فصل 27

Part Seven - Six Ways to Prevent Fatigue And Worry and Keep Your Energy and Spirits High

Chapter 27 - How to Banish the Boredom That Produces Fatigue, Worry and Resentment

One of the chief causes of fatigue is boredom. To illustrate, let’s take the case of Alice, a stenographer who lives on your street. Alice came home one night utterly exhausted. She acted fatigued. She was fatigued. She had a headache. She had a backache. She was so exhausted she wanted to go to bed without waiting for dinner. Her mother pleaded. She sat down at the table. The telephone rang. The boy friend! An invitation to a dance! Her eyes sparkled. Her spirits soared. She rushed upstairs, put on her Alice, blue gown, and danced until three o’clock in the morning; and when she finally did get home, she was not the slightest bit exhausted. She was, in fact, so exhilarated she couldn’t fall asleep.

Was Alice really and honestly tired eight hours earlier, when she looked and acted exhausted? Sure she was. She was exhausted because she was bored with her work, perhaps bored with life. There are millions of Alices. You may be one of them.

It is a well, known fact that your emotional attitude usually has far more to do with producing fatigue than has physical exertion. A few years ago, Joseph E. Barmack, Ph.D., published in the Archives of Psychology a report of some of his experiments showing how boredom produces fatigue. Dr. Barmack put a group of students through a series of tests in which, he knew, they could have little interest. The result? The students felt tired and sleepy, complained of headaches and eyestrain, felt irritable. In some cases, even their stomachs were upset. Was it all imagination? No. Metabolism tests were taken of these students. These tests showed that the blood pressure of the body and the consumption of oxygen actually decrease when a person is bored, and that the whole metabolism picks up immediately as soon as he begins to feel interest and pleasure in his work!

We rarely get tired when we are doing something interesting and exciting. For example, I recently took a vacation in the Canadian Rockies up around Lake Louise. I spent several days trout fishing along Corral Creek, fighting my way through brush higher than my head, stumbling over logs, struggling through fallen timber, yet after eight hours of this, I was not exhausted. Why? Because I was excited, exhilarated. I had a sense of high achievement: six cut, throat trout. But suppose I had been bored by fishing, then how do you think I would have felt? I would have been worn out by such strenuous work at an altitude of seven thousand feet.

Even in such exhausting activities as mountain climbing, boredom may tire you far more than the strenuous work involved. For example, Mr. S. H. Kingman, president of the Farmers and Mechanics Savings Bank of Minneapolis, told me of an incident that is a perfect illustration of that statement. In July, 1943, the Canadian government asked the Canadian Alpine Club to furnish guides to train the members of the Prince of Wales Rangers in mountain climbing. Mr. Kingman was one of the guides chosen to train these soldiers. He told me how he and the other guides, men ranging from forty, two to fifty, nine years of age, took these young army men on long hikes across glaciers and snow fields and up a sheer cliff of forty feet, where they had to climb with ropes and tiny foot, holds and precarious hand, holds. They climbed Michael’s Peak, the Vice, President Peak, and other unnamed peaks in the Little Yoho Valley in the Canadian Rockies. After fifteen hours of mountain climbing, these young men, who were in the pink of condition (they had just finished a six, week course in tough Commando training), were utterly exhausted.

Was their fatigue caused by using muscles that had not been hardened by Commando training? Any man who had ever been through Commando training would hoot at such a ridiculous question! No, they were utterly exhausted because they were bored by mountain climbing. They were so tarred, that many of them fell asleep without waiting to eat. But the guides, men who were two and three times as old as the soldiers, were they tired? Yes, but not exhausted. The guides ate dinner and stayed up for hours, talking about the day’s experiences. They were not exhausted because they were interested When Dr. Edward Thorndike of Columbia was conducting experiments in fatigue, he kept young men awake for almost a week by keeping them constantly interested. After much investigation, Dr. Thorndike is reported to have said: “Boredom is the only real cause of diminution of work.”

If you are a mental worker, it is seldom the amount of work you do that makes you tired. You may be tired by the amount of work you do not do. For example, remember the day last week when you were constantly interrupted. No letters answered. Appointments broken. Trouble here and there. Everything went wrong that day. You accomplished nothing whatever, yet you went home exhausted and with a splitting head.

The next day everything clicked at the office. You accomplished forty times more than you did the previous day. Yet you went home fresh as a snowy, white gardenia. You have had that experience. So have I.

The lesson to be learned? Just this: our fatigue is often caused not by work, but by worry, frustration, and resentment.

