The Technique of Getting Things Done: Rides For Directing Will 'Power From The Lives of The World's Leaders Dr. Donald A. Laird & Eleanor C. Laird

The Technique Of Getting Things Done:
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The Technique of
GETTING THINGS DONE

Books by DONALD A, LAIRD and ELEANOR C. LAIRD
Peactical Sales Psychou3gy
Sizing Up People
Practical Business Psychology
The Technique of Getting Things Done

The Technique of Personal Analysis
The Technique of Building Personal Leadership
The Technique of Handling People

The Psychology of Selecting Employees
Published by McGraw-Hill Book Company
The Strategy of Handling Children
How to Rest and Sleep Better

Published by Funk & Wagnalls Company
Increasing Personal Efficiency
Published by Harper <& Brothers
Human Relations in Banking
Published by American Bankers Association

The Technique of
getting things
DONE
Rides for directing
will 'ponoer from the lives of
the world?s leaders
by DR. DONALD A. LAIRD

and
ELEANOR C. LAIRD
McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc.
NEW TORK : LONDON

The Technique of
GETTING THINGS DONE
Cofyrighty 1947, by the McGraw-Hill Book Company, Ihc
All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof,

may not be reproduced in any form without
permission of the publisher.
ELEVENTH PRINTING
PUBLISHED BY THE MCGRAW HILL BOOK COMPANY, INC.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

To
PROF. HERMANN S. FICKE
Insfiring teacher
who has devoted his Ufe
to teaching others to
exfress themselves and to

affreciate lifers richness
Portions of tills book liave appeared as articles in magazines.
We are indebted to the editors of the following for permis-
sion to use the material in revised form:
AMERICAN WEEKLY
CORONET
HOUSEHOLD
ladies’ home JOURNAL
MAC lean’s
YOUR LIFE
Contents
CHAPTER PAGE
1. How producers are made 1
2. Producers in spite of everything 16
3. Be dissatisfied first 28
4. Detours that mislay initiative 46
5. Reading that helps get things done . . 60
6. How to get friends who help 86
7. How to plan to produce 95
8. How to say no to yourself 113
9. Doing the thing you hate most . . . . . 127

10. How to make yourself do it 137
11. How to decide trifles quickly 157
12. Getting a vigorous start 174
13. The best hours for getting more done .185
14. Working for quality 202
15. Doing two things at once . . . 211
1 6. The best place to work 232
17. Get someone else to do it 250
18. Work for more than money 262
19. Take on more work 283
20. How to make habit your friend . . . 292
21. Don’t accept your alibis 302
—
How producers are nmie
The world has always cried for men—and women—^who can

get things done, for people who have initiative, who are self-
starters, who see a task through to its finish.

It isn^t how much you know hut what you get done that the
world rewards and remembers.
More people are held back from success because they don’t
know how to get things done than for any other single reason.
A recent survey in 35 states revealed that 40 per cent of all
workers, two out of every five, must learn how to get things
done if they are to go ahead.
One out of ten is held back because he is not trusted. This
one may have the buck-passing habit, take unearned credit,
blame others, or be downright dishonest. Ten per cent of all
workers are held back for this reason.
One out of four is held back because he lacks the knack of

getting along with others. This one irritates when he should
win cooperation, criticizes when he should flatter, issour when
he should smile. Twenty-five per cent of all workers are held
back for social reasons.
But the big handicap to success, the survey showed, is not
lack of brains, not lack of character or willingness. It is weakness
I
in 'getting .things done.

I
.
The 40 per cent are the Almosts. They know what to do

and Almost do it on time. They Almost win promotions. They
Almost become leaders. They may miss by only a minute or an
I
2 The Technique of Getting Things Done
inch, but they do miss until they learn how to gain that minute
or inch for themselves.
There are astonishing differences in what different people
accomplish on the same job, using the same equipment and
materials. For instance:
One shoe factory worker will trim 1,090 pairs of heels in
a typical day, while another worker will trim only 765 pairs.
One laundry worker will iron a shirt in 279 seconds, while
another will require only 213, a whole minute less.
One coal miner will turn out twelve times as much coal as
another —an enormous difference, but not a unique one.
One silk weaver will produce twice as much silk as another.
The weaving machines do not determine the production, but
the people who tend them.
One taxi driver will consistently get 60 per cent more passen-
gers than another.
And so it human activities. Everywhere are fright-
goes in all
ful wastes of ability and opportunity.
In the present book the authors are interested in cutting
down these wastes. They wish to encourage you to use your
ability and opportunity. They hope to show you time-guaranteed
roads to accomplishment and set you on fire to make them your
own.
They want to help the Almosts become Achievers.
A Confession
The Almosts are not lazy. Often they are busier than an old
hen with a flock of ducklings. They putter around fussily all
day long and half the night, though they fail to accomplish
much.
They are held back by indecision, by lack of organization in
their work, by overattention to minor details.
How Producers Are Made 3
They are swirled around in circles, getting nowhere, because

they do not chart a straight course and then stick to it.
They work harder; they need to work more

don’t need to
effectively. They must learn how to make their work count.
I used to work hard, but in circles and to little good result.
As soon as an idea occurred to me I would start to work on it;
other things would be left unfinished. Then I would have
another bright idea and leave the first unfinished to work on
the new one.
Soon unfinished work so cluttered up my one desk that I had
to get a second desk and use a swivel chair between them to run
interference on myself. Much of my time was then spent trying
to remember in which drawer of which desk I had hidden the
work I had started a month before.
It was high-tension work, but it got me nowhere, like eating
soup with a fork. What I thought was “efficiency” was more
like mania. No wonder I failed to deliver the goods.
Labor-saving gadgets and appliances appealed to me, so I
acquired a lot of them to help me get things done. They' inter-

ested the small boy in me
and were heaps of fun. But I tinkered
with them, played with them, and altered them so much that
soon they were keeping me from producing. I was making work
instead of doing work.
I bought a second automobile to speed up my schedule. But
that was no more help than the second desk. I was still late.
I removed the pictures and insurance calendars from my
walls and put up a prettily framed “Do It Now!” sign, jmt like
a big businessman I had seen. But I did so many things “now”
that I was going off half-cocked most of the time. I’d look at
that sign and then rush to make a telephone call without plan-
nil^ the conversation, so would have to make additional calls
later to explain or justify the first.
I was wasting a lot of other people’s time as well as my own.

Blunders? Why, I made so many blunders in my high-speed
work that I had to spend hours each night untangling them.
Then one day I read what a five-foot-four-inch redheaded
Scotchman, Andrew Carnegie, had said to an office drone. “You
must be a poor worker to take ten hours to do a day’s work.”
And I was taking fifteen hours!
That challenged me to take an inventory of my work habits.
I found that my frantic speed was making me inaccurate. I
needed to plan ahead, to eliminate blind, headlong plunges, to
do the hard jobs first.
I needed to simplify.
Too many interesting but unessential side issues were dis-
tracting me from the important things.
I was putting off unpleasant tasks when I should have been
I doing them first.
I was taking too much time over minor decisions.

Unfinished work was worrying me like a politician about
to be turned out of office.
Soon was doing more, earning more, having more fun, and
I
not working a fraction so hard. Principles of accomplishment,

gleaned from industrial psychology and the work habits of men
who made themselves Achievers, raised my score in getting
things done.
After all, I wasn’t so badly off as that magnificent putterer,
Cervantes. He how to get things done until he
didn’t learn
was T. Barnum, the great showman, another
fifty-eight. P.
frantic worker, schemed and failed until he was sixty before he
finally found how to get things done and started his circus. The
artist Goya was still an Almost at past forty.
Sixty years passed before the original J. P. Morgan really

got going, but between sixty and seventy he made himself a
power in world finance. Abraham Lincoln did not become presi-
dential material until after the age of fifty. And, at the half-
century mark, Woodrow Wilson was just a good college pro-

fessor buried in academic halls. Aristotle did not get down to
work until he reached fifty; in the twelve years remaining to
him, he produced the work which has made his name perma-
nently famous.
One cannot be too old to get started right.
Always on Top of the Job

While many of us have to learn how to get things done
through hard knocks, a lucky few seem to have the knack of
producing more than they consume right from the start.
Take Sam Woodley, for instance. The American Association
for the Advancement of Science paid tribute to Woodley after
he had managed its office affairs for a quarter of a century. With-
out exception, the scientists admitted their dependence upon
him. “A whirlwind for getting things done,” one of them said.
Another said—a clue to Woodley’s skill in getting things

done —“He has an uncanny ability to segregate the essential
j
from the unessential.”
Sam Woodley went to work in his small Illinois town at
fourteen but took correspondence courses in bookkeeping and

evening courses in shorthand. After he was employed by the
A.A.A.S., he went to college nights and finally earned a Master
of Science degree.
Alexander Legge was another chap who seemed born with
the knack of getting things done and keeping on top of his job.
Perhaps his boyhood hardships gave him training in this. His
immigrant father was fleeced shortly after arriving in this
country; he was given counterfeit money in exchange for his
life savings. After a few difficult years in Wisconsin, the family

again hit finan cial zero, so moved to Nebraska for a fresh start.
Alexander was ten at the time, but he did his full boyish share
to help the family carve a living from the hard soil.

