Here you will learn Success Stories, Perseverance , Sweet Smell Of Success
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Others, whose sharpened
observation has been particularly occupied with form, after having pondered for
long upon the circular shape or the regular formation of certain objects,
provide us with a school of painting in which right angles and circles riot at
will in a manner that is most perplexing to the uninitiated. Which of us has not
been at some time or other a victim of the obsessions that haunt certain
specialists?
Dominated by the thought of the disease of which they have made a life study, to
the almost complete exclusion of every other thought, many doctors refuse to
recognize in their patients the symptoms of any other malady save that which
they are in the habit of treating.
Let us add that these doctors and artists are almost invariably perfectly
sincere in their delusions.
We at least are concerned only with such as are wholly sincere. The others, who
are all more or less frauds, have nothing akin in them to the obstinate.
They are, on the contrary, very much on the alert to change their mode of
operation at the moment when popular appreciation no longer sheds the light of
its favor upon it.
We are now considering only the case of those who are obstinate from conviction.
These people, believing that they were proving their perseverance, have by
degrees allowed themselves to be drawn to the edge of the declivity that leads
first to the fixed idea and later on to complete obsession.
This obsession should be all the more carefully shunned for the very reason that
it, in the same way as obstinacy, is the result of a misdirected will to
persevere.
It is a most dangerous foe to proper moral balance. At first sight it can quite
easily appear to us in the light of a virtue.
The man who has become its victim will be more than disposed to regard himself
as a person of great firmness of will, full of the most earnest determination in
the conduct of Ms affairs, and a devoted apostle of perseverance.
It is this mistake which, by preventing them from crushing this tendency as soon
as it makes its appearance, leads feeble-minded people first into the state of
obstinacy, then into the condition characterized by the fixed idea, and finally
into the complete obsession that they in their folly conceive to be a laudable
continuity of thought.
The remedy for this evil is the reasoned application of healthy perseverance.
Without irritating the victim of such obstinacy, and without making any attempt
to persuade him to instantly abandon the object of his devotion, his thoughts
may be directed toward the desire of realizing some aim which will be more or
less related to his dominant idea.
It will also be a good plan to break the chain of his obsession by suggesting to
him a thought, not altogether dissociated from it. He will probably not adopt
this thought, but some related idea, which, with a little patience, one can
gradually cause to take shape in his mind along the same lines as the obsession
that is preying upon him.
The victim of obstinacy will in this way allow himself to be led without
offering much resistance, as he has no feeling that he is being gradually weaned
away from his fixed idea.
This will be the time to substitute for those almost similar lines of thought
others of an associated nature, which will give rise in his mind to resolutions
that will insensibly tend to draw him away from his original obsession.
One should be careful to choose those projects whose achievement does not
involve too long a process of continuous effort.
This is not only one of the principal means of curing obsessions, but it is also
a sure way of preventing their recurrence.
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