England, he arrived in Paris, hungry and broke. Pawning his camera for five dollars, he 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.
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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.