How important is memory? Let me put it this way – without memory there can be no intelligence. Think of it like this – if you lost your memory, you would have no intelligence, because permanent experience would be impossible. For instance, you would be taught how to dress yourself one morning, but the next morning when your clothes were brought to you they would have no meaning; you would stare at them blankly, for you would not remember having seen them before.
Importance of Sense Training
Most of our knowledge comes through sight and hearing, so these senses are important in mental growth. The better trained those senses are, the wider and the more discriminating will be the range of our experience. The untrained sense means little knowledge and of poor quality: the trained sense means wider knowledge of the best type. Therefore, we must train the eye to see and the ear to hear. Or find a way to compensate for these senses. The kind of mental life we are living now will decide the kind of mental life we will live in the years to come. The process is continuous.
Character and Intellect
To achieve any kind of permanent success there must be a balance between character and intellect. In other words, you have to develop your mind and ethics equally. The superior ability which mental training and experience have given such men is not prostituted in the service of illegal gains, because they have the balance between intellect and character. Most of the great tragedies of commercial and professional life come from the lack of such a balance. The desire for great fortune consumes a person, or the ambition to create a family name of national and international distinction overpowers him: the sense of all finer considerations is lost—there is a tremendous plunge, scruples are thrown to the winds, and the result is disaster.
What is Mental Ability?
39. Mental ability is defined by Pelmanism as “that emotional response to stimuli, which, joined to the powers of understanding, memory and work, enables a person to achieve results of unusual merit.”
There are three factors here: (a) energy, due to interest, which, in its turn is due to internal or external stimulus; (b) intelligence, i. e. brain power pure and simple; and (c) action, or will-power. Let us analyze these three. Energy comes first: other words sometimes used are inward urge, zeal, and enthusiasm. In measuring your mental ability, or any man’s or woman’s, you have to decide, first of all, what is the depth and power of feeling or emotion as evidenced by a purpose, an ambition—an inward urge toward some aim which is to be achieved.
Or, simply stated, how much do you care about having a better life?
It may be that the urge is to expand in business, to paint pictures, to relieve the lot of the oppressed, or to get into politics; or it may be simply to do well, or better, the work you are doing now. The chief point is: that mental ability is primarily emotional. All the other powers—those we call purely intellectual—may be said to form the machinery of mind; the inward urge is the steam that sets it going.
How do you know if you have to urge, zeal, or stimulus? By self-analysis. For instance, have you had, from the earliest years, a definite tendency toward some line of thought or action! Did you desire to follow your present calling? What is it you want to be or to do more than anything else in the world? Answers to these questions may be infinite in variety, but if you can say positively that you take a deep and lasting interest in some sphere of thinking, or of practical work, your ability will be in that direction.
The Mind’s Essential Power
The second element in mental ability is what refer to as “brains.” The power to create a vast business, or to solve a profound problem in mathematics, or to discover a great law like that of gravitation, is said to be the offspring of thought, but every success in thinking has two accompaniments: the inward urge, and hard work. We have known men who for sheer brains were difficult to match; but they had no enthusiasm for anything in particular, and they were born lazy. To get the success you want, all your functions must work together in complete harmony.
The third element is work, or action. It simply means the effort you make to carry out the ideas you have arrived at as the result of the enthusiasm which moves you. To feel and to think are two-thirds of the process: to will is the final component. Action completes desire.
Looking at the three constituents in their unity, we see that in spite of some complexity they are simple as to fundamentals. In popular phrase, mental ability has three constituents: (a) driving power, (b) a good engine, and (c) hard work and perseverance. We can see now why some clever men seem to be failures. They have splendid engines (i. e., brains) but no force, no perseverance, no power for hard work. Other men have less ability but with plenty of “pep,” and a will to conquer, they leave their cleverer colleagues far behind.
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