Analyzing Character: The New Science of Judging Men; Misfits in Business, the Home and Social LifeBlackford, Katherine M. H. (Katherine Melvina Huntsinger)
Science
Analyzing Character: The New Science of Judging Men; Misfits in Business, the Home and Social Life
Blackford, Katherine M. H. (Katherine Melvina Huntsinger)
Characters and characteristics; Success
Strange that we have not learned that any faculty possessed must be
exercised or the possessor surely falls into evil ways. Strange that we
have not seen that the man who explores the unknown world in mighty
pioneering work, who frees it from oppression, who carries on its
tremendous physical and industrial development, could never be satisfied
if imprisoned within the four walls of an office. Thus hampered and
confined, unless he finds expression for his speed mania, he grows
irritable, ill, nervous, depressed. He troops, by the thousand, into the
consulting rooms of the physician and surgeon. And always and always is
the same prescription given: "You must get away from your work; you must
get out into the open; you must get plenty of outdoor exercise."
Exercise, exercise, exercise, has become the slogan. Magazines are devoted
to it. Whole libraries of books are published showing the relationship
between exercise and health. Sanitariums multiply whose principal means of
cure are located in the gymnasium, in the garden, in the woods, at the
wood pile, and on the farm. Fortunes have been made in the manufacture of
the equipment for exercise: Indian clubs, dumb bells, and whole shiploads
of so-called sporting goods, the object of all of which is to enable the
active man to get some relief from the ache of his muscles or nerves due
to lack of exercise.
EXERCISE FOR EXERCISE'S SAKE DULL
But the man of muscle is, as we have said, frequently a man of brains. He
has common sense; he has a desire for accomplishment and achievement. To
such a man, the mere pulling of cords, or the swinging about of his arms
and legs, the bending of his back, just for the sake of exercise, seems a
trifle stupid.
Very few men of this type ever keep up exercise for exercise's sake for
any very long period of time. They read in some magazine about the
benefits of exercise. Perhaps, on account of some trouble, they go to
their physicians, and exercise is prescribed. So, with a great show of
resolution and not a little feeling of martyrdom, they buy a pair of
Indian clubs, or wall exercisers, or a weight machine, or, perhaps, merely
buy a book of "exercises without apparatus," and make up their minds to
take their exercises regularly every morning. At first they attack the
task with great enthusiasm--but it is still a task. Perhaps marked
improvement is shown. They feel much better. They push out their chests
and tell their friends how they get up, take a cold bath every morning,
and then take ten or fifteen or twenty minutes of rapid calisthenics. In a
righteous glow, they relate how it shakes them up and makes their blood
course through their veins; how they breathe deeply; how the process
clears out their heads; and how much better they feel They wind up: "You
ought to do it, too, old man; it would make you young again."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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