Way to Will-power

Way to Will-Power
By Henry Hazlitt

Contents

I--A Revelation
II--The Intellect as a Valet
III--The Price One Pays
IV--Old Bottles for the New Wine
V--Resolutions Made and Resolutions Kept
VI--Success and the Capital S
VII--The Scale of Values
VIII--Controlling One's Thoughts
IX--The Omnipresence of Habit
X--The Alteration of Habit
XI--Will and the Psychoanalysts
XII--Concentration
XIII--A Program of Work
XIV--The Daily Challenge
XV--Second and Third Winds
XVI--Moral Courage

Excerpt

YOU have seen the advertisements. The lion and the man are facing each other; the man upstanding, hands clenched, his look defiant and terrible; the lion crouching. Who will win? The man, without doubt. He has what the beast lacks, Will-Power.

And at the bottom of the page is the triangular clipping which you cut out and send for the book on how to acquire it.

Or perhaps the advertisement promises you a $10,000 a year position. Nothing less than $10,000 a year seems capable of attracting the present-day reader of twenty-cent magazines. And those positions, one learns, are reserved for the men of Will-Power (not forgetting the capitals).

The advertisements betray bizarre ideas about the will and will-power. Any one who has the remotest notion of psychology might be led from them to suspect the advertised course. But the advertisements reflect not alone the advertiser's ideas, but the ideas of the plain man. they are written to catch the plain man's eye, and they do catch his eye, else how account for their persistence, their enlargement, and their multiplication, notwithstanding the notorious expensiveness of advertising?

Now I am about to reveal a profound secret about the will. The revelation will cause a good deal of shock and disappointment and a bedlam of protest. However, I derive courage to meet the protest because I have an imposing body of psychologic opinion behind me. I have behind me most of the reputable pscyhologic opinion since Herbert Spencer. And so here it is:

The will does not exist.

I repeat it, lest you fancy there has been a misprint. There is no such thing as the will. Nor such a thing as will-power. These are merely convenient words.

Now when a man denies the existence of the will he is on dangerous ground. It is as if he were to deny the existence of the tomato. Yet I do...

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