It would be only fair and would save a good deal of time in business for some of us who like to try new ideas, if there were some way of telling these men--if some warning could be given to us not to bother with them--if these men with brilliantly non-porous minds, could be fitted up so that one could tell them at sight--by their heads looking the way they are--by their being bald--by their having brilliantly non-porous heads--just nice perfectly plain shiny knobs of not-thinking. One could tell them across a room. But the man with the most refreshingly eager mind toward new ideas, I know, the mind the most brilliantly open--which fairly glistens inside with eagerness, glistens outside, too. The only thing there is to go by, in telling a man with a non-porous mind, is to try gently--changing it, and see what happens. XXIV MACHINE-MINDEDNESS The various forms I have mentioned of the malady of being fooled by oneself, all practically boil down to one in the end--one cause which we have to recognize and avoid--automatism, the lack of conscious control of the mind--letting oneself be rolled under the little wheels in one's head. The main central cause operating with people when they are being fooled about themselves, is machine-mindedness. A man's body being a great storehouse of psycho-mechanical processes and habits makes his mind react automatically, and when some one calls him a fool or acts with him as if possibly he might have moments of being fooled about himself, the man's whole nature like a spring snaps his mind back into self-defense, and instead of being grateful and thoughtful as a rational or second-thought person always is, he lets his subconscious self take hold of him, tumtum him along into showing everybody how perfect he is. Everybody knows how it is. XXV NEW BRAIN TRACKS IN BUSINESS Speaking roughly, there are two kinds of men who are markedly successful in business--the men who give people what they want, and the men who make people want things they have thought they did not want before. Moving pictures, watermelons, pianolas, telephones, forks, flying machines and locomotives, appendicitis, Christianity and chewing gum, umbrellas and even babies--have all been brought to pass by convincing other human beings that they do not know what they want, by a process which is essentially courting, that is: by a combination of fighting and affection which arrests, holds and enthralls people into adding new selves to themselves. I confess to a certain partiality for men who get rich by making people different because I am an evolutionist and the chances are that anything you do to most people that makes them different, improves them.