While writing this chapter, I went to see a revival of Jerome Kern’s delightful musical comedy, Show Boat. Captain Andy, captain of the Cotton Blossom, says, in one of his philosophical interludes: “The lucky folks are the ones that get to do the things they enjoy doing.” Such folks are lucky because they have more energy, more happiness, less worry, and less fatigue. Where your interests are, there is your energy also. Walking ten blocks with a nagging wife can be more fatiguing than walking ten miles with an adoring sweetheart.

And so what? What can you do about it? Well, here is what one stenographer did about it, a stenographer working for an oil company in Tulsa, Oklahoma. For several days each month, she had one of the dullest jobs imaginable: filling out printed forms for oil leases, inserting figures and statistics. This task was so boring that she resolved, in self, defense, to make it interesting. How? She had a daily contest with herself She counted the number of forms she filled out each morning, and then tried to excel that record in the afternoon. She counted each day’s total and tried to better it the next day. Result? She was soon able to fill out more of these dull printed forms than any other stenographer in her division. And what did all this get her? Praise? No. Thanks? No. Promotion? No. Increased pay? No. But it did help to prevent the fatigue that is spawned by boredom. It did give her a mental stimulant. Because she had done her best to make a dull job interesting, she had more energy, more zest, and got far more happiness out of her leisure hours. I happen to know this story is true, because I married that girl.

Here is the story of another stenographer who found it paid to act as if her work were interesting. She used to fight her work. But no more. Her name is Miss Vallie G. Golden, and she lives at 473 South Kenilworth Avenue, Elmhurst, Illinois. Here is her story, as she wrote it to me:

“There are four stenographers in my office and each of us is assigned to take letters from several men. Once in a while we get jammed up in these assignments; and one day, when an assistant department head insisted that I do a long letter over, I started to rebel. I tried to point out to him that the letter could be corrected without being retyped and he retorted that if I didn’t do it over, he would find someone else who would! I was absolutely fuming! But as I started to retype this letter, it suddenly occurred to me that there were a lot of other people who would jump at the chance to do the work I was doing. Also, that I was being paid a salary to do just that work. I began to feel better. I suddenly made up my mind to do my work as if I actually enjoyed it, even though I despised it. Then I made this important discovery: if I do my work as if I really enjoy it, then I do enjoy it to some extent I also found I can work faster when I enjoy my work. So there is seldom any need now for me to work overtime. This new attitude of mine gained me the reputation of being a good worker. And when one of the department superintendents needed a private secretary, he asked for me for the job because, he said, I was willing to do extra work without being sulky! This matter of the power of a changed mental attitude,” wrote Miss Golden, “has been a tremendously important discovery to me. It has worked wonders!”

Without perhaps being conscious of it. Miss Vallie Golden was using the famous “as if” philosophy. William James counseled us to act “as if” we were brave, and we would be brave; and to act “as if” we were happy, and we would be happy, and so on.

Act “as if” you were interested in your job, and that bit of acting will tend to make your interest real. It will also tend to decrease your fatigue, your tensions, and your worries.

A few years ago, Harlan A. Howard made a decision that completely altered his life. He resolved to make a dull job interesting and he certainly had a dull one: washing plates, scrubbing counters, and dishing out ice, cream in the high, school lunch, room while the other boys were playing ball or kidding the girls. Harlan Howard despised his job, but since he had to stick to it, he resolved to study ice, cream, how it was made, what ingredients were used, why some ice, creams were better than others. He studied the chemistry of ice, cream, and became a whiz in the high, school chemistry course. He was so interested now in food chemistry that he entered the Massachusetts State College and majored in the field of “food technology”. When the New York Cocoa Exchange offered a hundred, dollar prize for the best paper on uses of cocoa and chocolate, a prize open to all college students, who do you suppose won it? That’s right. Harlan Howard.

When he found it difficult to get a job, he opened a private laboratory in the basement of his home at 750 North Pleasant Street, Amherst, Massachusetts. Shortly after that, a new law was passed. The bacteria in milk had to be counted. Harlan A. Howard was soon counting bacteria for the fourteen milk companies in Amherst and he had to hire two assistants.

Where will he be twenty, five years from now? Well, the men who are now running the business of food chemistry will be retired then, or dead; and their places will be taken by young lads who are now radiating initiative and enthusiasm. Twenty, five years from now, Harlan A. Howard will probably be one of the leaders in his profession, while some of his class, mates to whom he used to sell ice, cream over the counter will be sour, unemployed, cursing the government, and complaining that they never had a chance. Harlan A. Howard might never have had a chance, either, if he hadn’t resolved to make a dull job interesting.

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 memorized it. He would ring a door, bell, a housewife would answer, and Kaltenborn would begin repeating his memorized 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.