At twenty-five he decided to give up his new career as a cow-
boy; he figured he could make a better living in business in
Omaha. The Omaha branch of the McCormick reaper firm tried
him out at their worst job, collecting bad accounts from tough
customers.
A few years later McCormick himself began to hear about
the abilities of this rangy Scotchman. Legge was promoted to
the Chicago branch, ultimately became president of the Inter-
national Harvester Company.
“He was always on top of his job, always ran his work and
never permitted it to run him,” McCormick said. That was
why this erstwhile cow hand climbed steadily until he was at
McCormick himself.
the desk vacated by
Companies don’t select men; men select themselves, on the
basis of their past performance in getting things done.
From boyhood Benjamin Franklin had an eye on how to get
things done. At ten he was helping his father salt down the
family supply of meat. It took a lot of salt meat to feed that
family of sixteen children. It was a slippery, sloppy job. Frank-
lin’s sweaty shirt smelled like a fermented pineapple. But he
worked willingly enough, thinking ahead as he worked.
When the barrel was nearly filled, young Ben looked at his
father. “You could save yourself a lot of work later if you
would just say one blessing over the entire batch now, instead
of at each meal.”
His mother, who wanted Ben to be a minister, tried to appear
horrified at his work-saving suggestion.
Years later Franklin applied the same principle to keep him-
selfalways on top of his job. “Have you anything to do to-
I
morrow? Do it today! ”
I
Childhood Hardships
^Those who have to hustle during their youth seem to ac-

quire habits of effective work early and carry these productive
habits through their active lives.
Fuller Callaway was such a man. He was the fourteenth

child of a Georgia minister. The family was almost as large as
the small congregation. The younger children wore hand-me-
downs.
At thirteen young Fuller, seedy as a cucumber, started out
for himself. He rented a bit of land and hired a mule to grow

cotton. After a year of tough but effective work, he had a net
Not much for a year of backbreaking toil, but
profit of $36.45.
that year gave him practice in the work habits that were to
make him a cotton millionaire.
He went to a city store, got a job as porter, and at eighteen
borrowed money to start his own variety store. At thirty he
had his own chain of cotton mills, which he built into the largest
organization of its kind in the South.
His work habits were typified by his favorite quotation.
Late to bed,
Early to rise.
Work like ben

And economize.
It is a good thing most of us are inconvenienced by having

to make a living.
And it is unfortunate that many grow up without having the

good training of regular daily chores in childhood to give them
the habit of getting things done. Modern labor-saving con-
veniences and steadily rising standards of living have made
children’s chores vanish. Nothing has yet been discovered to
replace chores for developing hustle early in life.
One of my friends makes an exceptionally good living at a
miserable job. For years he helped break in engineering gradu-

ates for a large electrical manufacturer. Now he is giving first
aid in getting things done to idle sons of the self-made rich.

Sounds like easy work, but it is trying, and only an inborn
optimist could stick to it.
Two brothers who had built up a sizeable business in the

Middle West, for instance, came to realize that their four sons
put together could not generate enough gumption to carry on
the business that they were running quite effortlessly. So they
hired my friend to devote four full years teaching these sons,
then grown men with families, how to get things done.
Two of the sons wanted to learn and did. They are now
leading the old firm to greater glory.
But the other two sons couldn’t understand why a business
that furnished employment for the home town should inter-
fere with their fun. They still think it was unfair because they
were forced out of the firm} they speak to their successful
brothers only when absolutely necessary. They grumble around
like horses with empty stomachs. They are teaching their chil-
dren to hate their uncles. They coddle the children, and make
them imagine the world owes them a living without working
for it. The children look as if they had been born sneering.
The successful brothers, on the other hand, are following my
friend’s teachings and training their children to get things
done. These lucky boys and girls have regular chores and regu-
lar outside work for hourly wages. They take work as a matter
of course, as something they owe the world.
Peter F. Collier should have had my friend on his pay roll.

Collier came to New York from Ireland as a boy. He started
as a carpenter, ended as a millionaire publisher of the classics.
He was accepted by the then-haughty Knickerbocker society.
This jolly Irishman, humanly enough, did not want his only
son to suffer the youthful hardships that he himself had en-
dured. It had been “root hog, or die” for Peter F. For his son,
itwas travel and play, with expensive schools sandwiched in
between. The only training Robert J. had in getting things
done was from his college teachers, and in those days Harvard
professors were a bit lenient with sons of the rich.
The immigrant had started a little magazine to advertise his
book and he turned this over to his heir. Colliev^s Weekly
sets,
did well enough for a time, then strange things began to happen
to it. Its star writers left for other jobs. Many weeks there was
no money to meet the pay roll —^because young Rob had taken
all the cash for a luxurious vacation. When his decisions were
needed, he was nowhere to be found.
He had never learned the rudiments of work. His father
had given him everything except experience in getting things
done. Half a dozen years after his father’s death, Rob Collier
lost his magazine, and other hands, not softened by coddling,
carried it on to greater heights.

Rob Collier had a brilliant mind. He was charming, honest,
handsome. And he toew it. He wasn’t exactly lazy, for he
worked hard at polo. But he thought things did themselves.
Of him it was said, as of so many who have failed to. carry on
family reputations, “He had every talent except the talent of
making use of his talents.”
He was poisoned by his father’s success.
He did not produce more than he consumed.
Shirkers and sluggards produce less than they consume. So

do some capable people who have not trained themselves in
effective worldng methods. It is the producers who raise the
world’s standard of living. It is the producers who win the
big share of the world’s rewards.
The world needs producers. Our civilization is young and un-
finished. Much needs to be done in every field of endeavor.
The greatest railroad is yet to be operated.
The greatest automobile is still to be designed.
The greatest scientific discoveries are still to be made.
The greatest strides are yet to be made in the conquest of
illness.
The greatest of everything is still in the future.
We hope this book will stimulate you toward the future and
the work it will afford.
When Napoleon was made emperor he selected bees as the
symbol for the new France. Work. And to Duroc, his aide, he
said, “Work! Work! I have an insatiable appetite for it. Even
in my dreams I am at work.”
Yet there are those who will do anything to get ahead, except
work.
The World’s Most Famous Story of Initiative
Elbert Hubbard dashed off his famous A Message to Garcia

in an hour. It was started by a friendly after-supper discussion
with his son, Bert, about the Spanish-American War. Bert told
him the real hero was Lieutenant Rowan, the man who got
a message through despite terrific obstacles. And in the story
Fra Elbert immortalized Lieutenant Rowan and all others who
get things done despite hell and high water.
The little story was an instant success. It was scarcely in the
mails before a railroad president telegraphed for 100,000 extra
Other companies ordered so many that
copies for his employees.
the presses worked day and night but still cotild not supply the
demand.
How Producers Are Made II
Nearly a half-century after it was written, it is still being

widely issued* The Academy had special copies
U.' S. Naval
printed for midshipmen in the Second World War. It has teen
translated into twenty-five languages, and more than 85,000,000
copies have been sold.
Why all this lasting popularity?
Because A Message to Garda

carries a message the Almosts
need —the message of getting things done.
Here is that famous little story in full, reprinted by special
arrangement with the copyright owners.
A MESSAGE TO GARCIA
In all this Cuban business there is one man stands out on the horizon
of my memory like Mars at perihelion.
When war broke out between Spain and the United States, it was very
necessary to communicate quickly with the leader of the Insurgents. Garcia
was somewhere in the mountain fastnesses of Cuba —no one knew where.
No mail or telegraph message could reach him. The President must secure
his co-operation, and quickly.
What to do!
Some one said to the President, “There is a fellow by the name of

Rowan will find Garcia for you, if anybody can.”
Rowan was sent for and given a letter to be delivered to Garcia. How
the “fellow by the name of Rowan” took the letter, sealed it up in an
oilskin pouch, strapped it over his heart, in four days landed by night off
the coast of Cuba from an open boat, disappeared into the jungle, and in
three weeks came out on the other side of the Island, Having traversed a
hostile country on foot, and delivered his letter to Garcia — are things I
have no special desire now to tell in detail. The point that I wish to make
is this: McKinley gave Rowan a letter to be delivered to Garcia; Rowan
took the letter and did not ask, ^ Where is he at?” .
By the Eternal! there is a man whose form should be cast in deathless

bronze and the statue placed in every college of the land. It is not book-
learning young men need, nor instruction about this and that, but a stiffen-
ing of the vertebrae which will cause them to be loyal to a trust, to act
promptly, concentrate their energies: do the thing—‘'Carry a message to
Garcia.’’
General Garcia is dead now, but there are other Garcias, No one who
has endeavored to carry out an enterprise where many hands were needed
has not been well-nigh appalled at times by the imbecility of the average
man — the inability or unwillingness to concentrate on a thing and do it.
Slipshod assistance, foolish inattention, dowdy indifference, and half-

hearted work seem the rule; and no man succeeds, unless by hook or crook
or threat he forces or bribes other men to assist him; or, mayhap, God
in His goodness performs a miracle and sends him an Angel of Light for
an assistant.
You, reader, put this matter to a test. You are sitting now in your
office — six clerks are within call. Summon any one of them and make
this request, “Please look in the encyclopedia and jot down a brief mem-
orandum for me concerning the life of Correggio.”
Will the clerk quietly say, “Yes, sir!” and go do the task?
On your life he will not. He will look at you out of a fishy eye and
ask one or more of the following questions.
“Who was he?”
“Which encyclopedia?”
“Where is the encyclopedia?”
“Was 1 hired for that?”
“Don’t you mean Bismarck?”
“What’s the matter with Charlie doing it?”
“Ishedead?”
“Is there any hurry?”
“Shan’t I bring you the book and let you look it up yourself ? ”
“What do you want to know for?”
And I will lay you ten to one that after you have answered the ques-
tions and explained how to find the information and why you want it,
the clerk will go off and get one of the other clerks to help him try to
find Bismardc —and then come back and tell you there is no such man.
Of course I may lose my bet, but according to Law of Average I will not.
Now, if you are wise, you will not bother to explain to your “assistant”
that Correggio is indexed under the C's, not under the Z’s, but you will
smile very sweetly and say, “Never mind,” and go look it up yourself.
And this incapacity for independent action, this moral stupidity, this in-
firmiiy of the will, this unwillingness to catch hold and lift — these are
the things that put pure Socialism so far into the future. If men will not
act for themselves, what will they do when the benefit of their effort is
for all?
A first mate with a knotted club seems necessary j and the dread of get-
ting “the bounce” Saturday night holds many a worker to his place.
Ad-
vertise for a stenographer, and nine out of ten who apply can neither
spell nor punctuate — and do not think it necessary to.
Can such a one write a letter to Garcia?
“You see that bookkeeper,” said the foreman to me in a large factory.
“Yes. What about him?”

