XIV. The Daily Challenge

XIV

THE DAILY CHALLENGE

WILL-POWER in its highest sense, is associated with the Napoleons, the Robert Bruces, and the Luthers. We connect it either with great historic characters, men of action who have shaken the world, or with the noble and almost incredible sacrifices of the Christian martyrs.

Will-power in the heroic sense is not dead. If any one had ever thought so, he must have stopped believing so in 1914. Millions of men went forth to die for their faith and seven million dead on the battlefield are seven million crushing answers to the cynic. If men will show such will for their country, they will show even more for their religious faith. Lest we forget the sacrifices of a former age, let me quote a few extracts from Taine’s account, taken from Noailles, Fox, Neal and other sources:

In three years, under Mary, nearly three hundred persons, men, women, old and young, some all but children, allowed themselves to be burned alive rather than abjure. . . . “No one will be crowned,” said one of them, “but they who fight like men; and he who endures to the end shall be saved.” Doctor Rogers was burned first, in presence of his wife and ten children, one at the breast. He had not been told before hand, and was sleeping soundly. The wife of the keeper of Newgate woke him, and told him that he must burn that day. “Then,” said he, “I need not truss my points.” In the midst of the flames he did not seem to suffer. “His children stood by consoling him, in such a way that he looked as if they were conducting him to a merry marriage.” . . . Thomas Tomkins, a weaver of Shoreditch, being asked by Bishop Bonner if he could stand the fire well, bade him to try it. “Bonner took Tompkins by the fingers, and held his hand directly over the flame,” to terrify him. But “he never shrank, till the veins and the sinews burst, and the water (blood) did spirt in Mr. Harpsfield’s face.” Bishop Hooper was burned three times over in a small fire of green wood. There was too little wood and the wind turned aside the smoke. He cried out, “For God’s love, good people, let me have more fire.” His legs and thighs were roasted; one of his hands fell off before he expired; he endured this three-quarters of an hour; before him in a box was his pardon, on condition that he would retract.

Such examples with all their horror, are a mighty inspiration. They are examples of pure will. We do not know what part of the astounding achievements of Napoleon to assign to his will and what part to the intellect which was its servant. The fortitude of these martyrs was a fortitude made possible by the will alone.

But however inspiring may be such examples, we must guard against connecting our conception of will-power too closely with them. If we place our conception of will-power too high, we are in danger of failing to recognize it in its humbler forms. The opportunity seldom comes when the will is put to such a test, or anything remotely approaching such a test.

The writers of the magazine advertisements for the will-power courses conceive a man of will-power as a man who “gets on,” an E.H. Harriman or a J.P. Morgan, a dominant personality, who must assume leadership and power; who bends others to his will, or breaks them if they will not bend; who gets to his goal, if need be, over dead bodies, but who gets to his goal. This is an elevating conception, but the average man of talent is apt to find it a trifle unreal and beside the point after he has finished Lesson One that evening and gone to work the next day. He is resolved to mow down all opposition, but when he gets to the office he finds no opposition. Everybody says Good Morning, pleasantly, though a few wonder vaguely why he has set his jaw so tightly. If he is a bookkeeper, he goes to his ledger and finds the same columns of figures to add up, the same elusive discrepancies to straighten out; and you can’t use will-power on figures, because they wouldn’t understand it. You can only use will-power on persons. But if he is a sales clerk he cannot “dominate” the customers; he must be pleasant and tactful. He might tell the floorwalker what he really thought of him, and that might give satisfaction to the soul, but it would be of doubtful value in getting ahead in business. And even a bank or a railroad president meets day after day the same routine problems, many of which involve heavy responsibility, shrewd and mature judgment, and sometimes a good deal of thought, but hardly will-power.

The need for will-power thus seems a distant need, which arises perhaps one day in a hundred, or one in a thousand. In fact, some people seem to feel that there are no outlets for will-power in this workaday world, unless you go out of your way to create them. This appears to be the opinion of no less a thinker than William James, who writes in his Psychology:

Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day. That is, be systematically ascetic or heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason than that you would rather not do it, so that when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test. Asceticism of this sort is like the insurance which a man pays on his house and goods. The tax does him no good at the time and possibly never brings a return. But if the fire does come, his having paid it will be his salvation from ruin. So with the man who has daily inured himself to habits of concentration attention, energetic volition and self-denial in unnecessary things. He will stand like a tower when everything rocks around him and when his softer fellow-mortals are winnowed like chaff in the blast.

