Way to Will-Power

Way to Will-Power

By Henry Hazlitt Contents I--A Revelation

II--The Intellect as a Valet

III--The Price One Pays

IV--Old Bottles for the New Wine

V--Resolutions Made and Resolutions Kept

VI--Success and the Capital S

VII--The Scale of Values

VIII--Controlling One's Thoughts

IX--The Omnipresence of Habit

X--The Alteration of Habit

XI--Will and the Psychoanalysts

XII--Concentration

XIII--A Program of Work

XIV--The Daily Challenge

XV--Second and Third Winds

XVI--Moral Courage Excerpt YOU have seen the advertisements. The lion and the man are facing each other; the man upstanding, hands clenched, his look defiant and terrible; the lion crouching. Who will win? The man, without doubt. He has what the beast lacks, Will-Power. And at the bottom of the page is the triangular clipping which you cut out and send for the book on how to acquire it. Or perhaps the advertisement promises you a $10,000 a year position. Nothing less than $10,000 a year seems capable of attracting the present-day reader of twenty-cent magazines. And those positions, one learns, are reserved for the men of Will-Power (not forgetting the capitals). The advertisements betray bizarre ideas about the will and will-power. Any one who has the remotest notion of psychology might be led from them to suspect the advertised course. But the advertisements reflect not alone the advertiser's ideas, but the ideas of the plain man. they are written to catch the plain man's eye, and they do catch his eye, else how account for their persistence, their enlargement, and their multiplication, notwithstanding the notorious expensiveness of advertising? Now I am about to reveal a profound secret about the will. The revelation will cause a good deal of shock and disappointment and a bedlam of protest. However, I derive courage to meet the protest because I have an imposing body of psychologic opinion behind me. I have behind me most of the reputable pscyhologic opinion since Herbert Spencer. And so here it is: The will does not exist. I repeat it, lest you fancy there has been a misprint. There is no such thing as the will. Nor such a thing as will-power. These are merely convenient words. Now when a man denies the existence of the will he is on dangerous ground. It is as if he were to deny the existence of the tomato. Yet I do... ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Windham Press is committed to bringing the lost cultural heritage of ages past into the 21st century through high-quality reproductions of original, classic printed works at affordable prices. This book has been carefully crafted to utilize the original images of antique books rather than error-prone OCR text. This also preserves the work of the original typesetters of these classics, unknown craftsmen who laid out the text, often by hand, of each and every page you will read. Their subtle art involving judgment and interaction with the text is in many ways superior and more human than the mechanical methods utilized today, and gave each book a unique, hand-crafted feel in its text that connected the reader organically to the art of bindery and book-making. We think these benefits are worth the occasional imperfection resulting from the age of these books at the time of scanning, and their vintage feel provides a connection to the past that goes beyond the mere words of the text.