“Well, he’s a fine accountant, but if Fd send him up town on an er-
rand he might accomplish the errand all right, and, on the other hand,
he might stop at four saloons on the way and when he got to Main Street
forget what he had been sent for.”

Can such a man be entrusted to carry a message to Garcia?
We have recently been hearing much maudlin sympathy expressed for
the “downtrodden denizens of the sweatshop” and the “homeless wan-
derer searching for honest employment,” and with it ail often go many
hard words for men in power.
Nothing is said about the employer who grows old before his time in
a vain attempt to get frowsy ne’er-do-wells to do intelligent work or

about his long, patient striving after “help” that does nothing but loaf
when his back is turned. In every store and factory there is a constant
weeding-out process going on. The employer is constantly sending away

“help” that has shown its incapacity to further the interests of the busi-
ness, and other “help” is being taken on. No matter how good times are,
this sorting continues; only, if times are hard and work is scarce, the
sorting is done finer, but out and forever out the incompetent and un-
worthy go. It is the survival of the fittest. Self-interest prompts every
employer to keep his best men—those who can carry a message to Garcia.
! know one man of really' brilliant parts who has not the ability to
manage a business of his own and yet who is absolutely worthless to any-
one else, because he carries with him constantly the insane suspicion that
his employer is oppressing or intending to oppress him. He cannot give
orders, and he will not receive them. Should a message be given him to
take Garcia, his answer would probably be, “Take it yourself!’’
Tonight this man walks the streets looking for work, the wind whis-
tling through his threadbare coat. No one who knows him dare employ
him, for he is a regular firebrand of discontent. He is impervious to
reason, and the only thing that can impress him is the toe of a thick-
soled number 9 boot.
Of course I know that one so morally deformed is no less to be pitied
than a physical cripple; but in our pitying let us drop a tear, too, for
the employer who is striving to carry on a great enterprise, whose work-
ing hours are not limited by the whistle, and whose hair is fast turning
white through his struggle to hold in line dowdy indifference, slipshod
imbecility, and the heartless ingratitude that, but for his enterprise, would
be both hungry and homeless.
Have I put the matter too strongly? Possibly I have. But when all the
world has gone a-slumming I wish to speak a word of sympathy for the
man who succeeds — the man who, against great odds, has directed the
efforts of others and, having succeeded, finds there’s nothing in it, noth-
ing but bare board and clothes. I have carried a dinner pail and worked
for day’s wages, and I have also been an employer of labor, and I know
there is something to be said on both sides. There is no excellence, per se,
in poverty; rags are no recommendation; and all employers are not rapa-
cious and high-handed any more than all poor men are virtuous.
My heart goes out to the man who does his work when the boss is
away as well as when he is at home; and the man who, when given a
letter for Garcia, quietly takes the missive, without asking any idiotic
questions, and with no lurking intention of chucking it into the nearest
sewer or of doing aught else but deliver it, who never gets laid off, never
has to go on strike for higher wages. Civilization is one long, anxious
search for individuals of just this sort. Anything such a man asks will be
granted. He is wanted in every city, town, and village, in every office,
shop, store, and factory. The world cries out for him; he is needed and
needed badly — the man who can “carry a message to Garcia.”
Seest thou a man diligent in his business? He shall stand before

kings.
—PROVERBS 22:29
Progress is not an accident^ but a necessity.
—HERBERT SPENCER
A man is a worker. If he is not thaty then he is nothing.
— JOSEPH CONRAD
There are two kinds of men who never amount to much: Those
who cannot do what they are toldy and those who can do nothing
else.
—CYRUS H. K. CURTIS
2
Producers in spite of everything

So YOU THINK luck has been against you? Listen to these stories.
John Kepler was one of the world’s most successful men. He
produced far more than he consumed. Though he was always
poverty-ridden and died a pauper, he left the world infinitely
richer than he found it.
He did this in a quiet, plodding way, working against a life-
time of obstacles that would have made disgruntled failures of

other men. But frail John Kepler had something within him
thatmade him get things done.
Life gave him a bad start from the outset. He was born two
days after Christmas, two months early. That was the era when
a premature baby had scarcely a chance in a million. Kepler just
pulled through a sickly childhood to become a frail youth, a
semi-invalid adult.
Both his parents were peculiar} eventually both lost their
minds.
His wife, an older woman who had been married twice
first
before, was as nagging and quarrelsome as her relatives} they

all seemed bent on making Kepler’s life miserable.
His second wife was an old maid who pouted because her
husband was not paid his back wages and she could not buy the
trinkets for which she longed.
As if that were not enough, his employer, bachelor King
Rudolph of Bohemia, was nine-tenths lunatic. He wanted
Kepler to look at the stars as an astrologer and forecast the most
i6
Producers in Spite of Everything 17
favorable times for starting wars and hunting expeditions. Kep-

ler’s self-trained, mathematical mind told him astrology was
rubbish. He guessed there were real secrets in the stars and was
determined to wrest some of these secrets from them.
He humored the paranoid king and his wife, but not his own
weak eyes and frail body.
Kepler would sit up most of the night, holding his myopic
eyes so close to his sheets of figures that his eyebrows were
nearly singed in the smelly candle. Bundled up against his
chronic chills, the sickly man would fill sheet after sheet in the
flickering light, while his wife pouted from her neglected bed.
His blurred sight found more attractive visions in his tables
of the stars and planets. Kepler saw not only figures on his
pages but the keys to the universe.
Kepler was not strong, but he had determination. Week after
week, year after year, he worked on. The hours passed un-
noticed. He filled oceans of paper with his observations and
computations.
Smallpox struck his family, took his favorite son. Soon Kep-
ler was back beside his sputtering candle.
The plague came. Kepler wrapped his fraying cloak around

his shoulders and hxirried his family away—taking along stacks
of paper and a supply of greasy candles.
Neither pestilence nor chronic illness nor empty pockets kept
him from getting things done.
He stuck to his tasks, and, from the stacks of foolscap that
were covered with the figuring of years of nights, he prepared
accurate tables of 1,000 stars by which mariners were to navi-
gate safely for centuries.
He discovered the use of two convex lenses and measuring
wires that gave the basis for the modern astronomical telescope.
He discovered the three laws of motion of the heavenly
1 8 The Technique of Getting Things Done
planets, this half-invalid who became the Lawmaker of the
Heavens.
He laid the foundation for the new mathematics of calculus,
harassed as he was by annoyances and obstacles.
When I begin to feel sorry for myself, when I am inclined
to leave things unfinished because of obstacles or difficulty,
Kepler’s voice rises from the past to my mind. It whispers his
Virgillan motto, the motto that helped him get things done,
i
“Things by moving, and gain strength as they go.”
live
'
John Kepler was one of the world’s greatest successes,
Verily,
though he was buried at fifty-nine in threadbare clothes in Ratis-
bon’s cheapest coffin. Nothing stopped him from getting things
done.
Chopin
The thin, tubercular voice of Frederic Chopin also speaks

from the past. He, too, knew that it is not outward circum-
stances but the inner man which determines how much we may
accomplish.
At twenty, women felt sorry for him because he was
so under-
sized. He
was shattered by lung disease, the smell of tobacco
smoke turned his stomach, and his French father, a tobacco mer-
chant married to a Polish girl, was bankrupt.
Trouble was brewing in Poland. His friends rushed to arms,
but this pale, physical wreck was too sick to join them. He fled
to Vieima, taking a cup of Polish soil with him.
Then he went to Paris, spitting blood and drinking nothing
but milk. On the Island of Majorca, for his health, the health
authorities ordered him away and fumigated his house j Chopin
had to pay for the fumigation, too.
“My dear corpse,” George Sand addressed him.
And Chopin summed up his various doctors’ reports, “One
said I would die, the second said I was about to die, the third
said I was already dead.”
Newspapers several times carried false reports of his death
before he was forty.
Dying by inches and joking about it, yet working feverishly
to compose fifty-foxxr mazmkas, eleven polonaises, and seven-
teen Polish songs, Chopin perpetuated his fame and nourished
the spirit of Polish nationalism. Fantasies, waltzes, preludes,
and ballads flowed from this pale young man as he struggled
against time and watched his life ebb away.
He was far from his native land, yet his nationalistic compo-
sitions helped to unite and glorify the Polish spirit. And, at
forty, the goblet of Polish soil was sprinkled on his casket. He

had forced himself, against handicaps, to get things done,
making his genius the greater.
Schiller
Another Frederic —Schiller, the poet— ^lost his health at thirty
and during his remaining fifteen years jam packed his life with
more Intellectual achievement than any other man of his time.
Weak, in pain, one lung adhering to his chest wall, no more
shoulders than a banana, he worked fourteen or more hours a
day.
Has constant companions were his wife, Charlotte, and suf-
fering. Yet he wrote not merely reams of poetry but reams of
happy poetry. No one who reads his “Hymn to Joy” can im-
agine that It was written by a man in agony. The agony was
of his body, not of his spirit.
He stayed up late nights to do his writing, stealing from his
sleep because well-wishing friends and admirers interrupted him

during the day. This made his health worse, but he was de-
termined to get things done regardless of the consequences.
20 The Technique of CJetting Things Done
The Sage of Chelsea
Thomas Carlyle, like Schiller, worked against physical suf-

