[Sidenote:  The Man Who Lasts]

Do as we shall tell you in this Course and you will become a master man, the kind of man who “lasts,” the kind of man who works his imagination overtime, the kind of man who can strain his energies to the utmost and then, finding himself still a failure, can rise “like the glow of the sun” to do bolder and bigger things—­the kind of man who wins.

CHAPTER IV

HOW TO AVOID WASTES THAT DRAIN THE ENERGY OF SUCCESS

[Sidenote:  Speeding the Bullet Without Aiming]

We have shown you that you have within you the potentialities of success in the form of latent mental energy.  We have shown you that your ability to achieve depends upon your ability to utilize to the full your underground mental resources.

But success demands that you do more than merely use all your mental energies.  You must use them intelligently.

[Sidenote:  Why Most Men Fail]

Most men fail because they speed the bullet without aiming.  They fire at random, and so bag no game.

Your pent-up mental energy is the powder in the cartridge.  Its usefulness depends upon the man behind the gun.

To succeed in business you must intelligently control and direct (1) your own mental energies, (2) the mental energies of others.

The course of the average man through life is an aimless zigzag.  It has neither direction nor purpose.  It represents wasted energy capriciously expended.

Mental energy is like water:  it has a tendency to scatter.  It is diffusive.  It seeks release in a thousand different directions at the same time.

As a boy, first learning to write, you were unable to prevent the simultaneous squirming of tongue and legs, all ludicrously irrelevant to your purpose of writing.  So now, as a business man, unless you have learned the secret of self-mastery, you are unable to concentrate your efforts, your attention is easily distracted, you exhaust yourself in displays of passion, you are forever doing things during business hours that have no relation to your business, you are forever doing things in connection with your business that do not contribute to its progress, you expend just as much energy as the accomplished executive or the successful “hustler,” but you fritter it away in unprofitable activities.

[Sidenote:  The Successful Promoter]

To correct this is to gain mastery and power.

Concentrate your mental energies on one thing at a time.  Stop spreading them around.  The promoter may have a dozen big enterprises under way at once, but he takes them up one at a time.  He transfers his whole mind and thought from one to the next.  You cannot of course be eternally doing the same thing; but make no mistake about it, the only way to succeed at anything is to consciously control your mental energies.  You may throw them now into this attack, now into another; but you must always have a tight grip on yourself, or you cannot succeed.