Note: The following is an excerpt from The Technique of Getting Things Done (1947) by Donald Laird.
The right reading — often accidental — wakes up slumberers and gives needed goals to those who still have none. The right book or article has started many on the main road and off the detours.
Enrich Weiss wanted to act in a circus, so this nine-year-old practiced in a shed behind his home in Appleton, Wisconsin until he could hang by his knees from a trapeze and pick needles from the floor with his eyelids. At twelve he ran away from home.
In a secondhand book store, when he was sixteen, he picked up a book on magic by Robert Houdin that was to change his life. He paid a dime for the book, started to read it after supper. He could not leave it. He thought about magic tricks while cutting neckties, while running in amateur races. He got more secondhand books on magic, worked up a few tricks of his own, and changed his name to Houdini.
He was a lifelong habitué of secondhand book stores, gathered more than 5,000 volumes on magic and spiritualism which are now in the Library of Congress.
In Abilene, Kansas, a tallish high-school boy from across the tracks wondered what to do when he graduated. He was tired of working in the creamery. He visited the weekly-newspaper office; famed editor J. W. Howe loaned him a book that had just come in. The book told the story of that amazing military leader, Hannibal. Young Dwight Eisenhower was fascinated. It was the turning point in his life. Reading the right book started “Ike” Eisenhower on the way to West Point Military Academy to become Allied Supreme Commander in history’s greatest war.
Robert E. Peary, a dreamy boy from Cresson, Pennsylvania, was inspired by Elisha Kane’s book Arctic Explorations (a dreary tome, if you ask me). Robert’s dreamy eyes narrowed; he could already see visions of the frozen Northlands. “I will help the world understand the mysteries of those places,” he decided.
That book gave him a goal. At thirty he made his first voyage of exploration to Greenland. At forty-seven he tried to reach the North Pole and failed. But he still had his goal, born of boyhood reading.
Heroically, he tried again and six years later did reach the Pole, the first person to capture this goal which men had been trying to reach for four hundred years. Scientific societies and governments the world over honored the boy who had gotten his start from reading, reading that gave him a wrought-iron determination.
Keep a supply of worthwhile books around where children can see them. Select books that cover a variety of subjects. Expose young people to the stimulation of reading. There is no telling where it may lead.
John Masefield ran away to sea at fourteen, was assistant bartender in New York for a while. At eighteen he read Chaucer’s The Parliament of Fowls. That decided him; he would be a poet. And in fifteen years his poetry had won everlasting fame. He became Poet Laureate.
A librarian, your boss, a book dealer, a teacher can help you pick the reading that will count.
Often we just stumble across the right reading; that’s why it is wise to read many things. I accidentally stumbled into psychology. I was halfway through college, majoring in chemistry, and an assistant in the physics laboratory. Then one Christmas vacation I started to read a four-volume manual on experimental psychology by E. B. Titchener. At the end of the vacation I knew I was changing my vocation. My chemistry professor was disgusted. But the halfhearted chemistry student became an enthusiastic psychology student.
Great Lives Remind Us
Do you have a hero? “Tell me whom you admire,” said Sainte-Beuve, “and I will tell you what you are.”
The lives of great men have aroused sleeping abilities in thousands of people who were once stumbling along. Reading such lives has given many an irresistible determination to get more things done.
Rudyard Kipling went to Bombay at seventeen wearing real whiskers. In the heat and sickness he toiled on a newspaper, apparently his lifework. Alone in the house one hot evening he picked up a book by Walter Besant, All in a Garden Fair. The book told the story of a young man who wanted to write and who did in spite of great obstacles.
That selfsame evening Kipling resolved that he, too, would write, whatever the obstacles. He started at last to save money. At twenty-four he returned to England with his savings, settled in a room over a sausage shop, and began the writing that was to make his name world-famous.
F. B. Morse was one of eleven children. He was ten when he read Plutarch’s famous Lives of Illustrious Men [another title for Parallel Lives], those stories of ancient Greek leaders and noble Romans. The book fired the young man; he, too, was going to accomplish something. Within a quarter-century he won recognition as a portrait painter, and a short time later invented the telegraph.
Plutarch’s Lives started him on the road to the American Hall of Fame.
Plutarch’s work has given many young men the stimulus to get things done. Napoleon carried a copy of it for twenty years. Oliver Hazard Perry, hero of the War of 1812, read and re-read Plutarch, starting in his youth. So did Robert Brookings, who established the famous Brookings Institute in Washington.
Benjamin Franklin attributed his zeal for getting things done to reading Essays to Do Good, by Cotton Mather. He was about sixteen, working in his brother’s print shop, when he seriously began to read to improve himself. He says in his autobiography:
I then proposed to my brother that if he would give me, weekly, half the money he paid for my board, I would board myself. He instantly agreed to it, and I presently found that I could save half what he paid me. This was an additional fund for buying books.
But I had another advantage in it. My brother and the rest going from the printing-house to their meals, I remained there alone, and, dispatching presently my light repast, had the rest of the time till their return for study.
Loyola was thirty and a common Spanish soldier when he was laid low with a leg wound. While convalescing he read The Lives of the Saints, which inspired him to become a religious worker. He founded the Jesuit order, was consecrated a saint by Pope Gregory XV.
“Study a great man,” said Louis Pasteur.
Great men who have done things, who are still doing things, can become our inspiring lifetime friends through their biographies and autobiographies. Get a hero — and get better acquainted with him by reading about him.
Some rich man who wanted to make the world hum could put more books about people who have done things within reach of the minds of the generation which is yet to do things.
Everyone can find new friends who count by reading books about people who count. Try reading a biography a month for several months.