feringj unlike the poet, his work was filled with almost un-
paralleled bitterness. Carlyle scolded and bickered with his
wife. His breath drew flies. He had a picklish disposition and
point of view but was heroic in the way he got things done
against chronic ill His habitual fault-
health and indigestion.
finding may have been a cause of his ill health. But give the
Sage of Chelsea full credit for the more than twenty large
octavo-sized volumes he produced.
He produced more than he consumed, though we may not
like the bitter spirit which permeated his labors. Perhaps his
sense of humor was upside down.
“H.M.S. Pinafore”
The lilting music of “Pinafore” must have been written by

a happy, carefree manj or so it would seem.
It was written by Sir Arthur Sullivan while he was in torment
from kidney stones. liis pain, day and night, did not keep him
from getting things done. He made the pain more endurable
by creating frolicsome music, not a dirge.
The Archbishop of Friendly Satire
Alexander Pope was a gnome of a hunchback, so crippled he

had to be laced in stiff canvas to stand up and had to be helped
in and out of bed. His teeth were like a decayed waterfront
piling, his eyes like pink ping-pong balls.
He laid out a plan of work when he was only twelve and

followed the plan during the balance of his life, drinking
gallons of coffee daily to relieve the pressure of his constant

headaches.
Repulsive to the eye, Pope charmed thousands by his elfin
work and became the unofficial Archbishop of Friendly Satire.
The constant gnawing and grating inside his head did not keep
him from getting things done—and he did pleasant things.
Samuel Gridley Howe, like Pope, had headaches which
completely incapacitated him at times. In addition, he suffered
recurrent attacks of fever, which he had contracted while taking
part in the War for Greek Independence. Knocked out at un-
expected times by this fever and by his migraine headaches, Dr.
Howe, nevertheless, managed to make himself the world’s
foremost educator and trainer of the deaf and blind as well as
reformer in the care of the insane.

Dwight Morrow, Julius Max Muller, Hendrik
Caesar,
Willem van Loon, William and William of Orange are
Pitt,
others who endured the excruciating agony of migraine head-

aches yet produced more than they consumed. Charles Darwin
had this handicap, could work only a half day at a time most of
his life, but his “Origin of Species” revolutionized biological
sdence. Gustav Mahler, another victim, conducted symphony
orchestras while deathly pale and from
biting his lips to keep
screaming at the pain.

Metchnikoff, who discovered the phagocytes in human blood,
worked against recurrent attacks of headaches. Timid James
Watt, inventor of the steam engine, was kept in bed for days
at a time by the same malady.
Sir Walter Scott, too, was headachy through life. The head-
aches started in his early manhood, were ever present to
plague him. Yet this pug-nosed lawyer—who had no sense of
—
smell made himself get up at five mornings and start his
work. He answered his letters the same day they were re-
ceived. Added was a crippled right leg, the
to his headaches
result of infantile paralysis before he was two years old.
Despite these obstacles he got a great thrill from just being
alive —^and producing. He swore only four times in his life.
Nobel and Dorset

Alfred Nobel was sent to a sanitarium at twenty, where his
rheumatic heart was relieved but not cured. It is an irony of
fate that the man who invented ways of making nitroglycerin
safe to handle had to use it for years as a drug to steady his ailing
heart.
Despite his sickly life, this self-educated man got many
thin^ done, including 355 patented inventions.
Marion Dorset had rheumatics, too ^and $600 from — his
father’s estate. Dorset’s rheumatics hit the muscles of his legs

and back. Yet for months he limped painfully through the hog-
country wallows and barnyards. His muscles tingling with
pain, he wrestled with young pigs and big hogs, extracting blood
samples and trying experimental injections.
Those were the days when farmland hillsides were dotted

with fires like Indian signals—pyres of hogs that had been killed
by the dread cholera. Suddenly a pig would stagger, turn red,
then purple, and die, all within a couple hours. One out of
every eight hogs was struck with the disease.
The remedy the government recommended was useless. Yet
here was an appalling loss; struggling farmers were wiped out
in a few days. Dorset worked for a cure and discovered one
indirectly. Shrunk to a mere five feet four inches by the tight-
ening of his rheumatic muscles, he worked on, hope in his
brown eyes, determination in his soul. This crippled invalid

eventually found the serum that immunizes against hog cholera.
H
IF THE SICKLY AND FEEBLE
CAN GET SO MUCH DONE,

WHAT CAN LIMIT THE
HEALTHY PERSON EXCEPT
HIMSELF?
Hog cholera
was conquered by a man who would not let his
handicaps keep him from getting things done.
W ITHERING—^LaENNEC— oOKE
Many hviman plagues have also been lessened by men who

got things done despite the handicaps of personal weakness and
ill health.
William Withering, an Englishman who studied botany be-
cause fresh air and sunshine helped his tuberculosis, discovered
digitalis, the heart remedy, said to be the most valuable drug
discovered since quinine. As his consumption advanced, another

scientist coined the poor pun, “The flower of phyadans is
indeed Withering.”
Rene Laennec’s mother was a consumptive, and from child-
hood so was Rene. Later he developed chronic asthnaa and
breathed like a squeaky hinge. But the sawed-off Frenchnaan
fought against his frail body, took medical courses, became the
leading pathologist of his ^y. He invented the indispensable
—
stethoscope which, through its snakelike listening tubes, gives
physicians inside information about your body.
Robert Hooke, too frail to study for the ministry as his pai-
ents wished, educated himself in science. A hiinchback with an
ashen face and teeth like yellow icicles, he got things done, made
half the scientific discoveries of his time. He invented the
balance spring that is on your watch.
Tuberculosis
Dread consumption, once one of mankind’s most fatal dis-
eases, has given many determined spirits an opportunity to get

things done.
Cecil Rhodes left the humid British Isles as a young man to
get the benefits of South Africa’s dry air for his infected lungs.
There his work in the open laid the foundation for his develop-
ment of the world’s richest diamond and gold mines.
Eugene O’Neill was flat on his back in bed, fighting tubercu-
losis, when he wrote his first play.
“Treasure Island,” “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” “Kid-

napped,” and most of Robert Louis Stevenson’s charming
stories were written, a few hours at a time, while he was pain-
fully wasting away. Everything about him drooped except his
spirit. An attack of diphtheria speeded up his tuberculosis, but
he continued getting things done.
Nina Wilcox Putnam, at twenty-five, had been given two
years to live. She spent the winter fourteen hours a day—
bundled up on the roof of an apartment in the soot of New
York City, smoke playing peekaboo with her features. She wore
woolen mittens over her gloves and, without removing them,
wrote her first novel, “In Search of Arcady.” The novel was
successful enough^ it solved her financial problems temporarily^

and her cure was complete. Most successful was her proof that
she could get things done.
Other Thoroughbreds
That picturesque leader of American lawyers, Rufus Choate,
with his mackerel-like complexion, was ill most of his life with
symptoms which were not understood in his time but which
were probably due to Bright^s disease. The strongest thing about
him was his heavy watch chain 5 it was strong enough to hold
a bull.
His friends, noting his weakened condition, urged him to
take a vacation to rebuild his constitution. ^^The constitution was
destroyed long ago,’’ Choate responded, am now living under
the bylaws.”
Francis Parkman, the Boston Brahmin, was born to wealth
and could have lived the life of a sick man about town. But he
made himself an outstanding historian of early America. For
forty years he worked, in a darkened room, on his bed or in a
wheel chair, so threatened with blindness that others had to read
to him.
Insomnia and ill health plagued Elizabeth Phelps, yet in
her small college town she wrote a book a year for thirty years.
Twenty editions of her first book were sold the first year, but
neither this early triumph nor her chronic invalidism kept her
from doing things for a third of a century more.
Marcel Proust’s father was Health Commissioner of Paris,
but the son was about the unhealthiest citizen in the Republic
Asthma plagued him from childhood, made every breath an
effort. His last six years were spent in bed, in a cork-lined room
protected from draughts, lighted by a glaring bulb. Drinking

tank cars of coffee, Proust scribbled away, writing against time,
“Remembrance of Things Past.”
to complete his masterpiece,
Hounded by persecution, slight, and weak, John Calvin
always had the body of an old man, but the Ten Command-
ments were stamped on his face. He spat blood, rheumatism
tied him in knots, and his head split with headaches. But his iron
determination made him a leader in the Reformation and, for
nearly quarter of a century, he ruled Geneva as well as him-
self. “You must submit to supreme suffering,” he said, “in order
to discover whether you are destined for joy.”

The wealthy parents of Florence Nightingale objected to her
study of nui-sing. But she wanted to get things done, became a
nurse, raised the profession’s low standards, reformed the Brit-
ish Army’s medical service. Her
long days and nights of work
in the field during the Crimean War left her health broken. But,
to the age of ninety, she worked to establish new hospitals and
training schools for nurses.
Catherine Mumford developed spinal trouble and had to
leave school at fourteen. At twenty-two she became engaged to
William Booth, devoted the rest of her life to organizing the
Salvation Army. Catherine Booth was a semi-invalid, forced to
spend much of her time in bed. She had scarcely a day that was
free from pain. Yet she was constantly in the field organizing,
speaking at religious meetings, or at home doing paper work,
as she and her energetic husband worked hand-in-hand to
establish their new group of religious welfare workers. Daily
pain did not keep Kate Booth from getting things done.
Many of the world’s great producers have had excuses for

not getting things done. But they have ignored the excuses and
produced. They have not had an easy-chair state of mind.
They have had ailments galore, but they have been spared
that combination which is fatal to producing, dropsy and heart
trouble —dropping into an easy chair and not having the heart
to get up from it.
They have produced! Regardless!
A man may have hrams and mcmy admirable traits^ but unless
he^s got BACKBONE y
too, he doesnH accomplish things. In
times of stress he wilts like a cut blade of grass in the sun.

