Master your mental energies, train them, concentrate them,—­thus only may you win riches with honor.

Thus broadly put, there is, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say there seems to be, nothing startlingly new about this proposition.

The world has always realized that singleness of purpose, concentration of effort, is essential to success.

But in the past the world has possessed no formula by which these qualities might be acquired.

Men have endeavored to create in themselves the necessary qualities for success, having no knowledge of the mental elements that went into their composition.

They have tried to run the mental engine knowing nothing of its mechanism.

[Sidenote:  Business Luck and “Blue-Sky” Theories]

Some few have been lucky, but the path has been strewn with a thousand failures to one that passed on to success.

There are some business men who look upon psychology as “blue-sky” theorizing or “new thought.”  There are others who have a hazy idea that it is a sort of unfathomable mystery intended to amuse long-haired scientists.  The truth is that every one of these same business men, if he is getting ahead, is unconsciously using psychological principles to the profit of his own business every day in the year.

[Sidenote:  Devices for Commercial Efficiency]

In the books that are to follow we shall show you the immense practical value of a truly scientific psychology.  You shall come into the psychological laboratory with us and work out rational, scientific and exact methods by which, without possibility of failure and with but reasonable effort, you can at any moment completely concentrate your mental powers.  You shall be instructed in simple devices for mastering scattered energies, repressing wasteful habits, banishing depressive moods and raising yourself to a far higher level of commercial efficiency.