This is a noble passage, but I cannot accept James’s implied view that daily life gives so few opportunities for the real exercise of will. Our whole modern journey from the incubator to the crematorium is taken in laps of twenty-four hours each; each divided sharply from the other; each with its routine much like the other; but each with its own challenge. And our way of meeting that challenge from day to day is our way of meeting the whole challenge of life. Every day we are faced with a challenge, sometimes large, often small, but it is always there if we but face it. We do not have to create it. We do not have to do unnecessary things. And if we meet it, we pay a premium for which we receive a return and sometimes a handsome one, whether our house burn down or not.

One test of whether you have met this challenge or not is in the way you feel at the end of the day. If you have met it, you will be rewarded with a glow of soul. If you have evaded or postponed it, your lot will be a sense of guilt. It may be ever so slight, but it will always be there, an uneasiness, like dirt in a corner.

I have already mentioned the little daily duties that most of us put off or leave undone. But there are duties of a more serious sort, duties that require one not only to overcome laziness but to surmount moral fear. Principal among these are unpleasant interviews.

Let us take the very practical matter of asking for a raise. You think you are worth more money. You know you are. You have always known it. You have been waiting long enough for the boss to find it out, but the boss has proved either singularly stupid or singularly selfish, and you have determined either to enlighten him or to uplift him spiritually. Your mind is fully made up.

But though your mind was made up a week ago, you haven’t asked him yet because on one day you had a mountain of work that had to be shoveled out of the way, and on the next you had been out late the night before and didn’t feel equal to an interview, and on the next you didn’t look very neat and on the next you were waiting for some mistake to blow over and on the next the boss wasn’t in a good mood. In fact, you will tell yourself anything except that you didn’t have the courage.

And yet to put off such an interview, when you have fully determined that it must be had, is like putting off getting up in the morning, or putting off diving into cold water when you have gone down for a swim. The longer you stand on the diving board, the colder the water seems to get, the more terrifying becomes the height at which you are standing from it. There is a psychological theory that emotion follows action and not action emotion; that you do not run away from a bear because a fear seizes you, but that fear seizes you because you are running away. Whatever of truth there may be in this, it is certainly true that though you may hesitate; and the like applies to interviewing the boss for an increase.

Here again I do not suggest inflexibility. It is sometimes better to do a certain thing in the future; but if you really mean to do it at all, I insist upon fixing a definite time.

Another challenge which is apt to occur once or twice on almost any day is the necessity for pronouncing that most difficult of all words for the tongue—No. A friend who has drifted from one job to another, finally becomes a salesman for oil stock, and wants you to “invest” in it; another wants to borrow money; another wants you to go into partnership with him; another wants you to spend with him an evening that you have set aside for study; another offers you a drink after you have signed the pledge. When you are with a young lady, a professional beggar, whom you privately suspect to be a fraud, an idler and a parasite, perhaps better off than you are, asks you for just a little silver change.

The answer you would like to give in each case is No. Yet you fear to give offense; you fear to jeopardize your friendship; you fear a nasty retort; you fear having to defend your position; you fear embarrassment. Often by refusing without unkindness, but with firmness and candor and tact, you can reduce giving offense to a minimum, but it is idle to imagine that you can altogether avoid it. That part which is altogether unavoidable must be faced courageously. A man cannot respect himself if he grants a request or gives money to a beggar not because he believes the request is fair, or to relieve the beggar’s distress, but simply because he cannot look his supplicant in the eye and tell him No. And the necessity for saying No is a daily necessity, an unpleasant duty that you do not have to go out of your way to find.

To add to all this, as a daily exercise for will-power, there is always the infinitude of bad habits to be broken and of good habits to be formed. As a mere specific example, a cold shower every morning, if you are physically fitted for it, is an excellent will exercise, which more than pays for itself in its effects upon your health.