— HUDSON MAXIM
Pulcherrhnum genus victoriae seifsum vincere. {The fairest
kind of victory is self-conquest.)

—Latin motto on the fireplace of
SIR RICHARD TEMPLE
A lost battle is a battle one believes lost.
MARSHAL FERDINAND FOCH

3
Be dissatisfied first
There magic in a goal.

is
‘‘What were you working for on your last job?” prospective

employers ask applicants.
Ninety-nine out of a hundred applicants give their last salary
as an answer. They often hopefully name a higher rate, if they
think they can get by with a little stretching.
But the hundredth says he was working for some specific goal
1 — ^he wanted to learn the business, to buy a house, to get mar-
ried, to lay by for independence by the time he was fifty.

Keep your eye on that hundredth man. He is working for a
goal. He is the one who wiU get things done. Pull up your chair,
,
and we will tell you about him.
The Richest Man of His Time

Everyone England, seemed to be work-
in little Burslem,
ing for a wage rather than a goal. It was a pittance of a wage,
too, for Burslem was one of the most disreputable places in
the world. It offended the eye and smelled like a zoo.
was a pottery town. Every backyard had its own small
It
pottery beside the outhouse,when there was an outhouse.
Waking hours were devoted to making cheap stoneware,
drinking, and fighting. On Sundays a few folk attended church,
mostly for the fun of interrupting the traveling preachers.
Thomas Wedgwood had a little pottery in his backyard and
28
Be Dissatisfied First 29
thirteen children. But, even with the labor of all thirteen chil-
dren, he could not pay off his mortgage.
When Thomas died his eldest son inherited the place, in-
cluding the durable mortgage. The other children worked for
their brother, except those who had attained the age of inde-
pendence.
The youngest, Josiah, was nine when his brother took over
the backyard establishment. For ten years Josiah worked for his
brother in the mud of the pottery.
had a painful limp; his right knee had been crippled
Josiah
by smallpox. Later he was to have the leg amputated, but that
is getting ahead of the story.
Squire Wedgwood, a dignified cousin of the Burslem family,
drove over from Cheshire one day with his motherless daughter,
Sarah, to inspect his poor relations. The squire owned three
times as many horses as the entire town of Burslem.
Sarah was a traveled young lady, but she felt sorry for the
nineteen-year-old cousin who sat with his lame leg in front of
him, his face yellow from years of child labor in the pottery
shed.
She gave him the book she had been reading.
Josiah could read, though most of his brothers and sisters
could not.
Hememorized the book before returning it to Sarah, with
a grateful letter. She sent him another book. He could not send
her books, but he made a porcelain box in a beautiful new shade

of green which he had developed.
The ugly, pock-marked potter and the tall, slender girl who
played the harpsichord were in love; and Wedgwood now had
a goal for which to work.
The goal seemed impossible. A had already
rich attorney
spoken to Sarah’s father about marriage. The squire harrumphed

to his lame cousin; no Burslem potter could marry his daugh-
ter. She would have a dowry of several thousand pounds, and
the man who married her would have to match it, shilling for
shilling.
They must not see each other for a year, the squire com-
manded.
“I’m sorry the dowry is so much,” Sarah told Josiah as he
left, “but you can match it, I know you can!”
The timid lad went to Sheffield, where he made pottery orna-

ments for knife handles. Hewas no longer an ordinary potter.
H[is ornaments were beautiful and were fired to be harder and
more durable than others.
He worked toward his goal for five years, laid away a thou-
sand pounds. Then back to dirty Burslem he went to start his
own business.
He wrote Sarah, “Burslem shall yet be a symbol of all that
is beautiful, honest, and true; and I’ll be the best potter
Eng-
land has ever seen.”
More He was now out not only to marry
goals for him!
Sarah but also to remove the odium from the expression “a
common Burslem potter.”
He started a flower garden, something new in dirty Burslem.
He bought a horse so he could ride the forty miles to visit
Sarah. The squire grumpily chaperoned every single minute
they were together.
Burslem potters had been working four days out of the week,
drinking two, and hectoring the preacher on the seventh. They
had been satisfied with their low condition and miserable liv-
ing. That is the pathetic aspect of poverty; people get used
to
low conditions and are satisfied.
The young man with the limp and a goal gradually changed
that. His flower garden was the start. He interested some of
the villagers in new kinds of pottery, though many remained
more interested in the two-days drunk. He hired a young artist
to teach them color harmony and design.
He changed Burslem. Instead of the old, coarse, brown pickle
jars, the potters now made vases and dinner sets of exquisite
lightness and glaze, which the nobility bought at fancy prices.
At thirty Josiah invited the squire to Burslem, to take an-
other look at the potters’ town which his lame cousin had im-
proved. The harrumphed and wiped his brow. He inven-
squire
toried Josiah’s property and regretted that it did not quite equal
his daughter’s dowry; the squire’s investments had increased
the dowry.
So Josiah worked toward his goal for four years more, when
the inventory more than matched the dowry. He
and Sarah
were married. One goal had been reached. But Josiah had other
goals now. He was determined to remove the village and the
potter’s trade from the disrespect that had always been their
lot.
Sarah and Josiah labored together toward these goals. Burs-

lem became an art center and was recognized the world over as
the home of Queensware; Wedgwood had been appointed
Potter to the Queen.
He extended his goals as he continued to do more things,
became the richest man of his time.
He gave goals to others, too. He awoke the decrepit, satisfied
town by making the people dissatisfied and then showing them
how to improve their products and themselves. Burslem be-
came a show place.
Satisfied people do not get things done. The satisfied person
has reached his goal, if any, and works only for the necessary
wages to keep him from starving and freezing.
The dissatisfied person has the urge to get things done.
That is why many apparently ordinary people do extraor-
dinary things.
Dalen
Wedgwood was not the first —^nor will he be the last —to be
stimulated to get more things done in order to get married.
Occasionally a lover’s rejection gives the incentive to do things.
Gustaf Dalen, for example, had made a few trifling inven-
tions as a boySweden, but he remained on the farm to help
in
his parents. He liked farm life and seemed satisfied. Love

changed that. His fifteen-year-old sweetheart was eager enough
to marry him but had wisdom beyond her years; she refused to
marry him if he remained a farmer. She knew he could be a
real inventor. So the young Swede left the farm and enrolled
in an engineering school at twenty-three.
He graduated, they married, and he started a series of in-
ventions which revolutionized the lighthouses of the world,
inventions that Edison said were impossible.
First came the automatic beacon, then a flashing attachment,
then a valve which shut it off during the daytime. He applied
the same genius, now trained and educated, to acetylene and to
a stove that cooked twenty-four hours on eight pounds of coal.
Winner of a Nobel prize in physics, Dalen had a sweetheart

who gave him his goal for getting things done; she was dis-
satisfied with a farmer-husband.

He kept on getting things done long after he might have
retired, for a full quarter-century. He was blinded throughout
those last twenty-five years as the result of an explosion dur-
ing an invention.
Gibbon
There was a woman in the case of Edward Gibbon, too. By

the time he had finished college his parents had almost given up
hope for him. The short, fat boy would never amount to any-
thing; he was addicted to a luxurious existence. The only thing
that seemed him was his own religion. He changed
to dissatisfy
first and then to that.
to this church
But he was positive he had found something to cherish when
he met Suzanne Churchod, at twenty-one. The fat young man
whose face was so comical, with its puffy cheeks and tiny, up-
turned nose, became engaged to straight-faced, blue-eyed Su-
zanne, a minister’s daughter.
Still he didn’t settle down to work. When his father ob-
jected to the match, this youth like an overstuffed chair wrote
his fiancee asking for a release from their engagement. He did
not want to risk losing his allowance.
Suzanne received this caddish letter and gave him his release.
She wrote him, “I can assure you that you will one day regret
the irreparable loss you have suffered in alienating forever the
too tender open heart of S.C.” In a year she was married, on
the rebound, to a wealthy, elderly banker and trundled off to
Paris to live in a style Gibbon envied.
So he would regret breaking their engagement, would he?
— —
He’d show her and the world ^that he was a better man
than the boiled shirt of a banker she had married to spite him!
Gibbon at last went to work. He was determined to make her
regret her cutting words.
He plunged into study, into a lifetime of study, and made
himself one of the world’s outstanding historians. It was not to
drown his unhappiness but to show Suzanne, now the famous
Madame Necker, that it was she who should regret their
broken engagement.
When he had an incentive to work he eagerly put his pug
nose to the grindstone.
The King OF Ireland
Charles Parnell had had an American mother. As a tall
young man with brown hair he fell in love at first sight with
7857
an American heiress. They became engaged. Suddenly she re-
timned to Newport, sending him a cold note that her family

disapproved of the match.
He followed her to America, only to be told that Miss
Woods did not intend to marry him since he was an unknown.
This shocked him into making something more of
jilting
himself than an unknown country gentleman. He fought ag^nst

his natural shyness, entered the field of political reform, origi-
'
nated boycotting, served prison terms for his convictions, be-.
came the Uncrowned King of Ireland to show the haughty

heiress he could be famous.
Years later the heiress exclaimed, “Oh! Why didn’t I marry
him!”
Perhaps it is better she did not, for her jilting gave him a
divine discontent. He was dissatisfied with himself but not dis-
couraged.
Hard Luck
Family misfortunes have given many people git-up-and-git.
The Hastings family had been notable for generations, then
lost their property. Young Warren arrived in the world when
the family had nothing. At seven, lying on the bank of a brook
that his relatives had once owned, he daydreamed about their
plight and resolved to win back their lost lands.
He had a goal as a seven-year-old, a goal that took him far
beyond his original goal as it expanded. Remember Wedg-
wood? Goals are that wayj they keep giving momentum to get
still more things done.
The Hastings orphan not only regained the family fortunes,

