Here you will learn Strategies For Success, Path To Success
Page 22 of
50.
Enthusiasm is also the avowed enemy of coordination.
Once our sense of continuity is at fault, it is impossible to follow out a plan
to the end without committing blunders which will hold us back the more
hopelessly as we become more eager to complete our task.
Coordination of ideas and of actions is vitally necessary in order to
successfully accomplish any enterprise.
If every stage through which the work must be carried is not foreseen and
decided upon in advance, if our initial enthusiasm and later discouragement have
introduced an annoying disorder in the smoothness of our original plans, there
is a very grave probability that the whole affair will result in disastrous
failure, if it is not brought altogether to a standstill at once.
Now seriously, what can be expected of a piece of work undertaken in a fever of
enthusiasm and then laid aside for a long time?
"We must also never neglect the factor of opportunity. It plays a very
important part in every piece of work that is conducted with perseverance.
It is a good thing to carry out any piece of work intelligently, but still
better to carry it out at the proper moment.
Opportunity doubles the value of everything.
Now enthusiasm is the avowed enemy of opportunity in that it proceeds by fits
and starts.
For the enthusiast there is no such thing as moderation. His must either be the
excess of toil or the period of discouragement, in which he ceases altogether to
labor, declares himself to be interested in nothing, and professes to have no
taste for anything, until the moment when another access of ardor drives him
once more to take up his interrupted task.
But what happens then?
This work that has been taken up, abandoned, and taken up again, does not
present itself to him any more in its original form.
Moreover, the time that has, gone by has modified a thousand details. That which
might have passed as a novelty has now become public property, or else the
trend of the times has changed and the long-neglected piece of work, in order to
have any chances of achieving success, must be completely made over from top to
bottom.
The workman is conscious also of other influences.
His energy that has been changed in direction by his enthusiasms and then
brought to nothing by his discouragements, has become unequal and lacks
coordination.
But this is not the worst of the affair.
His soul has felt the mastery of the different mental states that have swept
over him. His first freshness of impression has gone to join his original ardor,
which has become cooled by the chill of discouragement.
His earliest conceptions, not being rendered fertile by the application of
perseverance, have deserted him. He has lost faith in himself, and his
accomplishments reflect his loss of faith.
If he would persevere at his task he must summon to his aid an energy a
hundredfold greater than that of which he originally stood in need.
It may happen that, under the spur of a virile resolution, he can recover once
more his first flush of mastery and skill, but he will rarely ever attain to the
fullness of his original hopes.
That is given only to the moderate, who, instead of starting by looking at
things in too enthusiastic a light, make a compact with reason, the parent of
all wisdom and of the restrained conviction that leads one to the perseverance
that bears fruit in accomplishment.
Our
featured links related to Strategies For Success, Path To Success
