How to Become Rich, William Windsor [readera ebook reader txt] 📗

Musician.

Some men are wonderful in their ability to comprehend machinery, and in dexterity in the use of tools, the special sense represented by the organ of Constructiveness. They seem to be perfectly at home with a piece of new and complicated machinery in five minutes, while others will work on the same thing for hours, growing more and more bewildered, and exhibiting little or no mechanical genius whatever, literally making a botch of everything they undertake. When I was lecturing in Austin, Texas, in 1887, several gentlemen came to see me and asked if I would be willing to submit to a test. They said, “We have a man in this city who is unquestionably a genius in a certain direction, and we would like to call him out for a public examination and see if you can locate him.” I urged them to do so, at the same time remarking that that was the kind of a man I liked to get hold of. That night when I called for nominations, Mr. Geo. P. Assman was immediately elected. He came forward, and as I measured his head I said, “This man is a genius as a machinist. He has only  ordinary ability in other directions, but as a machinist he is a marvel. He has thoughts on machinery far beyond the comprehension of other men, and especially in the practical handling of complicated work.” Somebody in the audience sung out at this point “You’ve got him,” and the audience broke into applause. They then informed me that he was a most celebrated locksmith and machinist whose specialty was opening combination locks on valuable safes when the combination was lost by the owners, or when the works were injured by the blasts of burglars. On one occasion he had opened a safe in New Orleans in a few minutes when the trained locksmiths of the safe factory had worked for hours and failed. He was in the right business, was regarded as a genius, and was respected and admired by a whole section of the United States simply because he employed his best element of sense.

Some men have wonderful intellectual development and are specially gifted with the ability to acquire knowledge, but they may be most wonderfully deficient in that kind of executive force which makes use of it. They are largely developed in the frontal lobe of the brain where the intellectual organs reside, but are deficient in the regions of moral and physical energy; while others are largely endowed with ambition, physical and moral energy,—the parietal lobes are large and the head rises high in the crown, and they  are able to use all the knowledge they acquire. Their intellectual capacity may be limited, but they are able to put their knowledge to account, and what gems of information they possess are made to glitter by constant use. Men of the first class are always rated at less than their true value of intellectual ability; those of the second class at a greatly over-estimated premium. The first may be compared to capacious barns where knowledge is stored like hay to become musty because it is never used. I have seen hundreds of boys of this character, graduate with great honor in college (where the only criterion applied was the capacity to absorb knowledge as a sponge does water), only to be eclipsed in after years by the boys who graduated at the foot of the class, who were practically in disgrace on Commencement day. In our popular public school and collegiate system, there is too much stuffing of knowledge, and too little attention given to developing the practical sense of the student.

There are special senses which give physical and moral energy, ambition and industry. One man is splendidly equipped with knowledge and is thoroughly posted in regard to how a business should be conducted in all of its practical and theoretical details, but he is afflicted with inertia, he does not move. The unscientific observer says he is lazy, and that is true, but Phrenology analyzes even laziness and finds that it is caused by a lack of sense. Develop the organs of physical  and moral energy, which can be easily done, and the character of the man becomes transformed, and he becomes a cyclone of business push and executive ability. Another man may be gifted with energy, but deficient in knowledge and business tact, and he wastes his force in tremendous efforts at the accomplishment of small matters. He puts as much mental force into opening a can of oysters as would suffice to destroy a building. Figuratively speaking he loads a cannon to kill a mosquito, the result is a great waste of energy and vitality. By proper cultivation of knowledge, and adaptation to pursuits employing his splendid energies with large enterprise, a character of this description is brought into harmony with the eternal fitness of things.