but the momentum of getting things done made him Governor
General over fifty million people in India.
James L. Kraft’s thrifty Mennonite parents had bad luck,
too, and their farm was saddled with a $4,000 mortgage. With
$65 and ^n old horse, Jaiqes started peMing cheese to pay off
the mortgage. He reached his goal of clearing off the load of
debt, and the momentum carried him along to build up the
nationwide Kraft Cheese Company.
Jane Addams
Dissatisfaction over the lot of others givessome a goal. Jane
Addams’s mother died when she was twoj then came typhoid
fever, and she had scarcely recovered before the physicians
discovered tuberculosis, which left her with a crooked back and
her head drawn to one side.
One Sunday afternoon her father took the frail, crippled
girl for a ride through Freeport, Illinois. As they passed
through a slum section Jane’s sympathies were aroused; it was
her first view of how the other half lived.
She tugged at her father’s sleeve, pulled close to his side.
“When I’m grown up, I want to live right next door to poor
people, and the children can play in my yard.” A goal, and Jane
never forgot it.
Until she was thirty she spent many months in hospitals,

in a plaster cast or steel-framed canvas jacket. Then, with a
friend, she started Hull House in Chicago’s slums and for
nearly half a century worked toward her goal.
The momentum for getting things done won her a Nobel
prize and a place at the head of America’s greatest women.
Anthony Cooper
Anthony Cooper lived in luxxiry. But his childhood was
unhappy. His father was busy with petty politics; his mother
was more interested in society than in her children.
At unhappy rich boy was on a side street in a
fifteen the
small dty when he came upon some ragged drunks carrying
an unpainted coffin. They staggered with their load, singing
BLESSED ARE
THE DISSATISFIED WHEN

THEY HAVE A GOAL
off-color tavern songs. In their unsteadiness the coiEn slipped,

struck the ground, and split open. Their dead comrade tumbled
out.
Right there curly-ha|fed Anthony Cooper found a goal.
He would devote his enirgies and wealth to bettering the condi-
tions of the poor.
For seventeen years he fought to get a bill through Par-
liament that would provide for the mentally sick; he worked
for twenty years to break the system that sold pauper children
to mill owners; he became the first president of the Y.M.C.A.
and held this position for twenty-one years.
Those are just a few of the accomplishments of Anthony
Cooper, the seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, who got his goal
from a funeral procession of drunken paupers. As a youth he
was unhappy; as an adult, happy, because then he knew exactly
what he did not want.
The Wizard of Far.m Chemistry
The Carver boy found his goal earlier in life and on a

more personal basis.
He did not know his family, so picked the name of George
Another random document with
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the glory
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Title: The power and the glory
Author: Henry Kuttner
Release date: June 29, 2022 [eBook #68425]
Language: English
Original publication: United States: Standard Magazines, Inc, 1947
Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan, Alex White & the online
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE POWER

