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The Subconscious Mind in Business
By Robert Updegraff
One night I was traveling to Chicago in
company with a very successful Michigan manufacturer. We were
sitting in the smoking car discussing the six hour idea, and
finally he remarked in a burst of frankness, "This six hour
day you have been talking about would never work with me. When
I am at the home office I have to concentrate for long hours."
"But you are not at the home office all the time; you travel
a great deal, do you not?" I asked.
"Yes", he replied."Give me 24 hours on a train
and I can get a wonderful rest. In fact, that's where I get my
best ideas - on the train. Just a few months ago, on a trip west,
the whole scheme for a whole new bonus system for our sales force
came to me. I had been struggling with it for months without
success, but on this trip two fundamentals of compensation flashed
into my mind - ideas I had never thought or heard before.
I made an outline of the plan, and as soon as I got home I put
it into operation. It is working wonderfully. It cannot be due
solely to the new bonus system, but it is a fact that the first
quarter this system has been in operation, our sales have increased
25%, and we have never before shown such an increase in the history
of our business."
This man is a nervous type who must be exceedingly active when
he is active, and must relax utterly when he does relax, which
happens to be on the train. As he does a great deal of traveling,
his subconscious mind gets ample opportunity to function. Instead
of a six-hour day, he probably averages a four-day week, or a
three-week month at his office. Train travel is his technique
of employing his subconscious mind.
The philosophy of the six-hour day for executives is by no means
limited to day or hour units. It is a philosophy, not a system,
though to harness it every man must develop his own system of
balancing his load between his conscious and subconscious minds.
While I believe the six-hour day would serve most executives
best, it is undoubtedly true that it would not fit some men.
There are some who cannot work even a four-hour week or a three-week
month. They function best with long periods of relaxation - months
spent in travel or loafing. The unit matters not, but regularity
of relaxation does matter.
Relaxation is the key to the door of the subconscious
mind. A business acquaintance told me recently a wonderful "discovery"
he had made. His doctor had told him that he needed to relax
more. Not being able to get away from his office until the closing
hour, he had acquired the habit of dropping into an easy chair
in a corner of his office for 20 or 30 minutes several times
a day and picking up a book of fiction or biography or poetry
and forgetting all of his business concerns for the moment.
"I soon found," he told me, "that I had to keep
a little memo pad and a lead pencil on the table beside me because
so many ideas came popping into my mind while I read, that have
to be getting up every few minutes and going over to my desk
to make notes if this pad were not handy. I have never sat down
in that chair with any thought of developing an idea, but the
minute my mind gets relaxed, the ideas begin to develop of themselves."
This executive has merely stumbled onto his particular solution
of the problem of getting his subconscious mind geared into his
business. He discovered it by accident, but he now uses it by
design.
The wonderful thing about the subconscious mind is that it works
best when we are doing what we like best to do - when we are
following some hobby, whether it be whittling, painting pictures,
tinkering with an automobile, gardening, playing tennis, sailing
a boat, or whatnot.
A happy mind is a healthy mind, and a healthy mind, like
a healthy body, puts drive back into a man's activities. It was
Andrew Carnegie, that shrewd old Scot who knew how to conserve
his vitality as well as his money, who wrote "My young partners
do the work and I do the laughing, and I recommend to you that
there is little success where there is little laughing."
An editorial in Henry Ford's now defunct Dearborn Independent
read: "The father of photography was an army officer; and
of the electric motor, a bookbinder's clerk. The inventor of
the telegraph was a portrait painter; and of the jacquard loom,
a dressmaker. A farmer invented the typewriter; a poet, the sewing
machine; a cabinet maker, the cotton gin; and a coal miner, the
locomotive. The telephone was the after-school work of a teacher
of the deaf; the disc talking machine, the night work of a clothing
salesman; the wax cylinder phonograph, of a lawyer's clerk; the
typesetting machine, a grocery man. A physician made the first
pneumatic tire because his little son was an invalid. The story
of nearly every great inventor has been the result of someone
riding a hobby."
Coming down to contemporary man, C. M. Keys, president of a number
of concerns, including the Curtis Aircraft Corporation, in one
year recently spent five months fishing, golfing, and playing
tennis in Cuba, Florida, and Europe. Mr. Keys always leaves his
office at four o'clock and has not worked on Saturdays for five
years. His home is on Fifth Avenue, where he spends much time
rereading the classics and history.
Competing with him are many men who work eight and 10 hours a
day, day in and day out, and they wonder why they cannot catch
up. The simple reason is that Mr. Keys has taken his subconscious
mind into his business, whereas they have not. He does the biggest
part of his work "tirelessly."
Thanks to my friend Scott Hopkinson for helping make this lesson
real...
How can we use the lesson to uncover the wisdom that's already
inside of us?
Today's Exercise
Each day this week, close your eyes for 10 minutes and just be
aware of the thoughts that pass through. The more you can sit
back and notice these streams of thought as they pass through,
the clearer you will become in your life.
Be aware of your thoughts - Notice what you're thinking on a
regular basis. Know that you are the thinker of your thoughts,
not the thoughts themselves. As you practice this, you will begin
to notice shifts occurring in your thought patterns and your
reality.
Let your awareness unfold!
-- Paul Bauer
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