AND THE GLORY ***
The Power and the Glory
By HENRY KUTTNER
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Thrilling Wonder Stories, December 1947.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
CHAPTER I
Transmutation
Carrying the coffee-pot, the Belgian shuffled out of the room. The
door thumped behind him. Miller met Slade’s inquiring stare and
shrugged.
“So he’s crazy,” Miller said.
Slade drew down the corners of his thin mouth. “Maybe he is. But
I’ve got other sources of information, remember. I’m sure there’s—
something—up on Peak Seven Hundred. Something plenty valuable.
You’re going to find it for me.” His teeth clicked on the last word.
“Am I?” Miller said sourly.
“Suit yourself. Anytime you feel like it you can go back to the
States.” There was a threat in the way he said it.
Miller said, “Sure. And then you send a few telegrams . . . It was
a sweet little frame you fixed up on me. A murder rap—”
“Well,” Slade interrupted, “that happened to be a frame. I’ve got
to protect myself, though, in case you ever want to turn State’s
evidence.”
“I’ve done your dirty work for ten years,” Miller growled. “It’s too
late now to try crossing you up. But we’re both guilty of one particular
murder, Slade. A guy named Miller who was an honest lawyer, ten
years ago. I feel sorry for the poor sucker.”
Slade’s strong, implacable face turned away from him.
“The man with the gun has the advantage. Up on Peak Seven
Hundred there’s the biggest gun in the world—I think. Something’s
sending out terrific power-radiations. I’m no scientist, but I’ve got
men working for me who are. If I can get that—weapon—from the
Peak, I can write my own ticket.”
Miller looked at him curiously. He had to admit Slade’s strength,
his powerful will. Head of a slightly criminal and completely
unscrupulous political empire for a decade now, Slade was growing
restive, reaching out for new worlds to conquer.
Word of this power-source on the peak in Alaska had sounded
fantastic even back in the States but it seemed to fascinate Slade,
who could afford to indulge his whims. And he could afford to trust
Miller—to a certain extent. Miller was in Slade’s hands and knew it.
They both looked up as the Belgian came back into the room,
carrying a fresh bottle of whiskey. Van Hornung was drunk and well
aware of his own drunkenness. He peered at them from under the
huge fur cap he wore even indoors.
“Could man be drunk forever with liquor, love and fights—” he
murmured, hooking out a chair with his foot. “Ah well, it doesn’t
matter now. Have another drink, gentlemen.”
Miller glanced at Slade, then leaned forward across the table.
“About Peak Seven Hundred, now,” he said. “I wish you’d—”
The Belgian slapped a fat hand on the table. “You ask me about
Seven Hundred. Very well, then—listen. I would not tell you before—
I did not wish you to die. Now I am drunker and, I think, wiser. It does
not matter whether a man lives or dies.
“For twenty years I have been neither alive nor dead. I have not
thought nor felt emotion nor lived like a man. I have eaten and drunk
and tried to forget. If you wish to go to the Peak I’ll tell you the way.
It’s all quite futile, you see.”
He drank. Miller and Slade exchanged glances in silence.
“If you go,” Van Hornung said, “you will leave your soul behind
you—as I did. We are not the dominant race, you see. We try to
achieve the summits but we forget that there may already be
dwellers on the peaks. Oh yes, I will tell you the way to the Peak if
you like. But if you live you will not care about anything any more.”
Miller glanced again at Slade, who gestured impatiently.
“I’ll take a chance on that,” Miller said to the Belgian. “Tell me the
way.”
In the dim twilight of the arctic noon Miller followed his Innuit
guides up the snowy foothills toward Seven Hundred. For many days
they had traveled, deeper and deeper into this dry, sub-zero silence,
muffled in snow. The guides were nervous. They knew their arctic
gods, animistic, watchful, resented intrusion into sacred areas like
Peak Seven Hundred. In their fur-hooded Esquimaux faces oriental
eyes watched Miller mistrustfully.
He was carrying his gun now. Two of the Innuits had deserted
already, in the depths of the long nights. These two remained and
hated him, and went on only because their fear of his gun was
greater—so far—than their fear of the gods on Seven Hundred.
The Peak lifted great sheer cliffs almost overhead. There was no
visible way of scaling it. But the Innuits were hurrying ahead as if
they had already sighted a clearly marked trail. Miller quickened his
steps, a vague uneasiness beginning to stir in his mind.
Then the foremost Esquimau dropped to his knees and began to
scrabble in the snow. Miller shouted, hearing his own voice come
back thin and hollow from the answering peaks. But when he
reached the two, one of them looked up over his furclad shoulder
and smiled a grim smile. In his native tongue he spoke one of the
strange compound words that can convey a whole sentence.
“Ariartokasuaromarotit-tog,” he said. “Thou too wilt soon go
quickly away.” There was threat and warning and satisfaction in the
way he said it. His fur mitten patted something in the snow.
Miller bent to look. An iridescent pathway lay there, curving up
around a boulder and out of sight, rough crystal surfaces that caught
the light with red and blue shadows. Here in the white, silent world of
the high peaks it looked very beautiful and strange. Miller knelt and
ran a gloved hand over it, feeling even through the leather a slight
tingling. . . .
“Erubescite!” he murmured to himself, and smiled. It meant
copper, perhaps gold. And it was an old vein. The color spoke of long
exposure. There was nothing strange about finding a vein of
erubescite in the mountains—the interpenetrating cubes twinned on
an octahedral plane were common enough in certain mining regions.
Still, the regularity of the thing was odd. And that curious tingling. . . .
It looked like a path.
The Innuits were watching him expectantly. Moving with caution,
Miller stepped forward and set his foot on the path. It was uneven,
difficult to balance on. He took two or three steps along the
iridescent purple slope, and then. . . .
And then he was moving smoothly upward, involuntarily,
irresistibly. There was a strange feeling in his feet and up the long
muscles at the back of his legs. And the mountain was sliding away
below him. Peaks, snow-slopes, fur-clad men all slipped quietly off
down the mountainside, while at Miller’s feet a curving ribbon of
iridescence lengthened away.
“I’m dreaming!” was his first thought. And his head spun with the
strange new motion so that he staggered—and could not fall. That
tingling up his legs was more than a nervous reaction, it was a
permeation of the tissues.
“Transmutation!” he thought wildly, and clutched in desperation at
the slipping fabric of his own reason. “The road’s moving,” he told
himself as calmly as he could. “I’m fixed to it somehow.
Transmutation? Why did I think of transmutation? I can’t move my
feet or legs—they feel like stone—like the substance of the road.”
The changing of one element into another—lead into gold, flesh
into stone . . . The Innuits had known. Far away he could see the
diminishing dots that were his guides slide around a curve and
vanish. He gestured helplessly, finding even his arms growing heavy,
as if that strange atomic transmutation were spreading higher and
higher through his body.
Powerless, one with the sliding path, he surrendered himself
without a struggle to that mounting glide. Something stronger than
himself had him in a grip that seemed purposeful. He could only wait
and . . . it was growing difficult to think. Perhaps the change was
reaching to his brain by now. He couldn’t tell.
He only knew that for a timeless period thereafter he did not think
any more about anything. . . .
Thin laughter echoed through his mind. A man’s voice said, “But I
am bored, Tsi. Besides, he won’t be hurt—much. Or if he is, what
does it matter?”
Miller was floating in a dark void. There was a strangeness about
the voice he could not analyze. He heard a woman answer and in
her tone was a curious likeness to the man’s.
“Don’t, Brann,” she said. “You can find other—amusements.”
The high laughter came again. “But he’s still new. It should be
interesting.”
“Brann, please let him go.”
“Be silent, Tsi. I’m master here. Is he awake yet?”
A pause. “No, not yet. Not for a while yet.”
“I can wait.” The man sighed. “I’ve preparations to make, anyhow.
Let’s go, Tsi.”
There was a long, long pause. The voices were still.
Miller knew he was floating in nothingness. He tried to move and
could not. Inertia still gripped his body but his brain was free and
functioning with a clarity that surprised him. It was almost as if that
strange transmutation had changed his very brain-tissues to
something new and marvelous.
“Transmutation,” he thought. “Lead into gold—flesh into stone—
that’s what I was thinking about when—when I stopped thinking.
When that sort of change happens, it means the nuclear charge in
the atoms of one substance or the other has to change too. The
tingling when I touched the road—was that when it happened?”
But he paused there, knowing there was no answer. For when
had a man ever before felt the shifting from flesh to crystal take
place in his own body?
If it had happened that way, then it must have been a force like
the coulomb forces themselves that welded him into one with the
moving road—the all but irresistible forces that hold the electrons in
their orbits and rivet all creation into a whole.
And now—what?
“There are two methods of transmutation,” he told himself clearly,
lying there in the dark and groping for some answer to the thing that
was happening to him.
“Rationalize it,” his mind seemed to say, “or you’ll go mad with
sheer uncertainty. Reason it out from what you know. A chemical
element is determined by the number of electrons around the
nucleus—change that and you change the element. But the nucleus,
in turn, determines by its charge the number of electrons it can
control. If the nuclear charge is changed, then this—this crystalline
state—is permanent.
“But if it isn’t, then that must mean there’s constant bombardment
that knocks off or adds electrons to whatever touches that road. The
change wouldn’t be permanent because the original charge of the
nucleus remains constant. After awhile the extra electrons would be
dropped, or others captured to restore the balance, and I’d be
normal again. That must be the way of it,” he told himself, “because
Van Hornung came this way. And he went back again—normal. Or
was he really normal?”
The question echoed without answer in his brain. Miller lay quiet
a moment longer and then began to try once more to stir his inert
body. This time, a very little, he felt muscles move. . . .
What seemed a long while later, he found he could open his
eyes. Very cautiously he looked around.
CHAPTER II
Tsi
He was alone. He lay on something hard and flat. A dome of
crystal arched overhead, not very high, so that he seemed in effect
to lie in a box of crystal—a coffin, he thought grimly, and sat up with
brittle care. His muscles felt as stiff as if the substance of the
iridescent roadway still permeated his flesh.
The dome seemed to have strange properties, for all he saw
through it was curiously distorted and colored with such richness it
almost hurt the eyes to gaze upon what lay beyond.
He saw columns of golden trees upon which leaves moved and
glittered in constantly changing prisms of light. Something like smoke
seemed to wreathe slowly among the trees, colored incredibly. Seen
through the dome about him the color of the smoke was nameless.
No man ever saw that hue before nor gave a name to it.
The slab on which he sat was the iridescent purple of the road. If
it had carried him here, he saw no obvious way in which it could
have left him lying on the crystal coffin. Yet, clearly, this was the end
of the moving roadway and, clearly too, the forces which had welded
him to it were gone now.
The unstable atoms created in the grip of that strange force had
shaken off their abnormality and reverted to their original form. He
was himself again but stiff, dizzy and not sure whether he had
dreamed the voices. If he had, it was a nightmare. He shivered a
little, remembering the thin, inhuman laughter and its promise of
dreadful things.
He got up, very cautiously, looking around. As nearly as he could
tell through the distorting crystal there was no one near him. The
coffin stood in a grove of the golden trees and, except for the mist
and the twinkling leaves, nothing moved. He put out a tentative hand
to push the crystal up.
His hand went through it. There was a tinkling like high music,
ineffably sweet, and the crystal flew into glittering fragments that fell
to the ground in a second rain of sound. The beauty of it for a
moment was almost pain. He had never heard such music before. It
was almost more beautiful than any human being should be allowed
to hear, he thought confusedly. There are sensations so keen they
can put too great a strain upon human nerves.
Then he stood there unprotected by the dome and looked around
him at the trees and the mist and saw that the dome had made no
difference. These incredible colors were no distortions—they were
real. He took a tentative step and found the grass underfoot so soft
that even through his shoe-soles he could feel its caress.
The very air was exquisitely cool and hushed, like the air of a
summer dawn, almost liquid in its translucence. Through it the
winking of the prism-leaves was so lovely to look at that he turned
his eyes away, unable to endure the sight for more than a moment.
This was hallucination. “I’m still somewhere back there in the
snow,” he thought. “Delirium—that’s it. I’m imagining this.” But if it
were a dream, then Van Hornung had known it too, and men do not
dream identical dreams. The Belgian had warned him.
He shook his shoulders impatiently. Even with all this before him
he could not quite bring himself to believe Van Hornung’s story.
There was a quality of dream about this landscape, as if all he saw
were not in reality what it seemed, as if this grass of ineffable
softness were—and he knew it was—only crusted snow, as if those
cliffs he could glimpse among the trees were really the bare crags of
Peak Seven Hundred, and everything else delirium. He felt uneasily
that he was really lying somewhere asleep in the snow, and must
wake soon, before he froze.
That high, thin laughter rang suddenly through the air. In spite of
himself Miller felt his heart lurch and he whirled to face the sound
with a feeling of cold terror congealing him. It was odd how
frightening the careless voice had been, talking impersonally of its
pleasures.
A little group of men and women was coming toward him through
the trees. He could not guess which of them had laughed the familiar
laughter. They wore brilliantly colored garments of a subtle cut that
hung like a toga or a sari, with a wonderful sophistication of line. The
colors were incredible.
Miller blinked dazedly, trying in vain to find names for those
shimmering hues that seemed to combine known colors into utterly
unknown gradations and to draw from the range of colors above and
below the spectrum as we see it.
A women said, “Oh, he’s awake,” and a man laughed pleasantly
and said, “Look how surprised he is!” All of them smiled and turned
bright, amused faces to Miller.
He said something—he never remembered what—and stopped
in sheer shock at the harsh dissonance of his own voice. It was like
an ugly discord tearing through smooth, lilting arpeggios of harmony.
The faces of the others went blank briefly, as though they had
concentrated on something else to avoid hearing the sound. The
woman Miller had first noticed lifted her hand.
“Wait,” she said. “Listen to me, for a moment. There is no need to
speak—aloud.” A faint distaste was in her tone. Her . . . tone? That
could not be right. No voice was ever so sweetly musical, so gently
harmonious.
Miller looked at her. Her face was a small pale triangle, lovely and
elfin and strange, with enormous violet eyes and piled masses of
hair that seemed to flow in winding strands through one another.
Each strand was of a different pastel hue, dusty green or pale
amethyst or the yellow of sunshine on a hazy morning. It was so in
keeping, somehow, that Miller felt no surprise. That bizarre coiffure
fitted perfectly with the woman’s face.
He opened his mouth again, but the woman—it shocked him a
little, and he wondered that it did not shock him even more—was
suddenly beside him. A split-second before she had been ten feet
away.
“You have much to learn,” she said. “First, though—remember
not to speak. It isn’t necessary. Simply frame your thoughts. There’s
a little trick to it. No—keep your mouth closed. Think. Think your
question.”
Her lips had moved slightly, but merely for emphasis. And surely
normal vocal cords could not have been capable of that unearthly
sweetness and evenness of tone, with its amazing variations and
nuances. Miller thought, “Telepathy. It must be telepathy.”
They waited, watching him inquiringly.
The woman said, silently, “Think—to me. Frame the thought more
carefully. The concepts must be rounded, complete. Later you may
use abstracts but you can’t do that yet. All I can read is a
cloudiness. . . .”
Miller thought carefully, word by word, “Is this telepathy?”
“Still cloudiness,” she said. “But it’s clearer now. You were never
used to clear thinking. Yes, it is telepathy.”
“But how can I—where am I? What is this place?”
She smiled at him, and laughter moved through the group. “More
slowly. Remember, you have just been born.”
“Just—what?”
And thoughts seemed to fly past him like small bright insects,
grazing the edges of his consciousness. A half-mocking, friendly
thought from one of the men, a casual comment from another.
Brann, Miller thought, remembering. What about Brann? Where
is he?
There was dead silence. He had never felt such stillness before.
It was of the mind, not physical. But he felt communication, super-
sensory, rapid and articulate, between the others. Abruptly the
rainbow-haired woman took his arm, while the others began to drift
off through the prism-leaves and the golden trees.
She pulled him gently away under the tinkling foliage, through the
drifts of colored mists. Brushing violet fog before them with her free
hand, she said, “We would rather not mention Brann here, if we can
avoid it. To speak of him sometimes—brings him. And Brann is in a
dangerous mood today.”
Miller looked at her with a frown of concentration. There was so
much to ask. In that strange mental tongue that was already coming
more easily to him, he said, “I don’t understand any of this. But I
know your voice. Or rather, your—I’m not sure what you’d call it.”
“The mental voice, you mean? Yes, you learn to recognize them.
It’s easy to imitate an audible voice but the mental one can’t be
imitated. It’s part of the person. So you remember hearing my
thoughts before? I thought you were asleep.”
“You’re Tsi.”
“Yes,” she said and pushed aside a tinkling screen of the prisms.
Before them stood a low rampart of light—or water. Four feet high, it
ran like liquid but it glowed like light. Beyond it was blue sky and a
sheer, dizzying drop to meadows hundreds of feet below. The whole
scene was almost blindingly vivid, every lovely detail standing out
sharp and clear and dazzling.
He said, “I don’t understand. There are legends about people up
here, but not about—this. This vividness. Who are you? What is this
place?”
Tsi smiled at him. There was warmth and compassion in the
smile, and she said gently, “This is what your race had once, and
lost. We’re very old, but we’ve kept—” Abruptly she paused, her
eyes brightening suddenly with a look of terror.
She said. “Hush!” and in the mental command there was a wave
of darkness and silence that seemed to blanket his mind. For no
reason his heart began to pound with nervous dread. They stood
there motionless for an instant, mind locked with mind in a stillness
that was more than absence of sound—it was absence of thought.
But through the silence Miller caught just the faintest echo of that
thin, tittering laugh he had heard before, instinct with cold, merciless
amusement.
The prism leaves sang around them with little musical tinklings.
From the sunlit void stretching far below bird-song rippled now and
then with a sweetness that was almost painful to hear. Then Tsi’s
mind relaxed its grip upon Miller’s and she sighed softly.
“It’s all right now. For a moment I thought Brann . . . but no, he’s
gone again.”
“Who is Brann?” Miller demanded.
“The lord of this castle. A very strange creature—very terrible
when his whims are thwarted. Brann is—he cares for nothing very
much. He lives only for pleasure and, because he’s lived so long and
exhausted so many pleasures, the devices he uses now are not very
—well, not very pleasant for anyone but Brann. There was a warp in
him before his birth, you see. He’s not quite—not quite of our breed.”
“He’s from the outside world? Human?” As he said it Miller knew
certainly that the woman before him was not human, not as he
understood the term.
But Tsi shook her head. “Oh, no. He was born here. He’s of our
breed. But not of our norm. A little above in many ways, a little below
in others. Your race—” there was faint distaste and pity in the
thought, but she let it die there, unelaborated.
“You can’t understand yet,” she went on. “Don’t try. You see, you
suffered a change when you came. You aren’t quite as you were
before. Were you ever able to communicate telepathically?”
“No, of course not. But I don’t feel any different. I—”
“A blind man, given sight, wouldn’t realize it until he opened his
eyes. And he might be dazzled at first. You’re at a disadvantage. I
think it would be best for you to get away. Look there, across the
valley.”
She lifted an arm to point. Far off across the dazzling meadows
hills rose, green in the sunlight, shimmering a little in the warm, clear
light. On the height of the highest a diamond glitter caught the sun.
“My sister,” Tsi said, “has that palace over there. I think Orelle
would take you in, if only to thwart Brann. You aren’t safe here. Fur
your sake, it was a pity the port of entry you reached was here in
Brann’s castle.”
“There have been others, then?” Miller asked. “A man named
Van Hornung—did he come here?”
She shook her head, the rainbow hair catching the sunlight. “Not
here. There are many castles in our land and most of them live at
peace within and without. But not Brann’s.”
“Then why are you here?” Miller asked bluntly.
She smiled an unhappy smile. “Most of us came because we felt
as Brann does—we did not care very much any more. We wanted to
follow our pleasures, being tired of other pursuits after so many
thousands of years. All except me.”
“Thousands of. . . . What do you mean? Why are you here then?”
Her mouth turned down at the corners in a rueful smile.
“Well—perhaps I too was warped before birth. I can’t leave Brann
now. He needs me. That doesn’t matter to you. Brann’s dangerous—
his heart is set on—on experiments that will need you to complete.
We won’t talk about that.”
Miller said, “I came here for a purpose.”
“I know. I read part of your mind while you lay asleep. You’re
hunting for a treasure. We have it. Or perhaps I should say Orelle
has it.” The violet eyes darkened. She hesitated.
“Perhaps I’m sending you to Orelle for a purpose,” she said. “You
can do me a great service there—and yourself too. That treasure
you seek is—should be partly mine. You think of it as a power-
source. To me it’s a doorway into something better than any of us
knows. . . .
“Our father made it, long ago. Orelle has it now, though by rights
she and I should share it. If you find a way to get that treasure, my
friend, will you bring it to me?”
Long-grooved habit-patterns in Miller’s mind made him say
automatically, “And if I do?”
She smiled. “If you don’t,” she said, “Brann will have you sooner
or later. If I can get it I think I can—control Brann. If I can’t—well, you
will be the first sufferer. I think you know that. You’ll do well to
persuade Orelle if you can. Now—I’ve made a bargain with Brann.
Don’t ask me what. You may learn, later.
“Go to Orelle, watch your chance and be wary. If you ask for the
treasure you’ll never get near it. Better not to speak of it but wait and
watch. No one can read your mind unless you will it, now that you’re
learning telepathy, but watch too that you let nothing slip from your
thoughts to warn her.”
“You want me to take her hospitality and then rob her?”
Distress showed in Tsi’s face. “Oh, no! I ask only what’s mine,
and even that only for long enough to control Brann. Then you may
return the treasure to Orelle or strike a bargain with her over it. Five
minutes with that in my hands is all I ask! Now here is something I’ve
made for you out of your own possession. Hold out your wrist.”
Staring, he obeyed. She unclosed her hand to show him his
wristwatch in her palm. Smiling, she buckled the strap around his
arm. “It isn’t quite as it was. I changed it. If you need me concentrate
on this and speak to me in your mind. I’ll hear.”
There were countless questions still unasked. Miller took a deep
breath and began to formulate them in his mind. And then—Tsi
vanished! The earth was gone from underfoot and he spun through
golden emptiness, dropping, falling. The water-wall hung beneath
him. He floated in midair a hundred feet above the crag-bordered
stream at the cliffs bottom!
Panic struck him. Then Tsi’s reassuring thought said, “You are
safe. This is teleportation.”
He scarcely heard. An age-old instinctive fear chilled his middle.
For a million years men have been afraid of falling. He could not now
control that fear.
Slowly he began to drop. He lost sight of Tsi and the golden trees
and then of the water-wall.
Under him the stream broadened.
He sank down at an angle—and felt solid ground beneath his
feet.
There was silence except for the whispering murmur of the
stream.
CHAPTER III
The World That Couldn’t Be
Miller sat down on a rock and held his head in his hands. His
thoughts were swimming. Cold, fresh air blew against his cheeks
and he raised his face to meet that satisfying chill. It seemed to
rouse him. He began to realize that he had been half asleep during
the interview with Tsi, as though the mists of his slumber had still
blanketed his senses. Otherwise he would scarcely have accepted
this miraculous business.
Or was there another reason?
He felt a desperate impulse to see Tsi again. She could answer
his questions, if she would. And she had been the first friendly face
he had seen in this terribly strange land.
He looked up and willed himself to rise.
Impossible, of course. My own bootstraps, he thought, with a wild
sort of amusement. Were his feet pressing less heavily on the rock
beneath him?
And then, from above, came a high, thin laughter that was not
truly audible—Brann!
Even before the mental voice came, that malicious, slow thought
sent its familiar radiations before it. Something as recognizable as
sound or color—more so!—fell down the cliff and crept coldly into
Miller’s brain. He knew that unheard voice.
“You had better not come up,” it said.
Miller stood motionless, waiting. Instinctively he had fallen into
the fighter’s crouch. But how useless ordinary precautions would be
against this super-being!
He tried to close his mind.
“Go to Orelle, then,” it said. “I’ve made my bargain with Tsi and I’ll
keep it. But she’s a fool. She always tries to close her mind to
unpleasant things. She’ll never really admit we’re at war with her
sister. As long as she doesn’t name it war, she thinks it’s something
else.”
Again the high laughter.

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The Technique Of Getting Things Done:

Rides for directing will 'power from the

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will 'ponoer from the lives of

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PUBLISHED BY THE MCGRAW HILL BOOK COMPANY, INC.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

exfress themselves and to

2. Producers in spite of everything 16

9. Doing the thing you hate most . . . . . 127

How producers are nmie

The world has always cried for men—and women—^who can

starters, who see a task through to its finish.

One out of four is held back because he lacks the knack of

in 'getting .things done.

The 40 per cent are the Almosts. They know what to do

They are swirled around in circles, getting nowhere, because

They work harder; they need to work more

acquired a lot of them to help me get things done. They' inter-

I was wasting a lot of other people’s time as well as my own.

I was taking too much time over minor decisions.

not working a fraction so hard. Principles of accomplishment,

Sixty years passed before the original J. P. Morgan really

century mark, Woodrow Wilson was just a good college pro-

Always on Top of the Job

Another said—a clue to Woodley’s skill in getting things

fourteen but took correspondence courses in bookkeeping and

country; he was given counterfeit money in exchange for his

life savings. After a few difficult years in Wisconsin, the family

to help the family carve a living from the hard soil.

^Those who have to hustle during their youth seem to ac-

Fuller Callaway was such a man. He was the fourteenth

for himself. He rented a bit of land and hired a mule to grow

Work like ben

It is a good thing most of us are inconvenienced by having

And it is unfortunate that many grow up without having the

One of my friends makes an exceptionally good living at a

miserable job. For years he helped break in engineering gradu-

aid in getting things done to idle sons of the self-made rich.

Two brothers who had built up a sizeable business in the